 Thank you for joining us at lunchtime today. I'm Nathan Ryan, Chair of the Future Forum Board. On behalf of the Future Forum, thank you for joining us for a conversation on criminal justice and policing. Last month, the Greater Austin Crime Commission released a study recommending that Austin hire over 100 more police officers. In 2021, the number of homicides in Austin increased at an alarming rate. On September 1st, 2021, a new Texas law went into effect punishing cities that cut police budgets. And then, last November, Austin voters rejected a proposal that would have required there to be at least two police officers for every 1,000 residents in Austin. What does all this mean for criminal justice in Texas and Austin specifically? We're gonna take a look at that today with some expert panelists. The Future Forum is an organization that brings together individuals with different backgrounds, experiences, and points of view to discuss local, statewide, and national topics that affect us today. Our goal is to create civil, informed, and bipartisan discussions. This year, the LBJ Future Forum is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and we hope you'll join us for more programs like today's. The Future Forum's events are made possible by our incredible members and sponsors, including the Downtown Austin Alliance and Carbock Brewing. I also wanna thank Sarah McCracken at the LBJ Foundation staff and the LBJ Foundation staff, as well as Kim Williams and Michael Henderson from the LBJ Future Forum Board for all their hard work on this panel. There will be an opportunity to answer your questions at the end. You're able to type your questions into the Q&A box throughout the conversation, and we will address as many as we can. One quick programming note before I turn it over to our moderator. Unfortunately, Mimi Marziani from Texas Civil Rights Project came down with a cold and she's unable to join us today. We hope you get well soon, Mimi. And now I'll turn it over to our moderator, Tony Plahetsky, investigative reporter at the Austin American Statesman and KVU to lead our discussion. Take it away, Tony. Thank you, Nathan and Sarah and the Foundation for not only inviting me to do this today, but also hosting a very important conversation in our community that really has been unfolding in some aspects over the past couple of years, but really as someone who's lived here for two decades now, some of these issues go back, obviously, and in the history of Austin. We are now at a pivotal moment in the minds of many people in our community to keep this conversation going and to try to achieve what the topic of today's session is, which is to really try to reach a consensus on some of these really polarizing issues in our community. I wanna take just a moment to introduce our all-star panel, a panel of experts who really have been thought leaders in some of the topics that we're going to be diving into today. I wanna start with you, Chris Harris, policy director here in Austin for the Austin Justice Coalition. And what I'm gonna invite each of our panelists to do is take just about 60 to 90 seconds to tell us who you are and also what your goals are for today's conversation. So, Chris, let's start with you. Sure, thank you so much, Tony. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with all of you in this panel. So, yes, I'm the policy director at the Austin Justice Coalition. I've been involved in organizing an advocacy around criminal justice issues for the last really six years in earnest. And really my priorities around this conversation today are really to get at what public safety really means and to hopefully come to some mutual understanding with that because really from our perspective, if we're talking about public safety, what we're really talking about is the preservation of life and preventing the preventable harm, disability and death in our communities. And when we look at it through this broader lens, what we really see is that our investments don't go towards preventing the things that are causing the most harm, disability and preventable deaths in our community because those things are overwhelmingly public health related issues and public health receives a small fraction of what we spend in any community on public safety. And in fact, the opportunity costs that come with focusing so much of our dollars on a specific type of still horrific harm and death that occurs in our community from interpersonal violence are so great that they actually cause more harm in our community by doing so. And so I really want to have a broader conversation to ensure that when we talk about public safety, we're really talking about all the ways in which our community members face the potential for harm, disability or death and how we can work best with our public dollars to prevent those where possible. Mark Levin, hello, good afternoon to you. You are the Chief Public Policy Counsel at the Council on Criminal Justice and a senior advisor to write on crimes. I just want to invite you to do the same thing. Take about 60 to 90 seconds to tell us a little bit more about what you do and also your goals for today's conversation. It's great to be with you and also virtually at the LBJ library because some of you may know back in 1967, there was a report, a commission, the Katzenbach commission that LBJ convened that had more than 200 recommendations that are still very timely in many ways. Of course, it led to landmark improvements, including establishing the 9-1-1 system, better training for law enforcement, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and so forth, but it also dealt with conditions that were, you know, it found to be subpar to say the least for juveniles incarcerated around the country. And we still very much struggle with that here in Texas and beyond. So it was a very prescient report and one that did lead to some significant changes. So, but I've been working on criminal justice reform starting here in Texas back in 2005. And over that time, we've seen significant reductions in crime and incarceration. Obviously, as we all know, there's been an uptick in the last couple of years in homicides and certain other types of violent crime, but still overall crime is far lower. And of course, Texas now has about 118,000 people in prison versus a high of 160,000 when the state also had fewer people. So our incarceration rate here in Texas is down by more than 40%. But I started the criminal justice program with the Texas Public Policy Foundation back in 2005 and then the Right On Crime Initiative in 2010. And then last year, I joined the