 My name is Seth Mnookin and I am the Director of the Communications Forum. I'm thrilled that you're all here for the first forum of the year. Our Director Emeritus, David Thorburn, is also in the audience who led the forum for many, many years. And tonight, for the first forum of the year, we're talking about Jim Crow and the legacy of segregation outside of the south. I'm going to introduce our panelists and then we will get right into it. Melissa Nobles, who's immediately to my left, is the Kenan Sahin Dean at the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and a Professor of Political Science at MIT. She's also a collaborator and advisory board member of Northeastern Law School's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Clinic. Her current research is focused on constructing a database of racial murders in the American south between 1930 and 1954. She's the author of two books, Shades of Citizenship, Race and Census in Modern Politics, and The Politics of Official Apologies. And she's written many related book chapters and articles. And down at the end of the table is Tracy Mears, who miraculously drove up from Yale today and was not foiled by traffic along the way. She is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Director of the Justice Collaboratory. Before coming to Yale, she was the Max Pam Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago. And she was the first African American woman granted tenure at both of those institutions. She's worked extensively with the federal government, and in December 2004, she was named to be a member of President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which we will talk about in due course. Again, I'm Seth Manukin. I'm in comparative media studies here at MIT. Like all forums, we'll start out with roughly an hour of conversation, and then we will open it up to all of you. And for people who do not make it, here, some version of this will also be available online at a later point. So, Melissa, I wanted to start with you and just ask a little bit about the Civil Rights Restorative Justice Project, about what exactly that is and what it's working on. Great. Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here, and it's so good to see so many people joining us this afternoon. So, the Civil Rights Restorative Justice Project started in 2007 at Northeastern Law School. Margaret Burnham is the director, and she actually was a lecturer here at the Political Science Department prior to that. And the conference was about cold cases of the civil rights era, that is, and trying to find a way of investigating those cases. And we were talking then about the 1960s mostly. But after the conference, we realized that there was a big hole out there, and that is racial violence prior to the Civil Rights Movement. That is, there was a ton of violence during the Civil Rights Movement, and we can reasonably attribute it to black mobilization and efforts to stop the movement. But then what wasn't well understood, and I don't think she and I really appreciated it until we actually started the work, is that the period of the Jim Crow South, the segregated South, is not well understood, at least in terms of its violence. We have a pretty good story in the U.S., and it goes something like this. There was slavery, then there was slavery, then we had the Civil War, we had the civil rights, the major amendments to the Constitution, 13th, 14th, and 15th, we have then the violation of those rights during the Jim Crow period, 1965 Civil Rights Movement, Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act, the rest, and 2008 Black President. And it's a rather kind of triumphant story, and one in which we, in certain ways, can rightly celebrate. The period of the Jim Crow South is largely, at least in political science, and oftentimes in popular views of that period. One of disenfranchisement, segregated schools and water fountains, and violence, yes, but largely perpetrated by the KKK and maybe someone off. But other than that, the coercive dimensions of that period are not well studied or understood. And we began to see that when we started going into the archives. And so there is a book that was published in 1995, it's called The Festival of Violence by Two Sociologists, that talks about lynchings from, it uses a database based upon Black newspapers from 1888 roughly to 1930. And the authors make the argument that racial violence declines after 1930 because of the Black migration on itself. You can't lynch your workers, people are fleeing the horrors of the South, and so therefore that's why we see a decrease in violence in the 30s and 40s and early 50s. But that's an assertion, not an argument, because there's no evidence. They don't have the data to show that violence actually decreased in the 1930s and 1940s, hence our project. And so we use a similar methodology. We go and we look at newspaper accounts. Luckily, within the past 10 years, many Black major newspapers, and these are mostly weeklies, are now digitized. So it makes certain searches easier. And also, by the 1930s and 1940s, you have the rise of the NAACP, its chapters are opening. So they themselves are creating papers, and those papers are in archives. There's the Department of Justice that belatedly begins with NAACP activism to begin to investigate the South and the FBI. And all of those papers in the U.S. War Department because of soldiers who were killed when they came back after the war. And all of those archives have not been well examined, I mean, at all. So we, along with Professor Margaret Brennan, we basically come up with these, I provide the cases. I give them newspaper accounts. We have law students. The law students treat, basically, investigate these cases and contact surviving family members. And what we're finding is just a range of violence that none of us had anticipated, right? That many, as much if it was committed by police officers as by civilians, that it is in rural counties, some of it's connected to work. Many of it, many of the violence is oftentimes connected to a violation of Jim Crow norms. You didn't take your hat off. You didn't say, sir. When the police officers, when the soldiers come back from the war, they get on the buses and they've got their uniforms on. And little did we know, I don't know if you all knew this, but in Atlanta in Birmingham, bus drivers were armed. So we hear about Rosa Parks and she didn't stand up. Yeah, I know why a lot of people in the center of the bus drivers. She gets shot, at least in certain cities where they were armed. So in effect, certain state legislatures deputize bus drivers. They're not trained to be police officers. They're not trained, right? So if you get into an argument, so certain of these deaths are because a soldier gets on the bus. He has a certain carriage about him. He's just served in the war. He's proud of himself. He's got his uniform on. I'm thinking about one guy in particular. His name was Timothy Hood and I think it was Birmingham. He gets on the bus and he decides that there's a... So Jim Crow, you had like a little sign that said, you know, you sit behind this for Jim Crow. So he moved it forward so that more blacks could sit down. His moving it forward meant he was moving it into the white section of the bus. Bus driver didn't like that. There's an altercation. He ends up dead. So these, I mean, the... So it's for us investigating this, just getting into these cases, we've just seen a lot and we've learned a lot and it's given us a much more textured view of the nature of coercion in the South and what it meant. So how that echoes today is, and then I'll pass it on to Tracy, is a lot of the violence that we seem that we've been talking about from Trayvon Martin to all of the names that we've tragically heard over the past two years. Some portion of those deaths have to do with threat perception, behaviors, control of space, discipline. What are you doing here? You don't belong in this neighborhood. You look like a threat for the woman in the car in Texas. Are you irritated? Seemingly simple interactions, which ought not end up in death sentences, end up that way. And at least what I'm finding and what we're finding in our research is that those perceptions are deeply rooted in Jim Crow. That, in part, was what Jim Crow was about. Not being able to sit in a bus or having to drink out of another kind of water fountain, being able to vote, those are all incredibly important, but an equally important part of the civil rights of the Jim Crow period was the norms of behavior, how you behaved, and its marking of your status. And when people begin to want to challenge the status or act out of place, violence erupts. And in that way, the echoes of Jim Crow seem to me to be in the North today. George Zimmerman self-depritized himself. You don't belong in this name. Who are you? Well, many Southern whites felt that it was their job to deputize. You know, they could all police blacks in the Jim Crow South. That was part of what it meant. Jim Crow meant that you knew your place. It worked not only on laws but on behaviors. The echoes of that, in my view, that's what's happening in the 21st century, so alarming, is it echoes that. And it's something that is resistant to legislation. And so that goes back to the Jim Crow period. Tracy, I want to ask you about looking up North and looking at how some of the notions of black criminality were sort of established or seem to have been established in the North as early as the late 19th century. So I think you're referring to a book that you and I talked about a couple of days ago. I should say it's not my research. So I don't want anyone to think that I've done this research, although I think it is quite amazing. It's a book by a historian named Khalil Jibran Muhammad, and the book is called Condemnation of Blackness. And the connection and the reason why I've been interested in it is because my work has focused not precisely on the same topics that Melissa's work is focused on, but really about how to think about norms of criminal procedure, the actual law of criminal procedure, how the interpretation of constitutional law through the relevant reconstructions. So the first reconstruction was a passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment. Many of my colleagues called the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in that period, the second reconstruction, and there's a question about whether we are now on the verge of a third reconstruction, all around these kinds of issues and the ways in which both