 Hello, I'm Marvin Parnes, the Managing Director at the Institute for Social Research. And I welcome you today on behalf of the Institute and also my colleagues, Susan Collins, Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and Laura Lean, Dean of the U of M School of Social Work, who are co-sponsors of this event. I think there's a little need to point out the relevance of today's topic as the news coverage over the past year has underscored the continuing issues that arise in the context of police work in America. We trust that this event, using the successful efforts in police reform in Cincinnati as a point of departure, will make a positive contribution to this important discussion. And the sponsorship by the Institute for Social Research and the schools of social work and social policy really demonstrate how issues related to policing are at the crossroads of many concerns with social policy, social justice, and social intervention, as well as the challenges of measuring change and perception. I'd like to thank the staff who helped organize today's event, Cliff Martin and Laura Lee of the Ford School, and Anna Massey and Jane Ballo of the Center for Institute Services at ISR. I also would like to recognize the effort of the Director's Advisory Committee on Diversity at the Institute for Social Research for stimulating several campus discussions on the topic of police discretion. So our moderators will introduce the topic and our panelists, and I will introduce them now. David Thatcher is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Planning. His research aims to develop and apply humanistic approaches to policy research, and he is particularly interested in the use of case study and narrative analysis to clarify the ethical foundations of public policy. Also Ruben Miller, Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work and a Faculty Associate in the Population Study Center at ISR. His work focuses on criminal justice and social welfare policy, race and ethnic relations, and the urban poor. Take it away. Thank you. So I'm hearing from Cliff that we need to turn off our cell phones in the front room. That's why we're getting that kind of bleep, bleep, bleep. If you could turn them into airplane mode or something, that would be great. Thank you, Marvin, for that introduction, and thanks also for all your good work putting this panel together. We're at a really important moment in American policing right now. We have a level of social attention to policing and scrutiny of policing that we haven't seen in probably about 50 years. We have a window of opportunity in policing for real and lasting change, and we have that window because of the passion and commitment of so many civil rights activists over the past two years who have put policing in the national spotlight so successfully. You can get a little bit of a sense of how much it's in the spotlight if you look at that close up document available on the tables around the room, our Center for Local State and Urban Policy here at the Ford School. It's a report that describes how local government leaders around Michigan are thinking about policing right now. So we have this window of opportunity, and the question is how are we going to use it? What are the models of policing that we have for the current moment, for the 21st century, that we can use to guide us going forward? What I think is most important is that we have a model of policing in our minds that recognizes the positive role that policing can play and needs to play in so many struggling communities around the country. Right now we often see policing and social justice as being intention with each other and they tragically have been intention with each other in too many cities, but we need to find a model of policing that avoids that tension at its best. Police work is part of the work of social justice. It's about protecting the victims of racial violence. It's about coming to the aid of people in crisis. It's about protecting rights to free speech and free assembly. It's about keeping parks and sidewalks safe so that people aren't prisoners in their own homes. The best police officers will all tell you that they got into their jobs because they wanted to help their communities. The best police officers want to be valued, public servants playing a positive role and so the task is to find a policing strategy that can accomplish all the incredibly important work that every community needs their police to accomplish and that the most marginalized communities need more than anyone. But to do that in a way that avoids the indiscriminate and even brutal use of authority that we've seen too much of in the past two years, especially in communities of color. That's the problem we're struggling with and talking about right now, not just in cities with the most troubled police departments like Ferguson and Chicago and Inkster, but all over the country. All over the country we're trying to find a model of policing that accomplishes the essential work that police need to accomplish in a more humane way. And when those conversations get started in communities around the country, more than any other single example, the place they keep turning to is Cincinnati. Our panelists will tell you a lot more about this, but Cincinnati, 15 years ago, went through a crisis in policing equal to anything we've been seeing anywhere else around the country today. 