council on criminal justice as chief policy council. And what we really do is provide a center of gravity in the criminal justice policy space. We compile a lot of data on crime rates, on how the pandemic impacted domestic violence. And most importantly, I think we convene a wide range of experts, including through our policing task force, law enforcement leaders, civil rights advocates and so forth to come to the kind of consensus hopefully we'll be talking about today, really looking at the research about what the data shows, what works in policing, what works in crime prevention and on down the line. So it's a real pleasure to be part of this discussion with such a distinguished panel. Mark, thank you so much. Now over to veteran Austin police officer and assistant chief, Jerry Bazan. Good afternoon to you. Hi, good afternoon, Tony. And thank you all for having me on this panel. Again, it's an honor and it's a pleasure to get to again, participate in a conversation this meaningful with so many members that are experts in their field and have such varied opinions. Again, my name is Jerry Bazan. I get to be one of the police chiefs or assistant police chiefs here at the Austin Police Department. I've been here going on 29 years now. So I've seen a lot of changes in the city of Austin and especially a lot of changes within this police department. Currently, I serve over the investigations bureau. So I am the chief overall investigations here within the city. And I also oversee our organized crime division. I just wanna say that this is one of many steps on our journey to collaborate with the community. My hope today is to dispel any misinformation that anyone may have about the police department and also just kind of fill the gaps and help answer any questions that the community may have when it comes to public safety and our role as a police department with the police or with the public safety in the city. Chief, thank you so much. Obviously this panel was conceptualized and put together before developments that we've seen in our community over the past seven days with the announcement of indictments of 17 Austin police officers stemming from the May 2020 protest. Certainly the efforts to reform criminal justice an offshoot of that according to many reformers and activists you talk to is certainly police accountability. So I just wanna spend a couple of minutes if we can because this is such a monumental event that has happened in our community, Austin and Travis County now having the most indictments of police officers stemming from the May 2020 protest of any city in the country that I could find at least. So I wanna start with you, Chris on a path toward criminal justice reform and police accountability, what is your reaction to these 19 indictments? And do you think that that is part of the process that we're on in our community here? Sure, well, you know, so I think, you know, my honest initial reaction was relief. You know, how police accountability, you know ultimately works in the city of Austin is that we have a city manager who oversees the department and the office of police oversight. And we have the chief who's ultimately in charge of enacting discipline. And what we've seen is that despite the fact that the city has seen fit to pay out millions in dollars in civil rights settlements to victims of police brutality during the protests, they have not seen fit, particularly those two individuals to hold any of the officers who've committed those violations directly accountable for it. And because of that, really the last stop, the only other place where accountability could possibly be seen if not on the job from the department from the city is through the courts. Now, many of us have a lot of issues with the criminal legal system and don't see prison as the way that we should prioritize how we respond to harm. And so it's not a thing that we celebrate anyone being indicted or potentially going to prison. That said, we also know that police have extraordinary powers in our society more than any individual, training and weaponry, equipment with the weaponry and the authorization to use violence in the undertaking of their duties. And therefore it is extremely important that when they misuse those extraordinary powers that there is some layer of accountability that happens. And again, because that has not happened at the city level, this was the last stop. And so again, relief is our response or at least my response as it relates to these indictments. Mark, over to you. Your reaction to the major national news happening in Austin over the past week. Yeah, no, this is a very challenging matter and one that obviously all the facts will have to be reviewed once, if in fact these cases go to trial. But I think certainly it spotlights the need for better training for law enforcement, which is something we focused on de-escalation training in particular, the evidence is very strong when it comes to that. And I also think it raises the issue of civil liability and it could be a very ironic situation if in fact officers were criminally liable but not civilly liable because of qualified immunity. And I think in general, obviously the criminal law should be reserved for the most serious and particularly intentional violations. Now the officers, I know many of them or perhaps all of them in this case, they assert that they were following the policy in terms of rubber bullets and so forth that they were following orders to actually specific instructions. And so that actually, in the area of qualified immunity, which again is a civil question, typically would be a defense that they followed policy or decisions of a court that was on all fours with the current situation and therefore could claim qualified immunity. Now the problem with qualified immunity is it's really made it very difficult for people who have legitimate claims to get damages, which typically would be from the agency itself where the 95% of officers in civil suits are indemnified. So there are obviously real concerns about retention and recruiting for police these days, but I think, for example, Colorado adopted a qualified immunity reform and has not seen any blowback in terms of more officers harder to staff than any other staffing challenges across the country. So, and that law of course very much limits what the officer could pay to a very small amount if they even paid anything. And again, it's kind of like if an Amazon driver injures you, then you go after Amazon and you collect from them. So it's the same situation here. So I would finally say therefore that the primary focus that we really