violence and state violence plays a role in that. So going back to Khalil Muhammad's work, what he shows really interestingly is the ways in which we have used statistics over time to construct a picture of black people as criminals. And what's fascinating about his work is he shows that from the very first census in the 1890s, there was a process by which we are counting groups of people, so not just whites and blacks as it's often talked about today, but there was separate groups of white people, natives and immigrants, and he can show how over time there was tracking of white immigrant criminality that fell by the wayside as in the progressive era. These groups of people in the north received lots of help from many groups, so you think about in Chicago, like a whole house, and by lots of social service agencies essentially, but often private groups, while African Americans, he says, were left to work out their own salvation. And I think the reason why that's important to think about today in today's context is there is this trope about the ways in which black people are criminals, they're predating on themselves, therefore inviting a certain kind of policing, it demands an aggressive state action, while not receiving the same kind of help that other groups received in the past. And so therefore this kind of policing becomes a warrant for itself justified by helping, supposedly this group of people that can't seem to stop killing themselves, but it's also related to what Melissa was talking about in terms of constructing a threat. Who is the threat and what are we entitled to do to people who threaten us? And so in that period, and I found this astounding, crime statistics would be broken down literally into Russian, which meant Jew, Irish, Italian, and then essentially everything was done away with except for black and white. Yes. And it raises the question of... During this same period. Yeah, right. And largely in the north. And it raises the question of is there any useful reason to maintain those type of statistics in this day and age? Or should we look at crime more as urban versus suburban or income levels? It's an interesting question. I mean, so if you look at European countries, you can't actually keep these kinds of statistics by ethnic group or race. It's against the law, post World War II, for obvious reasons. People like... I believe... I'm not sure if he still believes this. It's an ongoing conversation we've had, but Glenn Lowry has at one point made this argument. I'm not sure if he still believes it. Glenn Lowry is a writer for the National Review. He used to be. But now he was to the right, now he's more to the left. He's moved slightly to the left of the extreme right. And Professor... He's still a brown. He's a brown. An icon. He's a brown. So, right? And interestingly, if we talk about government practice, the NAACP actually didn't want... I'm not talking about crime now. I'm talking about the EEOC statistics. Didn't want those statistics actually kept. And the government was like, well, how are we going to be able to track discrimination in the workplace if we don't keep track of it, right? And I think one of the things that Khalil shows is that the tracking of those kinds of statistics actually was helpful to certain groups, right? Then you know what people are doing. You know what kind of help they need. And it was helpful to certain immigrant groups. It just wasn't helpful to African Americans. And it was helpful to certain immigrant groups in creating social policies that would help them. Correct. Got it. Okay. So, Melissa, moving back to some of the work that you do, so in putting together this database, have you... I've always thought of that period as a period that at this point is fairly well understood in American history. There's certainly no shortage of both popular and academic writings on it. Has your sense of that changed? Yes, quite a bit, as I was mentioning. Yeah, it's true. It's well studied along certain dimensions. But the understanding of violence is not well understood. And I think there's several reasons for it. Some of it is a general argument about the study of the American South in general. There has not been as much scholarly interest in the region. And some of this has to do with the relative underdevelopment of that region relative to the other parts of the U.S. That region being the south. The south, right, exactly. And there wasn't a whole lot of interest within the south to study these issues for obvious reasons. But scholars looking on the outside, if you want to study, for example, so the states weren't always that well endowed. And so state administration was not well done. Right. And certain of this work is simply going through court records to a degree that there were actually any kind of court actions, arrests or the like, vital statistics, records, all of those things. So certain of this is kind of a function in, you know, to the degree that academic work is opportunistic, right? You're not really trying to be the pioneer of certain things. If you can get a great database from New York and Massachusetts or California or something to make an argument, you're not likely to go someplace where that's going to be difficult. So some part of this has to do with the nature of the region, quite independent of race and has to do with more the political economy of the U.S. In addition to that, though, there is, as I mentioned, and I wasn't saying it's tongue in cheek, there is a certain historical narrative that we're comfortable with and it's part of American myth making, which is somehow that this violence wasn't really, you know, wasn't as central to the period as it was. Or wasn't it a central component or wasn't it central to the sort of almost official governance of the area? Well, it was more our understanding of it because it was certainly understood by governance to be important, but southern legislators and policemen had different views about it in part because the mission to stop lynchings, and that is to the degree that there were several groups that tried to stop lynchings, the Southern Women's Conference for the Prevention of Lynching. I think that's what it was called. You know, they made the argument that we have to control this violence because we are seen as a lawless society, right, that this vigilantism and these police working under the color of law, you know, kind of killing people who they're supposed to be protecting and bringing them to justice. That is, you know, whether you've committed a crime or not, that's what courts afford to establish the fact of that. So we can't have policemen acting and we can't have citizens kind of taking the law into their own hands. So part of the argument against lynching wasn't about, you know, human rights or the value of black people or anything. It was like, we are lawless and we need law, right? And there were others who thought, well, no, we are very happy to operate in this kind of gray zone of, you know, kind of a selective application and denial of rights. And so that tension also is a part of that period. And none of those things, I don't think, are well understood. We had a deep impact on, obviously, black Americans to the degree that they were subject to its vagaries. But, you know, poor whites were subject, you know, no one wants, you know, to live in a lawless society. And it was recently, I'm saying the South, but it was quite variable across states and regions. Not surprisingly, you know, these states don't look too well when I'm looking at the databases. It's an eyeball. This won't surprise you all. Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Florida. The Upper South, not so bad. North Carolina, South Carolina sometimes, right? But when you think about just the numbers, yeah, it's those parts and certain counties within them. But we haven't yet, we're still trying to develop this database because it did not be quiet. We take one case, we send students out and invariably we find another case. And when we find the cases and we talk to family members, some of the family members, as I've told people, have said, how did you find out about what happened to my grandmother, my mother, my grandma? Because we come with the records from the FBI. Because oftentimes certain of these cases were investigated. But they didn't know that because many of the family members, families don't talk about it. Many of them fled the South, right? So it sounds a lot like what's happening all over the world. They fled. They went north. They didn't tell their kids about it. You don't need to know what happened to Grandma this and that. And it's not because they didn't love and care about Grandma. It's because they didn't want the kids to have that burden. But when we come, it's all, all this stuff comes, you know, really kind of rushing out. So, in a way, that's kind of the untold story. And there is, if I'm speaking, there's a certain urgency to this because people are dying. Like, there are cases that we can't fully finish. I mean, the survivors are dying. There's a dying of witnesses or, you know, a family member or something are dying. And we kind of feel like right now it's, you know, a living history. Within 10 years it's going to be a history, right? It's not going to be any direct survivors or people who are witnesses or who remember the time or this and that. And when they're gone, so much of this, the richness of it as well as the horror of it will be unknown to us. And we'll be allowed to continue with our myth making about what the United States was. So you know what I find fascinating about this is part of what you're, the story you're telling resonates with me. The part that feels a little bit jarring is the idea that this isn't the story that we know because I come at it from law. Right? And so if you look at the development of criminal procedure, the criminal procedure that you all know is probably the criminal procedure that you see on law and order, which I think is still on TV. It is. And it's always on TV. I don't know. I stopped watching TV about six years ago. Five kids, I just had to give up something. And so what you see are these things about the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the exclusionary rule. Okay, so that's new, right? Those are Warren Court decisions. Those are Warren Court decisions basically developed at the tail end of the period that Melissa is studying. So the 50s and 60s. Yeah. You know, basically MAP versus Ohio incorporates the exclusionary rule to the Fourth Amendment in 1961, I think it is. Not that anyone here