15 years ago, Cincinnati police officer, as you may know, shot and killed a 19-year-old black teenager named Timothy Thomas. He was the 15th person that police had killed in Cincinnati in about five years, all of them black. And the city exploded. There were four straight days of protests and rioting throughout Cincinnati. In the wake of all that upheaval for 15 years, Cincinnati has been engaged in an enormous amount of collaborative work trying to forge a new approach to policing for the city and to try to bridge that divide between the police and the community. Now, I don't think anybody here on this panel would say that Cincinnati has totally eliminated all the conditions that contributed to that crisis 15 years ago. I'm sure we'll hear some of that during the panel discussion, but something important has changed in Cincinnati. The year 2000, the Cincinnati police arrested almost 31,000 African-Americans on misdemeanor charges. That number has been cut by almost 60% by 2015. Use of force incidents by Cincinnati police officers have fallen even more rapidly than that. Racial disparities associated with traffic stops have declined according to studies by the Rand Corporation and community perceptions of the police have improved in measurable ways as well. They've been working hard for 15 years now at developing a strategy of policing that makes it possible for officers to play the key role that they need to play in the communities that need their help the most, but without taking the lives and the reputations and the dignity of so many young men and women in the community along the way, especially so many young men and women of color. They've been working hard to find strategies for resolving community problems in more focused ways and in more resourceful ways. And they've been viewing the power of arrest increasingly as a scarce commodity, sort of a last resort that you only turn to when all the other options have failed. Getting to that point was a long and difficult process and it involved a lot of people. It involved the community activists who brought attention to the need for change in the first place, like the Reverend Damon Lynch at Cincinnati's Black United Front right in front of me. It involved the lawyers who mobilized the power of the law as a force for change, like Saul Green to his left, who served as the monitor for the federal court overseeing the reforms. It involved academics who brought forth new ideas about how police can do their work, like John Eck, who worked with the Cincinnati Collaborative for many years, and he's a graduate of the Ford School, we're proud to say here today. I'm sure he'll say that's how he was able to play his role. And it involved the police officers who and police commanders who were open to those new ideas and to those community concerns and who brought their own insights about how police could continue to do better over time. People like James Whalen to John's left who served as a commander for the Cincinnati Police Department for many years. Again, I don't think anybody on this panel would say that the progress that they've made in Cincinnati was easy or smooth. I don't think anybody on this panel would say that they have all the answers, but they have made some important progress. And even the challenges and the unfinished business in Cincinnati has some important lessons that other cities can learn from. So thanks to all of you for coming to share these experiences with us. And I really look forward to hearing more about this important story. And thank you also to Assistant Chief James White at the far end of the panel from the Detroit Police Department who will offer his thoughts about the lessons that Cincinnati story can hold for us here in Michigan. So thanks to all of you for joining us here today. So for the next hour or so, Ruben Miller and I, Ruben, do you want to raise your hand and say hi to the crowd? We're going to trade off asking some questions to the panel to try to bring out this story of what happened in Cincinnati in more detail and bring out some of the lessons that it might hold for police reform in the 20th century. And I want to start by bringing us back to the beginning of this process of change in Cincinnati and ask, especially Reverend Lynch, I get sure that he asked me to call him Damon and Jim Whalen, to bring us back to that moment again in 2001 and the years leading up to us, leading up to it. Tell us a little bit about what policing was like in Cincinnati in that period, how it was perceived in the community, and how groups like the Black United Front that Damon was the president of at the time, how they were able to bring the city's attention to what was going wrong with policing in the city at the time. So if the two of you could maybe spend about five minutes each talking about those issues, that would be great. All right, Jim, I'll start. Good afternoon, everybody. And five minutes is not a lot of time, so I'm going to talk fast. As I sit here, it's almost like my head hurts as we talk about policing. And I wonder, why is policing such? Does it have to be such a big issue in our lives, especially for poor people and African-American people? As I sit here, I'm not far from Detroit. I'm not sure how far Detroit is from here. But I think of 1992 in a guy named Malice Green, who was beaten to death by a Detroit police, who was hit 14 times in the head by a policeman's flashlight. The officers were convicted of that death. And I'm wondering, why do things like that happen? I'm thinking about Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, 12-year-old little boy, and an open-carry state. Open-carry state in Ohio means if you got a gun, you can walk around and just openly carry it. It's not against the law. And within one and 1 and 1 half seconds of the officers coming on the scene, they pump bullets into his stomach and the 12-year-old boy is dead. I'm thinking about John Crawford III in Beaver Creek, Ohio, who was walking in a Walmart, picks up a pellet rifle from the shelf in Walmart. And the officers are called, and they come in. And within seconds, they just open fire and killing. And again, in an open-carry state, an open-carry state where we've had others just walk around the city of Cincinnati with their AR, whatever they are, these semi-automatic rifles, you can just walk up and down the street and it's legal. I'm thinking about Reverend Fred Shuddlesworth, who lived in Cincinnati for a lot of years, who was one of Dr. King's cohorts in the civil rights movement, who moved to Cincinnati and called Cincinnati up South. He said, we're the southern most northern city in America. And he said that