ought to have in terms of where most accountability in most cases, all but the most serious cases, it's gonna need to lie in the area of decertification. And there was actually some really good legislation that was unfortunately didn't quite make it last session here in Texas from two conservative Republican, Steve Toth, James White, both friends of mine, but it would have really put some teeth in the Texas commission on law enforcement. Right now you actually have to have two convicted crimes before an officer would be decertified. So it's an extremely high bar and that legislation would really help because again, the majority cases, you're not going to see a criminal prosecution. And the question is, I think the vast majority of officers do a good job, but a small number of officers who, you know, obviously like Derek Chauvin, who had 18 complaints, many substantiated that they do give the profession a bad name. And there's some people who just aren't cut out to be a police officer. If you have a hairpin trigger for your temper or whatever, you go into another field and do fine. And so that's why the small number of officers who are responsible for disproportionate share of valid verified misconduct, we need a better procedure for being able to decertify them and other departments to see that that person was decertified from misconduct. Chief, this is literally happening in your office. And obviously in recent days, we've heard from your boss, police chief Joe Chacon, largely defending the police officers who have been indicted, saying that based on his review and the review of executives, the brass of APD, they found no criminal violations and their assessments. So certainly I recognize that you all are still in the midst of some administrative processes as well as a number of civil suits still facing the city. But I do think it's important that we hear from you on this topic as well. Absolutely, Tony. And I would be lying if I were to say that I wasn't expecting this question to come up today, especially in line with the recent events. And I do recognize, I appreciate your question and I do recognize there are a lot of questions out there surrounding the recent indictments. And I wanna correct you, there were 19 of our officers that were indicted last week. Did I say the wrong number? Pardon me. I think you opened with 17. Okay, excuse me. Yeah, 19, yeah, pardon me. So other than to say that I do respect the judicial process, I want everyone to remember that our officers are innocent until proven guilty in that court of law. And as Mark said, I don't know if they'll ever make it to trial, but we have to remember that because right now I think they're being tried in the public eye right now. And I wanna give those officers a fair shake. With that being said, I do believe in police accountability. I know there's a lot of conversation out there that police and law enforcement in generally don't hold our own accountable. In the 29 years that I've been here with the awesome police department, I've done my time as an internal affairs investigator, as well as being the commander overseeing our professional standards division, which includes internal affairs. So I've seen the process. I've been involved in those investigations. I've been in conversations with executives even as I was at a lower rank. And I wanna assure everyone that's listening on this call, we do hold ourselves accountable, more so than I would say other police departments across the country. So I don't want anyone to think that just because we defend our officers doesn't mean that we are not holding ourselves accountable. The conversation and topic of training came up. As you all know, and again in the last several, during the last several months, the awesome police department's training academy has been under a watchful eye of a third party. And they just released their report a week or so ago talking about our training. We are working on improving our training. I still believe that we have one of the most robust training departments in the country of any law enforcement agency. I'm proud of what we do and how we train. Obviously there are things that can be done better. And those are things that are being shown to us that are being highlighted that we are working to amend. So other than that, since these indictments are so new and we are so early in the process, I don't think that I've got much more to add to this discussion at this time. And certainly I know that we could spend a lot of time on the protest and the aftermath, but I do wanna broaden our conversation as well. The topic is really about building consensus with regard to criminal justice reform. And it just seems like more and more that the divide is growing instead of diminishing. So Mark, I'll start with you on this question. I mean, is a consensus really possible in your estimation at this point? And if so, what does that look like? Sure, well, I think it is. And first of all, public safety is the most core responsibility of government. I think we can all agree on that. And it's kind of your right stop where my nose begins kind of thing that regardless of whether you're a liberal or conservative that the government needs to intervene if somebody harms someone else and better yet prevent that harm from occurring to begin with. And so we also, I think all of us across the spectrum want people to be able to reintegrate if they are incarcerated in terms of employment, in terms of family. And everyone can also agree that victims should be compensated through restitution or otherwise. And so you go down the line. And of course we'd all like to do this with the least expenditure of resources possible, but recognizing that it does take money, whether you're talking about police training, for example, or you're talking about pretrial justice to make sure someone comes back to court in terms of text reminders or mental health or drug treatment. Over the last year, there's been 100,000 deaths from drug overdoses. So that's Chris talked earlier about a broad conception of public safety and that's very much on target. And I mean, who's for fatal drug overdoses? Who's for violent crime? Now, I think the question, and I think it's, by the way, it's a lot easier to agree on the front end in terms of crime prevention strategies. And we are starting to see some results. For example, in Dallas, violent crime has declined 11% since they've implemented kind of a all of the above solution. And it's very targeted to people in places, kind of using a grid system. And they've used violence interrupters. They've used surging law enforcement. They've also