doesn't know what the exclusionary rule is, but why don't you give it ten seconds? But you watch law and order. So the exclusionary rule is if there is a violation of the Constitution, usually the Fourth or the Fifth Amendment, whatever evidence that was obtained in violation of one of those amendments, an illegal search, or a coerced confession, or a confession obtained in violation of Miranda, and I know you all know what Miranda is, because even my fifth grader knows what that is, who once actually told me I violated her Miranda. That evidence has to be thrown out. It can't be used at court, it's excluded. So it's how we enforce these constitutional rules. Okay, but before the Warren Court developed these rules, there was a prior period in which the Supreme Court, this is in the 20s, decided that it was going to start reviewing state court criminal decisions almost exclusively in the South. Actually, I can't even think of a case that was not in the South. So the cases you should be thinking about in this era are, if you've ever heard of the Scottsboro Boys, there's a very, very famous case called Powell vs. Alabama, where the Supreme Court decided that the due process clause of the 14th Amendment requires that a lawyer be appointed to, and I quote, poor illiterate Negroes who could not help themselves in this particular case. Now the South, because it's worried about being lawless, is celebrating because we gave these people a trial. Like, granted, they got a lawyer the day of the trial and the lawyer really wasn't prepared and the Supreme Court is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no. This is not going to work. There was another case during that period called Norris vs. Alabama because there was actually a law on the books that excluded black people from the jury. In the Scottsboro Boys cases, the Supreme Court said that was unconstitutional. There were other cases at this time, Morr vs. Dempsey, which was about sort of mob justice in any case. It's a bunch of cases where the court is making these tentative steps, all based on the 14th Amendment, to say that there has to be some basic level of fundamental fairness. They tossed out words like ordered liberty and the basic principles of justice and so on and so forth. What's happening is that the court is defining the meaning of due process as against the lawlessness of Southern justice, while mostly leaving the North alone. I mean, some of the rules are applied there, but the sense was, hey, the North, they're getting their act together. What are they doing? Khalil would say. They're helping these people figure out how to be American, ignoring the fact that there are African-Americans also in these cities, not so many but some who are not really being treated justly. It wasn't just one more sentence. It wasn't really until the 50s where the Warren Court fundamentally dissatisfied with the slow pace because it's very sporadic. It wasn't wholesale regulatory, you can't do this. The Warren Court jumps in, comes up with all these rules and develops these rules actually without reference to race. As I said, in these early cases, they are very clear. This is why we're doing it. We understand what we're doing with reference to racist Southern criminal justice. In the Warren Court opinions, races never mentioned, except for in one case, Terry versus Ohio, footnote 11. That's really it. I just wanted to clarify. When you said that the sense was in the 20s that the Northern states were dealing with this and by that you meant that discrimination against white ethnic groups, they were dealing with that. I think that's the interpretation that I would give because the cases, there aren't really any cases, not very many. Now sometimes you'll get some coerced confession, third degree cases. But those cases have their genesis, the law that allows the court to even have anything to say about those situations in the North have their basis in review of what's happening in the South. Melissa, with the restorative justice project, you're not only putting together this database. It's been involved in some truth commissions, some after-the-fact exonerations. Why is that something that's seen as being important right now in 2015? One of the things that we think is oftentimes, and this is partly a function of the pedagogy in dealing with law students, in dealing with families, which is that in most of these cases, there can be no criminal prosecution. People are dead in their life, but people want something. Often times for certain families, it is enough that their story is told and known. Someone had known publicly what happened to their family members that they've allowed us to videotape and that kind of thing. And others, it's quite private, right? And we appreciate what you've done for my family, but we're not too interested in sharing. And we respect that as well. And then whatever we can do, we try to. So for certain of them, I wish I had a specific case in mind. There's so many that sometimes run together. But some, for example, is as simple as correcting a death certificate where they will say, they may say shot, right? So yeah, the person was shot, but they may not tell the circumstances of that, right? Buy a lynch mob or something. So just so that we kind of set that record straight. Sometimes I wasn't involved, so I kind of hesitate to speak out of turn, but my collaborator, she helped along with attorneys in South Carolina to help with the exoneration of the George Stinney case, the young man who was executed at age 13, I think it was, in South Carolina. He was so small they had to put him on books to put him in the electric chair. That case, we were working with some lawyers down in South Carolina. There was someone who was alive at the time. This person was alive at the time, but he was afraid today to talk about it. Because of repercussion? Yeah, there's a fear. They were fearful. Yes, things have changed, but we're still living down here, and that's one thing I guess I want to say is that here in the northern and other parts of the country, the southern problem became a national problem for lots of many obvious ways. It's that southern legislators controlled the federal Senate. It was always a national problem. As blacks began to flee and went up north, the issues came with them. They came up south as it was called, circumstances which weren't in certain ways much better than in the south. But the... I've lost my chance. I'm sorry. You were talking about how afraid they were. Yeah, the fear is that many people actually did not leave the south. Right. And in certain of our cases... The perpetrators... The perpetrators' descendants and the victim descendants live in the same town. And let me just say one thing. In certain of these cases, you'll have a name and there'll be one syllable missing. And it's intended... Let's say the last name is Jones and the name is Joan. The white family be Joan and the black family be Jones. The connection is slavery, right? But they changed the names to distinguish the line, right? So we found a lot of cases where you say, oh, that's the black part of the Jones or that's the white part. Because people haven't left. So there's a certain level of mobility that we have in northern cities, but in certain parts of the south today, people did not leave and their descendants are still there. So it's not ancient. It's like that was just a couple of generations ago. And their people are still here and he runs the commissioner. And so we don't need you all coming down here talking to us about this. And that's also happened, which is sometimes why we use southern students. Because even though I'm African American, I'm still considered a northerner. They hear my accent and I can talk about my people from the south. They're like, yeah, yeah. Go back up to MIT, right? And so we have to deal with that. And I'm not... I don't want to make the south sound like it's a foreign place, but I do want to say that it's not... This is also a reality of our country. It's not the only thing. The south has a lot of different things, but it is still that. So we've been talking a lot about the south and I usually try and at least pretend that I'm going to address what's in the title of the forum. No, no, no, no. I'm at fault, not... But one of the things that sparked this we were talking about how much more segregated northern cities are than southern cities and how striking that is in a city like Boston, even a city like New York. And I wonder whether... Or I'd like to get your thoughts on whether that has to do with the fact that the south to some extent was forced to go through this reckoning after maybe the second reconstruction, the first day and the second. The north sort of didn't have to go through. You look like you deeply disagree with what I just said. No, I think... I was thinking about the fact that a few weeks ago I caught the tail end of the Jacob Lawrence migration series at the MoMA, which was unbelievable. I mean, just... I'm sorry, I missed this. There are no words. And so you watch... You walk through when you see the whole series, which it's probably still online. It's nothing like actually being there, but I would encourage you to take a look. And so he has panels actually capturing precisely this dynamic, right? And it actually echoes some of the things that Melissa was talking about. So Know Your Place in the South was all about particular norms of how you interacted with people, which you had to have. My people are from the South, too. They're still there. And Selma is where my people are. But you had to, because there was so much interaction and because the place itself, the spaces, weren't as segregated. But Lawrence has this amazing panel where talking about how in the north the way this worked was precisely about making race and space sort of coincident in particular ways. And I'm sure many of you have read the Ta-Nehisi Coates piece on reparations where he talks about how that's created with redlining and racial covenants and so on and so forth. So it's just two different sides of the same kind of thing. Now, the reason why I was looking at you and you said the north hasn't had its reckoning, well, I'm not sure that the south did, number one, which is what this project is about. And, you know, number two, I guess that's what's happening now. You guess that's what's happening now in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement, in terms of... And you think that's a reckoning that's focused on the north, or is that... I think, yes. I do. More so because a lot of the incidents