to say that we had a lot of the vestiges of Southern racism in the city of Cincinnati. I'm thinking about in the year 2000 in Cincinnati in July of 2000 with a festival in our city, a music festival, that a lot of people from Detroit attend that in the year 2013, downtown restaurants closed their doors to 50,000 African Americans who came down just to have a good time. And that's not the year 1950. That's the year 2000. Even with the passing of a public accommodations act, they still closed their doors. And then, so out of what happened in the year 2013, downtown restaurants closing their doors to African Americans, a group called the Black United Front was formed and I became the president. In November of 2000, two African American men were killed by Cincinnati police within a 24-hour period. One young man named Jeffrey Irons, I think, was accused of stealing a stake from a grocery store. And it is said that as the officers came to arrest him, they got into a struggle. He reached for the officer's gun. And of course, he was killed. The next guy was Jeffrey, I mean, was Roger Owensby. And the police came upon him, and a scuffle ensued, and he was choked to death. The coroner's report was mechanical asphyxiation. From that, the Cincinnati Black United Front, with our attorney, filed a class action lawsuit against a biased policing in the city of Cincinnati. At that point, that Roger Owensby was killed, Cincinnati police had killed 14 African American men in a five-year period. Some of them were justified. Some of them were not in our eyes. But at that point, everybody dying was black. Every officer that killed him was white. And we felt that there was a problem in the city of Cincinnati. The lawsuit was filed in March of 2001. In April 2001, a 19-year-old black male was running from police. An officer cornered him in an alley, pulled his gun, and shot him. At the time that the officer shot him, the officer was, of course, distraught. And what he said was, it just went off. It just went off. In other words, he didn't mean to shoot him. It was an accident. The gun just went off. He was running with his hand on the trigger and not on the guard. And it just went off. Well, later, the story changed. I'm sure somebody said, yeah, that's not going to fly. So the story then changed to he reached for his waist. And then, of course, there's these five famous words that every officer will use when they take a person's life. I feared for my life. Those are five words that Supreme Court holds up to say that if they have those five words, I feared for my life. The nine times out of 10, the officers found to have been justified and taken alive. When Timothy Thomas was killed, Cincinnati divided. It divided pretty much along the lines of race, a large part of the white community said, well, why did he run? A large part of the African-American community said, well, why are they shooting? And what most people didn't understand is that all of us have streams of consciousness. As an African-American born and raised in America, I have a dual stream of consciousness. I have a Eurocentric stream, because I'm born and raised in America. I attended the same school as my white Jewish friends. I learned about the French Revolution. I learned American history. But I also have an Afrocentric stream. I'm born in a black family, attend the black church. I live the black experience. I know what it means to be the only African-American in the room, in the board room, in the classroom. And that's a blessing for me to have that dual stream of consciousness. Most white Americans, though, only have a Eurocentric stream of consciousness. And really, that's all you need in this Eurocentric country. The problem comes is when we see the same thing at the same time, and come to different conclusions. And I'm not sure the age of this room. But for those of us who remember the OJ trial, and we could have all been sitting in the same room at the same time, and Judge Lance Edo says not guilty, you know what America did? It divided. White people said, well, I can't tell you what they said. You know what they said. I can tell you, but I won't. And then black people, like, cheered at the verdict. And we could have all watched the Rotney King beating in Los Angeles. And we divided. And a lot of white America said, why didn't he just lay down? And black America said, well, why do they keep beating him? And Cincinnati, the vision with Timothy Thomas is, well, why did he run? And a lot of the white community, that was their question. And the black community is, why are they shooting? The issue is this, is that by having a dual stream of consciousness, I can see what white people see. Why did he run? Why didn't Rotney King just lay down? And of course, OJ did it. Who did it, but OJ. But most white Americans can't see what I see because they don't have that different stream of consciousness. And so we keep dividing on these issues. Policing in America, and we're talking about 21st century policing, which I'm not so sure is any different than 19th century policing or 15th century policing. And we shared this in a small meeting earlier today, is that for too long in this country, police have been the front line of white supremacy. And I don't even think they realize that they are the front lines of white supremacy. And so if you saw the movie Selma, if you remember the Civil Rights Movement, if you're trying to march across the Abin Pettis Bridge, who's on the other end to stop you? Not Governor George Wallace, not the legislature. It's the police. They become the face of white supremacy. If you're trying to desegregate the lunch counters and they bring out the German shepherds and the water hoses and sick of them on people, it's not the governor there with the German shepherd. Who's the face of it? It's the police. And we continue to see that today. And if there's gonna be a real change in policing, then we have to understand that America is rooted and grounded in white supremacy. And Native Americans understand that. Asian Americans