gotten rid of dilapidated buildings, abandoned buildings put in street lights. So they've taken kind of a whole comprehensive approach and specifically focused on the areas that have the most violent crime. And that's really can be as concentrated as a certain street corner. And it's not to go round people up or stop and frisk or anything like that, but it's also recognizing the role of services, including after school programs for youths, right? Because we know during the pandemic, a lot of young people never re-engage with school. There's a couple of million kids on accounted for that didn't come back to our public schools. And in many cases didn't go to private school or homeschooling. So we've seen this huge decline in juvenile delinquency over the last few decades. Our juvenile incarceration nationally went down by more than half and even greater decline in Texas. But the concern is if we don't re-engage these young people in positive activities, we're gonna see, for example, car jackings, which is largely 17, 18, even younger, 15, 16, that we hear about now. So I think that all of these things, and again, the agreement is so much easier on the front end to prevent crime, whether through police presence. I just saw police on horses here in Houston after the exhibits of reports of assaults on jogging trails. So that's the kind of visibility that we see that can be beneficial in deterring crime, but also these non-police responses. I mean, police are the first people to say, we need, for example, people with mental illness, another place besides the jail where they can go. And so they recognize, I believe, I don't want to speak for a law enforcement, that there are one tool in the toolbox. And so I just continue to be optimistic. I know this issue was often used to score political points, but I really believe when you get down to it, we all want a safer society, a freer society, and we don't want to be taxed more than necessary to accomplish that. Chris, in your estimation, can a consensus really be reached in terms of what appropriate law enforcement and an appropriate criminal justice system looks like? I wish I shared Mark's optimism, because I do appreciate it. I think for people like myself and others that work on criminal justice issues, either entirely or in part as a profession, those that I respect, we want to make ourselves obsolete. We don't want to have to do this work. We don't want this to be a lifelong thing. This is very difficult work and hard work. Unfortunately, what we see on the other side are interests who are very much committed to preserving the status quo and don't see the situation in a similar way. In particular, when we talk about police, prison guard, and other associations that represent those individuals, their entire agenda is to grow both their own organizational power and dollars, which means more members, which means more dues-paying members, means more political power for them, and ultimately to increase the actual on-the-ground authority of their members as it relates to how they can treat members of the public. I see no change in how those organizations function or approach these issues. And because of the power that they possess, both within the political structure and their ability to get earned media, earned press, frankly, I think it's going to be very, very difficult to find a consensus as long as those organizations hold sway in our public policy debates. And I want to be clear here because I am talking about not necessarily the every single person who works for these organizations, not talking about the actual departments themselves in many cases, I'm talking about these associations that represent many of their members. And so because of their sway and power within the current political and media sphere, I don't see consensus as very likely, especially because of, you know, their willingness to utilize fear as a tactic, as a motivating tool. Mark mentioned, you know, how public safety is often used to score political points. And I think, you know, these are the entities that are most often trying to point out the score. And so until or unless we're able to reduce or minimize the power that these organizations have, then I'm not sure that we can't reach a consensus. Chief, certainly the police play a big role in whether or not a consensus is reached or not. You know, your officers are on the ground. They're the ones who are having that frontline contact with citizens. How do you really see the police being a positive force in that conversation? Sure. So, you know, I like to think of myself as an optimist, right? So I do hope that we can work to consensus when it comes to public safety and law enforcement. We pride ourselves here at the Austin Police Department as being a department who engages and reaches out to our community. Community engagement, community policing, it's not just something we say that we do, it's something that we try to interweave into every fabric of our department when it comes to call takers at 911, when it comes to the officers who respond to the 911 calls, when it comes to victim services, detectives, investigators, all the way up, we remind our employees that every contact made with a citizen is an opportunity to build that relationship. So that is something if that culture hadn't already been, isn't already accepted or lived out throughout our department, that's something that we're working on. And I, you know, again, I've been here for almost 30 years and I learned about that from the day one of my Academy time. So I'm hoping, and I've seen it throughout the department and I've seen officers and our civilian staff live that out. Now that being said, I also understand that there are things that we have to do to build that community trust. One of those things is doing exactly what I'm doing now and what we as executive staff are doing when we go out to these community meetings is we want to give the community a voice. We want to listen to what they have to say because that's important to us. Again, we would be blind if we thought that we are the only ones who can make policy and we knew what was best and how to best serve our communities. So one, we want to give the communities a voice and we want to be able to listen to them. Part of that listening is also being respectful to the different voices. We may not have to agree with everything that's being said, but we again need to be respectful because again, part of that consensus is how do we work together? How do we partner in, how do we partner together in making those things work together? Our points of view and other points of