that have sort of galvanized the movement have happened in the north, but not exclusively. No, not exclusively, but I think most of them have happened. And it's also an urban phenomenon. And, you know, north is urban. And that's not to say that there aren't cities in the south. So just to make sure that I'm getting what you're saying. I have to say I haven't really thought about this until this moment. In an hour I might change my mind. That'll be part two. So you're saying that the reason why we have much more segregated cities in the north is essentially because there are cities in the north in a way that they weren't in the same way in the south that those were already desegregated communities in terms of where people lived. They were segregated more in terms of moors and laws. Is that right? So I want to back up from the reason. The last thing you said about it is true that in the south there was much less and I think continues to be much less segregation in terms of where people live. And that was both... The relationships were managed through explicit law and through norms because black people always lived amongst white people in the south. That was always true. And that when there was migration to the north, at first the populations were small enough so that people I think just sort of went where they were and then people in the north decided actually to adopt explicit policies to contain people. And we know that's true in Chicago and for sure, Detroit, I mean we can go down the list of cities. Boston for sure. And that I think sort of one consequence of that both political and policy reality is the kind of policing that we have in the north. And so do you think that the kind of policing that we have in the north is in some fundamental way different from what we see in the south? So that's where I get to the sort of urban city thing. Right. Because I think big city policing is just different from not big city policing and there are just more cities. Right. So I want to talk about your work on Obama's commission but before that I want to get into this notion of this being a reckoning period. Do you think that that is because... Why do you think that is? Is that because we have become aware of all these incidents because of the proliferation of cameras on phones and social media allows us to learn of these incidents in a way that we couldn't before? Is there something else going on? I think there's a certain element of it. These things have been happening for a while. Now it's people I think are prepared to believe. Right. Because there's video. Because there's kind of evidence. I think that some of that is true. This won't be a surprise when you have an... And this is true in all kinds of cases, murder cases. Well, one person is dead, one party is dead. So that story is forever unknown. And when the perpetrator involves one of the shooters as a police person, they get the benefit of the doubt. There's a certain difference. And we all kind of see that and there may be good reasons for that. Except when there's a question of the murder. I mean, you know, the basis of it, the reason for it. And there's always been some dispute about the view of the over-policing of minority neighborhoods, either under-policing or over-policing. Right. And I do think though that the cameras have been a big part of it. But I think what the Ferguson showed, the Ferguson incident and Mike Brown incident showed was that we have this murder. But then the tipping point, when people came out in the streets and really were angry is because they pointed to not just a murder, but the constant basis of the interactions between whites and blacks and the police forces. And which became known that basically blacks were like a source of revenue. And that had been something that had been going on forever, where you get a ticket and you end up, we've all heard about it now. And the notion of policing being more than about criminal, I mean, basically creating crimes. If you read some parts of the Ferguson report, if you were black walking down the street, you were subject to the arbitrary nature of that at the end. What appeared to be arbitrary, except if you understand the logic of revenue generation, violates any notion of civil liberties. That is a complete negation of any notion of living in a free society. None of us would look and read that story about Ferguson and think that's a free society. If we took out Ferguson, Missouri and put in Russia or something, we'd be like, yeah, of course, this is horrible. So there is a way in which, so the Mike Brown murder was in itself its own problem, but it also revealed what else was going on. And that is then a much larger question of the relationship of black citizens to the American state. What is our status as citizens? So the black lives movement is kind of calling that back into question. The civil rights movement said, look, we are equal. We have to vote this and that. In the 21st century, again, we're asking, what is the status of black American citizenship? What does it mean to be a black citizen in the United States? In an age of a black president? Yeah. I was wondering when you were going to bring that part up. That is my handoff to you. Yeah, I actually think that that is, when you say is it the social media, it's hard to disentangle particular things, but I think there is a constellation of things that I would bring together. And Melissa's already touched on many of them, including the fact that this is happening after 2008. But let me add a couple of other things. In our post-racial society? Right. If it's a black crow, it's over and now we have a black president. But let me add a couple of other things to the mix, which adds to this, what does it mean to be a citizen? So one way of understanding what it means to be a citizen is that your government works for you and does things for you and helps you and protects you. So we now live in a world in which policing justifies itself by being good crime fighters. So you have to understand that that's a relatively recent development. And the notion of policing? Oh, yeah. So I'm looking out, there are lots of students in the room. Basically, if you looked at any research involving policing from 1995 to 2000, I'll just pick a book, David Bailey, he would say, there is no credible evidence that police can do anything about crime. That's a myth. Police will tell you that they should have more resources, but no one can actually show that putting more police in a particular place is going to do anything about crime. What we have police for is to respond to crime, solve the crime, a la la, in order, and maybe that will happen. But that's not how we're justifying the existence of police. And then suddenly, around 2000, that changed. There were these economists. Listen to Freakonomics. I don't know. Steve Levitt figures out the amazing instrument so he can do the statistical regression to figure this out. Whoa. Police make a difference. This was huge because it meant that all these police executives could go around and say, we make a difference. Public safety is our warrant. We are going to go out and help people in high crime areas. Where do those people live in big cities in the north? So Bloomberg, Ray Kelly, all of these people, we're going to do stop and frisk. We're going to do all of this stuff. And we're going to show that it is reducing the murder rate and who's benefiting? Black people. We're helping black people. And if it's a cost for them to have their autonomy and privacy interests interfered with, well, they're getting a really serious benefit too. So public safety becomes the justification for policing and also is a way of constructing citizenship. But what's forgotten? What's forgotten in this? Is a way of constructing citizenship in the sense that... That they're paying attention because historically in this other period, there was all kinds of... Paying attention to crime. To crime. Right. That wasn't happening. That was one of the problems during the Kerner Commission that was pointed out. Randy Kennedy's first book on race, crime and the laws. Like, wait a minute. There's an under-policing problem here too. Like the state isn't paying attention to the fact that so many people of color, black people in particular, are being killed. So like now they're paying attention to it. But they're paying attention to it in a very particular way that has costs for this group. And what people are forgetting is that there is another part of the equation that people care about. And they care about being secure. They care about security from predation by the state. Both of those things are true. Like you don't want private predation. So you should... Police, you should help keep me safe. But at the same time, you shouldn't do that by killing me. It's pretty basic. That doesn't seem like that radical an idea. But is that something... Is that a notion that is getting pushback from police departments, from law enforcement agencies? Well, it's interesting. I mean, so one of the things that we did on the president's task force was talk about the importance of promoting public trust while also promoting public safety. So a lot of the work that I've done over the last decade and a half or so has been about these ideas of promoting policing with procedural justice and legitimacy being very targeted, not sort of going out and arresting people. There are very particular strategies you can use to both be effective but also to enhance trust. And the research is quite clear that when people have competence in legal authority and in the law, they actually decide to voluntarily comply with the law. So enhancing trust is its own crime-fighting strategy, essentially. So essentially the opposite of stop and frisk could be another way to reduce the broken windows theory. And so there was a guy on the task force who was a national union representative, Sean Smoot, who is a leader actually in passing laws about not having financial gain in the police station for policing. He actually had a law, introduced a law, and had it passed in the state of Illinois before the whole Ferguson thing came out. Not having financial gain. So you can't sort of stop and arrest people in order to make money. It actually has to be for a public safety reason. Things like that. So I think it is clear that policing agencies and the unions in particular feel under attack. But if you get down to the sort of local, the more local level unions, they understand the importance of building these trust relationships. It's complicated and it's hard. But I do think