understand that. Black Americans understand that. But we really need white Americans at some point to understand that. And see how do we uproot one of the major cancers in this country? So what we did in Cincinnati is we decided how do we bring our city together? We'll take policing, which is right now at the forefront, the face of the oppression of African Americans and poor people in our city. And how do we craft something that brings police reform but also better community relations that also brings about equity and equality? And we came out with this agreement. It's called a collaborative agreement. Some people call it a historic collaborative agreement that did bring about major change. It brought about major change in how policing is done, areas of use of force and accountability. But more than that, it brought a community together. It brought 3,500 people together to speak about these issues. And it brought a larger community together to understand that we have to change in Cincinnati. There were one city. So finally, let me say this. What we did at that time is we brought every tool from the Civil Rights Toolbox to bear. We brought legal, we filed a lawsuit against the city of Cincinnati. We brought protests. We were in the streets almost every night. We brought economic pressure. We had a boycott against the city of Cincinnati. The first person to pull out of Cincinnati for us was Bill Cosby. We said, don't come to Cincinnati. It was almost like, don't play Cape Town. It was like, don't go to South Africa. Bill Cosby pulled out. Whoopie Goldberg pulled out. Major conventions pulled out. And then we had three nights of civil unrest. And I'm not sure which of the tools in the toolbox was the most powerful. But I know the economic boycott, which cost the city about $60 million, had an impact. The negative press had an impact. The three nights of civil unrest had an impact. And that impact was really on the psyche of the city. And my final, finally, is this. Most of this happened in the community where I pastored for 25 years. It was in the heart of downtown Cincinnati, a place called Over the Rhine. Over the Rhine, while it was one of the poorest communities in the city, it housed our music hall, where the symphony is and where the ballet is. And when there's unrest and over the Rhine, there's this ease and a place called Indian Hill, where the most affluent live. So we got phone calls, the activists, from people in Indian Hill saying, what can we do to help? I don't know if they were real or they just wanted to make sure they could safely go to the symphony, but it didn't matter. We welcomed their help. And it's been 15 years now. And Cincinnati is a better place, not perfect, but we've come through a major time of trial. And we had to face our own systemic issues, issues of poverty, issues of race. And I think more importantly to me, I needed the police to understand that while each of them individually may be a great guy and a great girl, that you're ponds and you become the front lines of the oppression of poor and black and Native American and Hispanic people in this country. So that's part of our story. And I'm sure as the day goes on, we'll talk more. But that's where we were pre-2001. Jim, what did this look like from the police perspective? I retired from the Cincinnati Police Department in September of last year after spending 30 years there. I mean, captain, three weeks before Timothy Thomas was shot and killed. For anybody that's ever been in policing, up through the rank of lieutenant, you're a policeman. From captain and up, you're an administrator. So I learned how to be a police officer throughout the entire era that the Reverend just described. And I think we were the same as virtually every other police department was in the country at the time and many remain today. And I'll give you just a couple of pointers or a couple of points about where I think we were. Community involvement was tolerated, but not welcomed. We would listen to what folks had to say and then when they walked away, we would decide what we thought was the best way to go. I think we didn't have a sense of the whole. We had a very singular perspective and if there's one transition that I think occurred from pre-2001 to post-2003 or four when we stopped denying the changes that needed to occur and started to actually do it and started to do it to embrace it. It was that singular approach. The police officer who's going down the street and gets evaluated every month or once a year or however the police department does it on how many tickets they write and how many arrests they make, et cetera. What is on that police officer's mind? Whether that officer is white, black, male, female, gay, Hispanic, whatever. If that's what you get evaluated on, that's what you do when you go out tomorrow. And if the police officer believes that they're helping the community by writing that ticket or making that arrest, that's where that confusion comes up between what the Reverend described as the way that type of policing is received versus the way the police officers that provide that or inflict it, whichever way you wanna think about it, the service that the police think they're providing to the community at the time. So leading up to 2001, that was our police department much the same I think as every other police department at that time and I think many remain that way to this day. The transition that occurred once we got it, once we started understanding where we needed to go to truly embrace the community and to stop tolerating them and start working as part of the fabric of the community was when we adopted a much more holistic sense. What is really going to solve the problem? Is this guy going to jail today gonna solve the problem? Or is it really a long-term mental health issue and we need to get social service resources in a trip to the hospital done here? And a lot of that goes to the statistics that Professor Thatcher threw out at the very beginning of this, the decline in arrest, the decline