view, right? Because we all understand that there are more sides than the one side of the story that we're always hearing, especially with social media playing such a huge role in what's communicated. Nowadays, it's hard for officers and the general public to discern truth from fiction. And again, part of that building consensus is again just building that trustworthiness. We want to be trusted by everyone out there. It doesn't do us any good for our officers to show up with our APB badge and patch in our patrol cars if the community and our public is not gonna trust them. So we have to build that communication, that transparency and that trust in order for that consensus to be achieved. Chief, thank you. I wanna spend some time also talking about an issue that Nathan raised in his introduction and that is the lack of relationship or the relationship depending on how you see the world between the number of police officers Austin has with a number of murders that was in fact historic in 2021. Certainly if you are someone who views the role of police as combating crime, you automatically correlate number of officers on the street to less crime. Reformers see that conversation as much more complicated and nuanced and a lack of direct relationship. So Chris, you and I have certainly talked about this over time as well, but I'm wondering if you can more fully explain your position and the position of many reformers with regard to safety versus number of officers. Sure. Well, yeah, it is really complicated, but I'll try to do what I can in a short response. So I think obviously there are many different types of criminalized behaviors, things with deemed crimes and some of those crimes are actually related to harm and people being harmed and some of those crimes are not. And so when we use an overarching term like crime, firstly, I think we dropped the ball a little bit because we might be talking about very minor things, victimless things that our legislature and its wisdom has chosen to criminalize, but is not actually a problem in our society that's causing harm to anyone necessarily. So I wanna start there. Secondarily, when we talk about obviously the most severe type of crime, we talk about the loss of life, murder. You know, I think the picture as it relates to how police can play a role is very complex and it's not necessarily that more police will mean reduced murders. We can see that in the number of officers as well as the ratio of officers to population around the country. We have cities that have higher end officer to population ratios that have very high murder rates versus cities that have lower officer to population ratios that have much lower murder rates. There's not a correlation between these two numbers. And when you look really specifically at the incidents themselves, you start to get a picture of why. The Austin Chronicle, for instance, looked at 10 years of murders in an article last year. What they found was that two thirds of them were between people that knew each other. The plurality of those in private spaces, where the police are not able to access. Now, are there instances maybe where some previous police interaction could have gone differently and prevented it, perhaps. But what we're often talking about with murder is something that happens between two people that know each other in private. And so what we're talking about in terms of how do we prevent this is not a police-centered conversation, it's about other things. And I think when we look at how COVID, how the increase in murders has corresponded with the onset of the pandemic, I think this gives us a better picture, right? So when we talk about underserved communities, communities where more people live in precarity without healthcare access, without access to capital, without access to the better schools and education, we often see that those are the areas that also have higher rates of interpersonal violence. And what we've seen with COVID is an expansion of that precarity beyond even those traditional neighborhoods and then of course exacerbated in those underserved and underinvested in communities. And so with that rise in precarity, a loss of social cohesion, a rise in antisocial behavior, these are the things that we believe are contributing as much or more to what we're seeing right now than anything to do with policing. I think that's the difficult part for many people to do is to really decouple the notion that loss of life, loss of interpersonal violence or harm can be directly solved or prevented by additional officers. And that's where we're really looking at how can we look at more broad interventions firstly on the front end to help prevent that precarity, help prevent those situations that lead to the loss of social cohesion, lead to these more dangerous behaviors, lead to reliance on markets that are criminalized and how can we then also, when we do have an emergency that arises, respond with the best person possible who can meet the needs of those people who are in that emergency. And unfortunately, because of our historical overinvestment in policing, we really don't have the people that we need to respond to a lot of those varied types of emergencies that arise. And so, for us, it's really about trying to find out how we can make those investments in the preventative measures, in reducing a precarity in our communities and in the best types of responses for each type of emergency that people in our community face. Chris, one point that you did not mention just then, though I've certainly heard you mention it before and Chief, I've heard the police themselves talk about this as a major contributor, particularly to the number of murders that Austin saw last year. And that is the proliferation of guns. So can you just spend a couple of minutes talking about that as well, the number of guns on our streets? Absolutely. So yes, last year we did see a record number of homicides here in the city of Austin. And starting off this brand new 2022 year, January, we saw one of the highest murder rates that our city's ever seen in a one month period, especially in the January period, following last year's homicide rates. Also, and I don't have the numbers with me, but yes, last year more of our homicides occurred with the use of guns in any other time that we can remember. A lot of that has to do with the number of illegal guns that are out on the street. As a matter of fact, I'm not the skill of Chief Chacon's thunder, but here in the next week or two, he's going to do a public press release or a presser talking about our stance against illegal guns here and what we're gonna do