this sort of crime control is self-justifying, is fueling this dynamic that Melissa was describing. And crime control is fueling this dynamic and despite the fact that we're at a historically low, in terms of crime in the country, a historically low period. So last year when the two NYPD officers were killed, one thing that struck me was how, through whatever prism I was observing this through social media, there was this, there was Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter were set up as if they were in opposition to each other. Which I found a little bit alarming, although I guess not that surprising once I thought about it more. Is there a way that these large police forces can be, can sort of become part of the solution and not think of themselves as in this adversarial relationship? Yes, I mean, I think, you know, to understand that, just going back to what I just said, that if you are willing to work with people in the communities in which you are providing public safety to enhance trust, that will be a strategy that works for you. It's just, it's hard for them to do that when they've been trained not to do that. Everything about their training is about understanding the public as dangers to them and to their safety. Number one, they define their safety in very narrow ways. So, you know, you'll talk to police officers and they will say, I just want to get home to my family and I will say, you know, that's great, but if you think about it, that's a really narrow way of understanding your safety. How about getting home to your family in an emotionally healthy way. Yeah, right. In a way that you can actually, you know, interact with your partner and your children. You know, police officers have one of the highest suicide rates of any profession. They have really high, you know, heart disease. It's a very stressful job. And so, getting them to understand that these kinds of strategies that we have been advocating in terms of legitimacy, procedural justice, and building trust, not only, encourages members of the public to volunteer and really comply with the law. It makes interactions more peaceful. It lessens the risk that they will be harmed physically. And it just makes the job less stressful. Like everybody's happier. So, one last thing I want to get to before we open this up. The discussions that the country is having right now about these issues seem in a very fundamental way different from conversations that we've had about race, at least in my lifetime. So, obviously, not going back to reconstruction. Which, in some ways, gives me, makes me optimistic because it seems like having these conversations is a sort of requirement for them figuring out what to do. At the same time, I see efforts to roll back some of the advances of the Voting Rights Act and the kind of full-throated support of policies like that. And that makes me a little bit despondent. So, I'm curious where you're emotional, where you fall, if what's happening today is making you more or less optimistic for the future of the country and race relations in the future of the country. I would say I'm surprisingly optimistic. In part because I think what I like most about the Black Lives Movement is that for most of the 20th century, the Civil Rights Movement, NAACP, and I should say here that we're not for the NAACP, I don't know where Black Americans would be, frankly. I thought I appreciated it and then I started doing my research and we read through their papers and this guy Charles McPherson, who ran the Birmingham office, he was a physician but also the president of the chapter and worked under extreme circumstances. You think about all that they did, okay, fine. But one of the things that the NAACP also did as a strategic matter in the 20th century was always a concern about Black respectability. A notion about citizenship, we had to prove that we were worthy to be citizens. So there was a policing of that. And the Black Lives Movement is like, we're done with all that. Whether we're criminals or not, whatever that is, we are citizens and there are structures to deal with that and they ought to deal with us as you deal with other people who accuse of crimes. So we've decided to kind of take that off the table. That's not a way to think about how we're going to assert our rights in the 21st century. We are human beings, we're citizens. Whether we've done something wrong or not, there was a process to do it. It's called a court and not the police and others who decide to be the judge and the executioner. We have ways to do it. So I'm encouraged by the Black Lives Movement because it's kind of eschewed Black respectability. So we're done with that. Look, we're here. We're here. And that way I think it's opening up, and that way it's speaking to all kinds of movements where people are saying, we are who we are, deal with it. We're citizens, we want our rights and we're not qualifying it and we're not doing any of that. We pay out to acts as we're here, treat us. Treat us fairly. So I'm encouraged by that. That's what I find encouraging. It isn't wrapped up in the whole morality anymore. And not even appealing to American conscience. A big part of civil rights movement was America's conscience and the rest of it. We're done with that too in the 21st century. Enough. And I'm encouraged by that. I'm encouraged by it's just no nonsense. These young people, I had a friend who went to a Black Lives Matters Movement meeting of organizers, which by the way are run by a lot of women, by the way. And these women are completely irreverent. So they're like non-deferential. So you have, you know, the pillars of the civil rights movement, people who, Bob Moses, people who you look to with some deference. And they ought to be, you know, given what they did for the civil rights movement, there is a certain amount of respect there to do them. I think these young women respect them, but they also feel like it's our century, it's our time, it's us, we're doing it. I like all of that. And so I'm encouraged, I'm really encouraged by it. And even though it is a frightening time, I think there are, there are allies out there who are mindful. Just the idea that the Black Lives Matters become like a tagline and people qualify and talk about it, but we're talking about it in a different kind of way. It strikes me as a good time. So I'm hopeful. So you can be not hopeful. Yeah, good. So everything that Melissa said I agree with, and I can see why focusing on that part of it is encouraging. Here's the part that worries me. If you look at the success of the civil rights movement or even, you know, the sort of latest successes of immigration rights and the like, almost every one of those movements had a legal target. So think about the ones that don't, and weren't successful. Occupy anybody? What was the legal target there? There wasn't. And the fact that you might need a legal target in order to be really successful is worrisome to me. So let me just take some of the points that you made. The idea that, you know, sort of all lives matter, we're here, we're going to take, so we have just focusing on the criminal justice system, a way of organizing our legal system here that places primacy on innocence. And we have these tropes, right, that will let 10 guilty people go free to protect this innocent person, which actually really doesn't happen, but sort of the system is organized around innocence, such that, you know, we have all these innocence projects and I'm really happy about that. But like, there are a lot of people who really are guilty who don't get treated fairly at all, right? And if you think about a different way we could organize our system, again, let me look to France, they don't organize their system. Most of the Western European countries don't, but let me use France in particular. They don't organize their system in that way. When you go to court in France, pretty much everybody assumes you're guilty. And they don't have the same kind of, you know, procedural safeguards that we do, and yet their system is set up so that people who are guilty are almost always treated with mercy. And, you know, and Europe people don't go to prison as long. And they're guilty, right? And if you've seen, I think it's either an Icelandic, I think it's an Icelandic or a Finnish prison, it's amazing and, you know, so on and so forth, right? I don't see how we get there, for example. Okay, now outside of the criminal justice system, you know, once we have a world in which there is legal equality, which technically we do, you know, the issue here is really about fundamental redistribution of resources or a kind of government intervention that we can call reparations, but, you know, is really about redistribution of resources. You know, what's the legal target for that? You know, it's like we have to have a different government. Yeah. I mean, it's not only the legal target, it's just, in addition to that, the mindset of the country seems so removed, I mean, so far away from that. Right, even while the country, I think, as you pointed out, is sort of understanding that there is something deeply, fundamentally, and horribly wrong. We're having the conversation. We are having the conversation. It's just hard for me to see how we get there. I mean, there is, well, is criminal justice reform a way that, yeah, I don't know. Well, so I focus on that in all honesty because I actually think it's easier than the, right? I actually think it's easier to get... You strike me as someone who searches for the easier path and then chooses that path. I think it's easier to get fair policing. I've done a lot of work on violence reduction strategies because it's easier to save someone's life than it is to turn somebody's life around. So I've done all of this work in Chicago that's about keeping people from shooting each other. And at the end of the day, you'll talk to people in foundations and they'll say, oh, it has to be the social service component of your strategy. I was like, no, maybe 10% of people ever stepped foot in the social service component that we offer to the people who are involved in it as... It's a long, complicated reason why we do and I don't know if that is really relevant to this forum, but the point is, is that all I can say is that people are not dead. That is not the same thing as saying that a person has learned how to read, that they've graduated from high school, that they have a job, that they are staying, that they are fully involved in their children's lives and that people are flourishing. Not being dead is not the same