to keep Austin safe with the upcoming South by Southwest, which is just a couple of weeks away. So in regards to the guns, there are a lot of illegal guns out there. And this is where the number of police officers directly correlates with those illegal guns is when we have less officers responding to 911 calls, and let's face it, a lot of people pain us as crime fighters. First and foremost, we are public servants. So our vast resources that we are asking for are to meet the response of our community, the 911 calls. As a citizen here in Austin, when you call 911 and there's an emergency, you expect to have a response from a law enforcement agency. So by reducing the number of officers on patrol, it reduces our abilities to responding as we should. A lot of that also has to do with our specialized units as well. So again, I'm over organized crime and we have a certain units in those details that focus on gun violence and getting those illegal guns off the street. Having to reallocate our resources from certain units and put them back on patrol, again, takes away from our resource in combating gun crime. So those guns are out there and there is very little we can do as a law enforcement agency with the limited number of resources that we currently have. So we've got about 17 minutes left. I just wanna tell our viewers, if you've got questions, now is the time to put them in the chat. We'll be posing them to our panelists. Mark, I do wanna ask you, where is your truth in this conversation with regard to number of police officers and the relationship or lack thereof on crime on the street? Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I think zooming out is helpful. We are, in terms of police officers per capita, we have fewer than France and Italy and Mexico. So of course, in terms of incarceration, where as everyone knows that the world leader, 5% of the world's population, 20% of the world's prisoners. But in terms of police per capita, we're actually maybe middle of the pack. So, and then in terms of cities, Chicago and Baltimore have more than twice the police per capita of Austin or Tucson, but there are different situations and may have a higher level of violent crime to deal with. But I think it really, the focus is also on what should police be doing. And of course, we've seen a lot of positive changes in terms of either co-responding or alternative responders in certain types of issues in terms of drug possession, mental health cases, somebody's yelling at the top of their lungs in McDonald's. I know you could always have the officers the backup, but also noise complaints, certain traffic matters, there are jurisdictions that are experimenting with other alternatives to police. But I think also, the numbers aren't just about solving crime, it's about response time as was stated earlier, the ability to engage communities at meetings and develop relationships and training. If you don't have enough officers, then you're not gonna be able to allocate officers not to be on duty and to be in training. And then finally sending, there's certain cases where I think sending two officers instead of one with somebody who may be volatile, you're able to reduce the risk of either force or even excessive force being used. And then finally, on the building trust thing, I think this really kind of brings us all together in terms of understanding that the community, being able to provide information on homicides and other serious crimes to officers, the willingness of witnesses and victims to cooperate, that's the partnership that's critical to solving crimes and hopefully even preventing them through violence interrupters, for example. And I do think, I do agree with Chris that some of the policies like civil acid forfeiture, the Sandra Bland bill, which has run into opposition in Texas from police unions where we were trying to basically say you can't be arrested for fine only traffic violations like failure to signal or a broken tail light. That unless there's some urgent public safety threat to the officer, that I think that a lot of police are coming around to the idea. And I even saw some banter on like the Facebook page for a cleat that basically some of the members, some of the actual officers actually thought this Andrew Bland bill was pretty reasonable and thought that the union by continuing to oppose it was reducing their influence. So I do think over time, and I know it can be slow, I do think a lot of officers have come to rise and there are by the way other states like Illinois where a forfeiture bill was agreed with with the police organizations. So I do think over time as you particularly as of course as you fund law enforcement sufficiently through general resources so they're not kind of neat what you kill forfeiture mindset. And then of course you do explain that these policies in terms of arresting people for fine only traffic offenses, for example, they erode that trust that really is in the interest of police officers and the community. We do have one question from viewer that I wanna pose to the entire panel now. It says, what do you think of state legislative involvement and deciding local police policies outside lawmakers having a say in specific city police decisions? Certainly we have seen that to an extent here in Austin and Texas. Chris, I'll start with you. Well, I think it's a complex question because I think clearly the state has an interest in preserving the rights of its citizens where it's seeing them in fringe expanding those rights. So to the extent that we're talking about legislation aimed at doing things like Marcus saying about limiting some sort of enforcement activities because they're seen as ultimately counterproductive or harmful, those are things I think at across the board level that the state should be looking at doing. When it comes to targeting specific cities particularly as it relates to HB 1900 and saying how much that must spend on police or other types of services, I do think that's an overreach. And I think that ultimately those types of services that are paid for by city tax dollars should be allocated by locally elected officials. And that's, I think what ultimately federalist system is set up to allow tax dollars acquired by that local jurisdiction to be largely smitten by the elected officials of that jurisdiction. So, and I think on principle that makes sense. And then I think specifically as a relay stage of the 1900 it's extremely short-sighted in that again, I think it was obviously a knee jerk to what amounted to ultimately a 20-ish million dollar reduction in the Austin police budget as well as the sort of moving of the forensics lab and the 911 call center to separate departments not shrinking those departments but simply moving them to be operated differently and by different personnel. And what that money ultimately went to was things like increased community health paramedics that are helping people dealing with substances dealing with homelessness. It went to domestic violence shelter one of the best interventions to help folks that are dealing with domestic violence actually escape that and prevent harm. It went to parks and other things that again help keep kids out of trouble and provide these opportunities for people to do other things. So, ultimately that $20 million wasn't vested in public safety just in different forms of it. And for them to then say that, that necessitates preventing any reduction in police spending in any big city across the state in perpetuity I think is extremely short-sighted and ultimately harms public safety because now we won't be able to make those sort of reinvestment decisions in the future if we see that actually those dollars could be better spent on something that might actually prevent something that police are responding to today. Mark your answer to this question what do you think the level of state legislative involvement should be in deciding local policing policies? Well, and it does have an analog in terms of the federal which of course the traditional federal is providing technical assistance support. A number of jurisdictions have used America Rescue Plan money for different crime prevention such as violence interrupters and so forth. Now, one of the questions is if you have a one-time funding source and you implement that then and you don't have that grant the next year your budget goes down you could be portrayed as quote defunding the police, right? So it is these are complicated matters but I think that one of the bigger question really now is recruiting and retention. I had a call from a city council member and he has a mid-sized city and they're way short in terms of their officer staffing and they never made even thought of reducing funding for police but it's just a matter of hiring and I think expanding the pool. I mean, only 11% of officers are women. So that's a key area I think and there is some evidence that actually having more women in policing does lead to better outcomes. So I really think that we need to encourage more people to go into policing even looking at some college programs where a lot of people when they go to college don't know what they wanna do and wouldn't it be great if there was a program there that could, whether it's community or four year college be an avenue towards getting into policing. Chief, can you pick up that conversation? I'm curious if you can just discuss the difficulty or not that APD specifically is having with regard to recruitment of new police officers and the degree to which the department is going to try to find not just officers but officers who would be a good fit for Austin as well. Yeah, absolutely. As Mark said, it's Austin police department. We're not siloed in a recruitment battle. I think law enforcement agencies across the entire country are having difficulty recruiting officers and I don't know why that is. I don't know if it's because of what's happened the last several years with light on law enforcement in general or if there are other attributes causing those issues but we here at Austin police department we do have a recruiting department that is actively seeking qualified individuals first here within our local community because again, we wanna represent the community that we serve and who better to represent our own community than our own community, right? So we're first hiring within our community and we're also outreaching. We're going to other cities, other states where we feel qualified candidates are that may not wanna serve or be officers in their states or their cities for whatever reason that is. We're trying to make the Austin police department as desirable as possible. And I think we're doing a pretty good job and going back to the defunding that Chris was talking about yes, a lot of that money was in came with our forensics department and our communications but part of that money, I think that affects us here at the police department more so than everything was the cancellation of the classes, right? And I understand why those cadet classes were paused because there was a question as to what type of training were we providing to our recruits? So again, for better or for worse, we can always improve. So we looked at the curriculum, we're improving that curriculum. Now I think it's time to move forward with that. We've got just about seven minutes left here but Chris, I wanted to ask you just on that topic, when you hear police officials, including Chief Bazon say that APD is having difficulty recruiting officers, what is your response to that? I mean, I guess I really don't have one. I mean, that's not an area that I'm really focused on is police retention and attrition and things like that. I think when we look across society right now, we see many industries making similar claims about being unable to find staff. I think this might very well just be a product of obviously changes in the economy due to the pandemic. Some people staying home with children that have left the workforce. Some people that have decided to pursue different careers, they realize life is short. And then I think the elephant here is over a million people dead in our country over 1,300 just here in Travis County. And these deaths reverberate in ways we don't even understand and want for a long time. And so again, for us, it's how do we really look at how we can prevent all sorts of preventable things because while obviously what many of the things that police are responding to today are serious and important and require intervention. And the deaths from interpersonal violence or harm from interpersonal violence that occurs in our community is no more of a tragedy than a preventable death from cancer or heart disease or COVID or the flu or overdose or any of those things. And for us, we want to see us put our dollars towards preventing those things that are again causing and leading to the most preventable harm disability and death in our communities. So Chris, you sort of answered this, but I want to ask all of our panelists as well. Chris, you gave us a kind of a foreshadow of how I think you may answer this question. But in the few minutes we have remaining here, I just want to ask each of you and Mark, I can start with you, but as you look to