thing as flourishing. So I'm not hopeful. Sorry. On that optimistic note, I'll open it up to the audience and if you could please go to one of the microphones. If you could just go to one... We have two microphones. That would be great. Thank you. Tall. Hello. Hello. Okay. Many things are in my head. So if it's a little bit off, it's because many things are in my head. Melissa, you actually hit on something that I wanted to start my questions with and that is the role of the... The decision of the civil rights movement to go in a certain direction was a lot more complicated than we've been told. Talking about that story, so unpacking that. So a friend of mine's father was very important in the NAACP in a certain state, maybe Mississippi, I think, and she called me one night since I've been working here. Her father passed and she went through his records and found out that there were huge arguments about whether to go for plurality or integration and within the NAACP and outside of the NAACP the arguments were very, very heated and people made some decisions that they made and I have since interpreted that and layered it in a certain way and that is that the decision was made to focus on certain portions of what was happening in the South and that other things were kind of ignored so that you could have something doable because it was hugely big and every state had lynchings. Every state had a lot of things and so when you think about that they were ignoring what was going on in the urban areas and I'm from Los Angeles which is one of the major places that this was taking place and so ignoring the segregation ignoring the despair of the people ignoring all of this and by 1964 New York explodes and in 1965 Los Angeles explodes and people said what about us? I mean if we had said Black Lives Matter then it was what about us? We have things that we're looking at why are you always shooting us up and beating us up and all of that so I think that part of what we are doing here is I think in the eaching or something it says that if you don't finish something it's going to come back and I always thought that if you have a little piece of a plant that's poison or whatever it's going to go again in a certain way so the north has been actually the question about whether or not we're ever going to have a civil right movement a civil society because of all of the once people escape and they go to a place that's totally segregated certainly by the 60s that was true but as early as the 1890s after they sort of disarmed us after the Civil War my friend said it wasn't called it shouldn't be called re-instruction it should be called the disarming of the Black population after the Civil War they had to make it clear that they wanted nothing to change in as many places as they could possibly do so they went and kidnapped us and took us back to the south or they shot us down or they lynched us and lynching actually was at its highest in the 1930s not this lowest they were killing people right and left but the way in which Los Angeles is constructed because it is seriously one of these cities that has been understudied and my relatives are in all sides of it my relatives are in the police and they're also in jail so you can see the whole scandal that actually means that the work was not done and that's why it's so difficult that you know about where are we going to start with this is really the issue it's not where are we going to continue it's where we're going to start there are people living in these cities in conditions much worse than the rural areas that we're talking about people who've never had any opportunity schools falling apart etc so I wanted to just say that I think that's part of the segregation it is so entrenched and so rigid and so horrific and I can recall I'm very much of a militant my hair has been like this since 60 whatever and I can recall one of my relatives showing up supposedly undercover he's a policeman and I said what the hell are you doing here and my brother said the same thing he was at my school trying to be undercover looking all cop-ish and so we had this whole battle what are the police for and who are you for are you going to shoot somebody what's going on here so in order to deal with that you have to have a whole new construct and understand why Harold Cruz finally wrote plural but equal because it was so obvious to him even in the crisis of the black intellectual that something was wrong it was a civil rights movement and he wasn't able to articulate it until he got to plural but equal unless we do that unless we look at it plurality could do today like it could have done then we're in a place where we have not even begun to think about how you actually liberate people and have them and this has nothing this is the NAACP and some of these people talent and tith bullshit but that's what it is and people are they're feeling that they don't want to be characterized in certain ways they don't want to acknowledge they pretend like we could hide what we do we don't want to talk about this in front of white people and one time I said to some people are you think they don't know what are we not talking about but it is horrible there are things that are so horrible and things that we've done and things that we've experienced that are just so terrible because we come out of despair and other people that just magnificently rise above it and how do we do that is a real issue and how do we make sure that the society does not interfere with our ability to be whoever we are is the issue and that's okay I'm going to defend as Richard Pryor said the thugs in the Arizona state penitentiary I just saw him the other night on the commercial and he said some of those people don't ever need to get out and he said I was very naive I thought that black people were there because of the struggle and he said one of them why'd you kill everybody in the house and he said because they was there so that came out of a black man's mouth and what we need to figure out is how to get at this in a certain way so I know that's not a question but I wonder what you think I wonder what you think of what I'm saying and where this might lead us to bring it open okay well I think what's for sure is that the debates within black communities about strategizing has always been complicated and we necessarily collapsed that it made it more simplistic than it actually is so I well appreciate as you said that many places there's been a lot of robust discussion and each movement makes a decision at the time about what they imagine what they think given the information before them what will work and the same movement the same decisions are being made now about Black Lives Matter and they may have made some right decisions they may well have made some wrong decisions time will tell and while we may look back at the civil rights movement and think oh the MWACP as I suggested made some strategic decisions about how they were going to present African American aspirations but there's a reason there was a reason why they did it and at the time it may have made some sense responding to the cues that you're getting so you all are immoral you are this, you are that so how do you go against that you talk about your morality you talk about your uprightness women have had to deal with that you are this and that so you respond to it on retrospect everyone has the luxury of hindsight to say don't let the people set the terms don't let your opposition set your terms I mean you know you deal you work with the dark cards and you use the language that you know so I don't want to be overly I didn't in all mean to oversimplify and or be overly condemned in the MWACP but rather to reflect then in the 21st century we live in a different we have a different political language and I'm embracing that language because I think it's suitable for where we are now can I just add just a word to that which is you know to point out the costs of particular strategies is not the same thing as saying were I to do it over again I would do it totally differently because you might not have an option really to do it differently and Melissa's right the NWACP achieved amazing things amazing things it is also true that the path that the organization chose to achieve those amazing things has particular costs for us today that's just recognizing the reality can you add to yourself also just for posterity's sake yes hello Arthur Berger I appreciate your comments very much my question is regarding the the successes that the Black Lives movement matters can lead to and the concern that was raised that at this point there doesn't seem to be a legal target that it's aiming towards and you point to an example of the Occupy movement which was a failure in that regard and I'd like to relate that concern with the initial comments Professor Noble made talking to the Jim Crow period where the aspect of the expected behavior of Black people and your last sentence you said was legislation's not going to solve that so I'd like to take if you could comment that comment with strategy that you'd recommend for success in the Black Lives Matter movement thank you the problem with asking you to do this is now you need to come up with solutions but I will say this though that one part of it is while it's not legal I'm going to leave it to you in part because you've been working on this that the working with police practices because so much of these things turn on those interactions and the videotape has given us a view of that to a degree that we have them but in describing so I guess while it's not legal it is getting at better training police right on how to interact with citizens and in turn for citizens also to learn a bit more about how to interact with police but assuming that both are coming from a place of we want to work better together and we don't want what should be relatively minor incidents turned into deaths so that what should be at the top of this this is why I think black life matters so much is that it should be we should all be concerned about the preservation of life of the policeman and the citizen that life has to be because it can't be that a cop stops you for some BS traffic stop in your debt that cannot be an acceptable way that our society operates and that's and that comes to police practices that comes to citizen awareness it comes to social interactions all of these things that have been a big part of our society relations and that's why I mentioned the Jim Crow period was based upon known cues of how black was supposed to act and if you didn't act