the future, the coming months, the coming year, what is your goal around this topic, around consensus, not only consensus, but reform as well? Sure, and picking up on what we were just talking about, I think officer wellness programs, we evaluated a number of those at the Council on Criminal Justice and found that those can be really helpful in retaining officers, which is obviously the other side of the coin from recruiting. And exposure to violence, whether it leads to PTSD or other trauma, that really actually is something that unites both officers and people who have been incarcerated, for example, and exposed to it in those settings. And also people that have just been exposed to violence on the street or domestic violence. So that's really where I think we can find these commonalities. And certainly we, here in Houston where I am, I mean, the first 10 minutes on the local news, you probably all heard the phrase, if it bleeds, it leads. You don't report obviously on the planes that land safely. And that's understandable, right? The media has a duty to inform the public about crime. But I also think people look on next door, right? And somebody heard of what they thought was a gunshot and then it turns out it wasn't. So there's a lot of noise out there. And people have to kind of like with COVID, right? You have to be able to make hopefully objective determinations about what risks in life there are and how best to protect yourself. I think the, but I really do think that the communities that where violent crime is the most pernicious problem, they do want policing and perhaps a little bit different kind of policing than we've seen traditionally. And so in my view, there is this opportunity to come together and really fund those things that work. And that's why an evaluation component is so effective to identify those practices like focused deterrence, for example, has had very good outcomes. Violence interruption, especially when you tend to the professional development and wellness of the violence interrupters. And then you kind of do this whole menu of strategies like Dallas is doing focused on certain people in places because that's really where you get the most bang for your buck. And combining it with the environmental issues in terms of whether it's street lights, abandoned buildings, providing recreation centers for young people after school and so forth. So it's really all hands on deck and that's why I'm optimistic we can find consensus. Chief, as you personally look to the future from where you sit, but also from the perspective of the Austin Police Department, what will be the department's goals and your personal goal for that matter and the months and year to come? Yeah, absolutely. So I just wanna say this, a vast majority of people, of men and women that come into the law enforcement profession want to do the right thing, right? And what policing look like when I first joined almost 30 years ago and what it looks like now are completely different. And I think moving forward in another 30 years, policing will look again completely different than it does today. And I think it's progressing towards the better because just because we did things a certain way in the past doesn't necessarily make it the best way. So again, what my hope is, is that we can be a department who listens. So as we serve our community, we can take the input, give them the voice so that we can become the police department and off the services that our community expects from us. Chris, and to you, certainly I know that you and the Austin Justice Coalition have made this a huge priority in the days ahead as well. Sure, and I think for our part, we're looking to, as it relates specifically to these issues and issues of interpersonal violence, made some considerable investments in how we can expand access to conflict resolution outside of the criminal legal system services as well as restorative justice personnel to resolve and restore after harm has occurred. And I think we hope to continue to expand those efforts in our communities, to try to see harm again prevented where possible and we're not restored in ways that hopefully don't involve people having to go to prison and punishment being the central response. And I think, again, to the whole, I think what we really want to see is investment of our public dollars in the things that are causing the most, again, preventable harm, disability and death in our communities. And by and large, again, where we see that is in the areas of public health. And so, and we believe that the lack of access to public health and healthcare and in general precarity within many of our communities is what is causing or does cause more interpersonal violence. And so if we actually do put our dollars towards preventing these other forms of harm, we can also prevent a lot of the interpersonal violence that we rely on police to respond to today. So I think those are really central to our goals as we move forward with this. And again, just I think, but I do think to Mark's original point, I think we all want a safer communities. We all want communities where we feel safe and where we are safe. And ultimately where we also have most freedom that we're able to have and don't feel as though our rights are infringed under threat. So there's a point of consensus that we can all work from. Thank you all so much. It's one o'clock on the money. So thanks again for joining us. And I'm gonna kick it back over to Nathan for a couple of closing remarks. Thanks again. Absolutely, Tony. Thank you for moderating today. Chief, Chris, Mark, thank you for sharing your time and insights with us. These conversations are valued for the health of our city and citizens and our civic health as a country. So thank you all. Thank you to each of you who've spent your lunchtime with us for taking part in with us today. If you're not yet a member of the Future Forum, I would encourage you to sign up on our website, lbjfutureforum.org. Members enjoy first access to events and happy hours, networking opportunities and benefits the LBJ Presidential Library. Coming up next, we'll take a look at the changing demographics and political trends in the Rio Grande Valley and also save the date for our annual Easter Egg Roll, which is back this year. We haven't had it for the last two. That'll be on Saturday, April 16th at 10.30 a.m. More details will be shared and posted to lbjfutureforum.org. Soon, as well as on all of our social channels, you can follow us at lbjfutureforum, at lbjfutureforum. Thank you so much. And I hope to see you all again or see you around town. Thanks for joining.