a certain way that was licensed to let you I think that's right so there are two ways in which you might say that it's not legal so, you know, a quick 20-second primer on the procedural justice stuff that I talked about we know that the way that the public assesses whether police or any other person in legal authority are acting fairly is with respect to four things one, whether you're treated with dignity and respect two, whether the decisions that this person is making are interpreted by the relevant target and the cop you're the target the decision that I make is fair, is it neutral, is it based in fact, do I do things like say to you the reason why I stopped you is whatever even if it's a BS reason you have to articulate it I've said it three, do I give you a chance to tell your side of the story people really care about that even when telling your side of the story isn't going to make any difference to the outcome and four am I acting in a way that cultivates an expectation in your eyes that I will treat you benevolently in the future, so this fourth one is impacted by all sorts of things, who your friends are you know, are you a black person and you look at the TV and you see that people are treated in a certain way so of course I don't expect police to treat me benevolently, were you a victim of crime in the past and the police didn't show all these kinds of things those are the things that really matter and there's all kinds of training that you can do for police that teach them about that I've developed some myself with my colleague Tom Tyler we're doing this all over the country and so you can train people but the thing that's interesting about these four factors is that like a typical way of thinking about legitimacy of police is to say well they should just be lawful they should act consistently with constitutional law that's really really important but the common law doesn't really have anything to do with those things so that's the, it's hard to legislate part, right? so the court says in a case called Ren versus the United States that as long as a police officer is probable cause to believe that you've broken a law, traffic law then they're pulling you over is fine even if the reason why they're pulling you over has nothing to do with the fact that they really care in Sandra Blance's case that she what did she do like like you know the guy didn't really care about that that really wasn't why he stopped it but the court has said that's okay there's nothing about the fourth amendment that says you have to tell somebody why you stopped the person nothing in the fourth amendment says that you have to treat someone with dignity and respect that part is the part that's what are you gonna do, legislate what you can do is legislate you have to do this kind of training you can legislate you have to have officers to be sensitive to implicit bias that kind of stuff you can do but the training itself comes from a different expertise that's not so much about what the law says or it's not about just obey constitutional law does that make sense I want to be overly simplistic here but is in the absence of legislation is something as simple as body cameras is that an instrument that can kind of force some of those changes well some of it I mean there's some real nascent research that shows that when cops are wearing body cameras there are many fewer complaints that cops act differently that person everybody acts differently but that stuff's really new one wonders about what's gonna happen when the body cameras become the new normal it's amazing that we see the kind of things that we see when the cops know that people are filming them sometimes they know, sometimes they don't but whatever I think that's why in the president's task force we actually didn't have a lot to say about body cameras because the technology changes so quickly I do think body cameras give us lots of options for good training so it's less about evidence of wrongdoing and more about opportunities to actually see how these interactions go and then do after the fact training and figure out whether the training actually makes a behavioral difference in the way that we expected to things like that it's clearly an important opportunity that's obviously true oh sorry blah blah hi I'm Sasha from comparative media studies thank you so much for this talk so I have three questions the first one is actually the first one is a little less of a question and it's more of a response to the sort of conversation about the lack of policy proposals I don't think that's true at all I'm gonna just briefly read the 10 point policy proposal from campaign zero launched a couple weeks ago the campaign zero is different from the black lives matter launched a couple weeks ago by some key activists from black lives matter I'm not saying black lives matter as a movement has embraced them but it's important for people in the room who might not be following it that closely to know so you know one point one end broken windows policing point two community oversight boards point three limit the use of force in all interactions point four independent investigations and prosecution of you know of police point five is community representation I'm not sure how that's different than a community oversight board six is body camps and film the police so organized citizen surveillance of police seven is improved training eight is an end of for profit policing so quota systems payment based on nine is demilitarization so that includes some specific policy proposals about ending the pipeline of you know surplus military into local police forces and ten is fair police union contracts so they include that as well so my first question is about what do you think about the campaign proposal the second one is about it was something that you were describing earlier in terms of the shift in argumentation about the reason for police and the way that they're able to mobilize statistics to talk about well more pre police presence means reduced crime and so on it's a really I guess dark question about the evolution of the predictive policing systems and algorithms and I'm thinking of the crime stat systems that have been now adopted by many local agencies and the idea that Oscar Gandhi raises in some of his work around the what does he call it the endless loop of algorithmic policing so basically you allocate resources based on crimes that are in your database but the crimes that are in the database are based on the previous allocation of police to police communities of color and black communities specifically so then you put more police there and then of course they're going to note more crimes and so the database will always tell you put more police here in a black community so as those systems unquestionably get adopted more and more widely how do we escape that trap and then the last one is more hopeful it's a sort of question about so that one's for Melissa which one the hopeful one obviously the hopeful one so the hopeful one is about the the question about the possibility of larger shifts and transformations and I do think there's a really interesting moment happening in terms of broader criminal justice reform so even just in the last couple weeks so last week Ella Baker center and strong families forward together launched a national report called who pays about the costs, who bears the cost of incarceration and it's looking at the cost of families of having a loved one inside $13,580 something per year born by 84% of the costs are born by women, mothers, grandmothers wives, sometimes daughters that report which was a community based participatory research action report got covered in the New York Times the nation, CNN the Atlantic just goes on and on and now this week the TV coverage is starting to pop and come out it's hard to imagine that just a couple years ago a community based participatory research report about mass incarceration would become part of a national conversation a sitting president visiting a prison isn't there isn't this leading aren't these signs of hope towards the possibility of a body shift so that's a lot of questions sorry I'll just stop so I'll be really quick so you can hear from hope so campaign zero that's new if you actually look at the Black Lives Matter platform it was really interestingly devoid of any kind of legal target to the extent that it did have legal targets it had things that actually if you're looking at it as a lawyer and I want to be clear I have great admiration for this but you're looking at it and you're just like that's not going to happen so for example it's the kind of thing the attorney general needs to investigate every police officer who kills a civilian it's like it's just fun it's not whether it's it's just like a fundamental misunderstanding that the government in this country works the federal government just doesn't do that that's what federalism is for example things like that so campaign zero is a platform that was developed in part by my friend and fellow Task Force member Brittany Packnett and almost I would say 8 out of the 10 of them actually came from the president's Task Force report so those were our recommendations not all of them are legal targets in the sense that I'm talking about that I think historically have shown to be parts of successful organizing so while I think they're good ideas I'm just not sure right that's my point if you think about the way social movements work there's a reason why the NAACP picked the kinds of targets that it did that actually helped to mobilize the movement and why you know King's subsequent strategy was not as successful and that doesn't mean that I don't think that his strategy his policy proposals of course I do that's why we're here we haven't been able to do it yet so that's the first comment on that the thing about the you know the policing and the predictive policing it's interesting if you want to read a really interesting piece about that there's a piece by David Sklansky it's in this Harvard Kennedy School series from the executive session on policing which I participated in my own piece in that series is called rightful policing his piece is called the puzzling persistence of police professionalism love that alliteration go David right and so you know he talks about there's always the next new thing including predictive policing I don't think it's as dark as you might think because police just really aren't that good as a general matter and you know I don't want to make it seem like I'm like you know I do a lot of work with police I think we need them I want them to be better right but there are 18,000 policing agencies in this country we talk about 20 of them only half of them have more than 50 officers this is what I'm talking about this urban you know this is like for most of them a lot of the stuff that we're talking about just you know just doesn't matter you know and certainly predictive policing is not because they don't have any kind of a sophisticated you know deployment strategy know where people are all of that kind of stuff now everything you said sort of does matter for New York and matter for Chicago and you know and for those people we have both evidence but also recommendations about how to do policing smarter which is not just about sending hundreds of people to a particular place again and again and again just in New York don't forget HOPE though but you have like HOPE is down even though we only talk about 10 or 20 of these police forces they represent a hugely outsized they do except that remember the unions represent everybody and so this is sort of an issue right I mean it would be different if you know you could imagine just if we're just focusing on those 20 policing agencies and they had their own union and you know they didn't sort of think about the ways in which they were connected to you know the citizens and so on of the world but it just doesn't work that way and every one of these agencies is located in a state and some of them get federal funding and some don't and some have Republican governors and some don't and it's a challenge HOPE is down and I think it's been well I don't have much to add I thought your comments about where you felt hopeful seemed okay with me I can't despair is winning out more questions we probably have time for one or two more so we'll make these two the the last two questions could you make comments just identify yourself I'm sorry I'm John Ibister could you make a comment on the reconciliation and the part of the program that you're working on sure so the reconciliation dimensions of it are quite individualistic they relate to each particular case that we examine and for the vast majority the reconciliation is largely more of a private one meaning that for the victims families finding out about what happened to their loved ones and getting whatever documentation we've been able to provide along with our describing the other cases that we know about as a way of saying to them it wasn't an isolated incident what happened to your loved one is usually the most important one part of the reconciliation that I should say that we recognize it's not fully not as well developed is what happens for the perpetrators families and so one instance we had a it was a town in Texas so it wasn't necessarily the perpetrators family but the town itself had a public discussion about what happened to the person they named the street after the victim white and black members of the community came together they learned about his life met his descendants the mayor kind of officially apologized on behalf of the town and the black and white residents in many of these cities it's still black and white but not all obviously American democracy is changing but in these instances they had those public gatherings which are quite local we're talking about this was a small town in Texas seemed to have gone a long way so that's one part of it which is meeting with bringing towns together and it's of a certain generation so I should say sometimes we've gone out on these cases and met families one venue that we found pretty useful family reunions many african-americans have family reunions over the summer and we would go now the great thing about them is that you get well fed but you know I've got many cousins now but there's also something about this pretty interesting that is quite a generational thing so people under 40 whatever so we'll come and talk and we'll say who's the most eldest person in the room because we want to talk to you but then in addition to that we describe to the family what happened we think happened we need their help whatever memories they have this and that and it's kind of surprising the younger people aren't really that interested their parents are interested and their grandparents are very interested but the younger people are like okay now can we get to the dance and so we're not being naive here we recognize that in a way it's not capturing the imagination of the younger people and we kind of so if reconciliation so we can read that in two ways one could be that this isn't our story right we're not we don't really fully understand it and we're not even going to claim we're not even going to claim that we understand it and we could take heart net by saying that this generation sees their life in a different kind of way maybe they are not freighted with the ways that I is in my fifties and people older than me kind of look at this so I haven't been as disheartened by that but it did take me by surprise when I saw young people remember being at several family unions and yeah the kids are looking at me like when are you going to be finished and so I learned at first my distress turned to well okay I'm going to put a positive spin on that and just assume that for them this isn't their story but they have another kind of story they're writing their history their story they're writing it and I'm an observer in a way to that story I just want to add one thing to that which is the very the second recommendation that this is the president's task force that's online final report which you can get online the second recommendation we made this is one point two is that law enforcement agencies should acknowledge the role of policing in past present injustice and discrimination and how it is a hurdle to the promotion of community trust and you know we had a bunch of stories a lot of testimony about that and one in particular I wanted to share briefly which was the police chief of Montgomery Alabama do you know this one? John Lewis? Yeah this is the John Lewis story so this guy's name is Kevin Murphy he was the police chief and John Lewis was went back as he does and the chief was part of a delegation that welcomed him back this was in 2013 the church that was fire bombed the night after a bunch of the freedom riders arrived so the church is fire bombed they cut electrical you know this mob white mob does this and the police are nowhere to be found right so this is what I was talking about like there's a part of citizenship where the police actually protect you it wasn't happening so Kevin Murphy goes to him and says I want to and John Lewis was there during the fire bombing yes he was there this is years years years later the new police station is across the street from this church it wasn't then so he goes to the church and he says I want to apologize to you for the way that the Montgomery police acted it was their job to protect you as you tried to exert your constitutional rights we failed you he had this whole long thing and then at the very end of it gave John Lewis his badge and he said this badge is reserved for people who stand for rights like you and you should wear this badge and you know John it was actually you should you can watch it it's really moving nobody knew he was going to do it even his wife didn't know he was going to do it by him I mean the police chief and you know these are extraordinary acts that are extremely meaningful that's hope the thing is is you know what I think is interesting about Melissa's project is you know she says she's doing these really small retail like trying to imagine to do a recommendation like we do to do this wholesale big it's really hard because after Kevin Flynn does this now every police chief can't go on do it because then it doesn't mean anything anymore so you know it's hard Lewis said he said I just want to make sure you have another one when he gave him his badge that was alright last question good evening thank you for all of your comments my name is Camille Uoli and I'm a Ph.D. student in the economics department I know you mentioned Freakonomics and within the economics community there's a lot of discussion about that in the economic analysis within that but I was also wondering what kind of questions you thought it would be really interesting to answer given the very large dataset work often done by economists huh well right so I didn't go into the whole backstory so Steve Leavitt thinks that he comes up with the right instrument but then Justin McCrary finds out that it was a data artifact blah blah blah anyway suffice it to say that it really has been established that you can do this right so that the endogeneity problem was addressed successfully here's what I think I think that one of the issues with that work is that it has fed into what I'm calling the public safety paradigm because we collect crime data right so we have crime data and we have police we can count them and so this becomes an important question because of what you said at the beginning why are we looking at Boston and California and Chicago because we have data why don't we look in the south because nobody has data why don't we actually attempt to assess police legitimacy and the extent to which there's public trust because surveys cost a lot of money and we don't have data we pay attention to what we count right and so part of your question is is there a way to think about using the extant data because you're an econ major and that's what you do you know to actually address the kinds of questions that I think are really important the answer is no there is no extant data what you need to do is is either create it or start agitating to get this data right because you know things aren't going to change until we start counting what really matters well I want to thank both of you so so much for coming here I really appreciate it thank you all for coming as well we will have some version of this online if people are interested in continuing the conversation and if you want more information about upcoming communication farm events you can find that online as well oh and the restorative justice project has an amazing trove of materials online although our website is it's a little stale not compared to ours they can't keep up and we but so if you look at it and it looks a little stale and excuse it doesn't reflect it's wealth but there are primary documents there are also the cases but we haven't put up everything because we still haven't organized it we have too much so thank you all very much and please join me in giving more since there's your hand