in force, et cetera. I got to be part of the team that implemented that over the course of a number of years and then basically did our best to sustain it up until the time that I left in the Cincinnati Police Department, of course carries on. It's not perfect, it's the minute you think you're done in this type of work, that's when you start sliding backwards. But that's where we were pre-2001, looking forward. Can't tell you how much I appreciate this conversation and how much we appreciate this conversation. I wanna turn our attention for a moment to the obvious heat that had to be in the room when these different partners were coming together. And I know that, for example, we're giving the attention in 2001, 2002 went on. And we know that Reverend Lynch, a professor, Eck and James Whalen were all involved in the process in one way or another. And so I'm wondering if the three of you could describe what negotiations were like, what came of them? What were some of the challenges that arose during this period? What were some of the main principles that you were pushing for maybe that you didn't get? How did you come to agreement? How did you negotiate the heat that's in the space? Thank you. First, let me tell you what a great thrill it is to be back here after something like 39 years, I can't believe it. A place like this didn't exist when I was a master's student here. And this school made a huge difference in my life, not only my professional life, but I'm also married to a Ford School Ips graduate when we were here. And we have a lovely daughter who is now fighting plant pathogens. So I wanna thank this school for having a great life in that respect. A lot of what I did on this, if not the specifics, the spirit of it came from what I learned at the University of Michigan, both as an undergraduate and as my master's program. My role in the negotiations was as a subject matter expert, I was brought in to assist the negotiator, Jay Rothman. My team, which myself and a couple of graduate students from the University of Cincinnati, we drafted parts of the working document that acted as a negotiating instrument which eventually evolved into the collaborative. And we were, we once proposed the use of a problem or an approach to policing as a strategy for the Cincinnati Police Department. I started working on police reform right after leaving here in 1977 and worked for about 17 years for a group called the Police Executive Research Forum. I've been doing police reform working mostly within police agencies. Cincinnati was the first time I had an opportunity to work with community members and it was a very eye-opening experience. One of the things I had noticed over the years that there was a constant oscillation between those who wanted fair policing versus those who wanted effective policing or between those who disliked coddling versus those who disliked brutality. We would see a form of policing come up which would try and keep people as fair and after a certain amount of time, those who thought crime was going to the roof would gain dominance, the police strategy would change. That would go on for a while and that cycle would repeat itself. So one of the things that I became very concerned with was that whatever the collaborative agreement ended up achieving, it had to find some way of breaking that cycle. It had to have policing that was both fair and effective. Could not have people come back in several years and say, oh, that's very nice. You're hugging a bunch of black people but crime is going to the roof. So one of the things that I was interested in is making sure some kind of policing strategy was embraced by the collaborative agreement that had a chance of doing this. The one strategy of policing I was aware of mostly because I'd worked on it for 17 years was problem-oriented policing. At the same time I was working with the collaborative agreement process, I was also on a National Academy of Sciences panel on policing practices and policy. And it was clear from the evidence that we had been putting together that it was an effective strategy. There was a lot in problem-oriented policing that said it could be fair as well. The evidence on there doesn't exist as much because no one studied it. Problem-oriented policing changes the work of policing from running around from incident to incident to actually trying to resolve underlying conditions at a modest level. Not trying to make the world in general less racist or less impoverished, but trying to address the kind of things that generate the incidents that police can get into trouble with. I think it's safe to say that with the exception of the police, no one who was involved in the negotiations understood what problem-oriented policing was when we first started. We didn't get it either. Yeah. But you know the words. Yeah, we heard the words. Yeah. What I found amazing in the negotiation process was how rapidly Reverend Lynch, members of his team, and members of the fraternal order of police who were brought in as part of the negotiations start understanding exactly what this is. To the point today, I think it's safe to say that you guys are better at explaining it than I am. This had huge implications for the monitoring team because I think it's all will tell you that a good portion of his monitoring team were experts in this type of strategy. The, it is probably the case that it also took longer to actually implement the collaborative agreement than it would have if we had not had that involved. And it's still probably the issue that is most outstanding in terms of the thoroughness in which the police embrace it. To me, a lot of what I saw in this, because I was more an observer after having proposed it and just suggesting things that made sense and trying to keep people from doing things that made no sense, was the roller coaster ride that we went on. We would have a week of absolute awful behavior in which one disparate of anything useful coming on and then something good would happen and all of a sudden we were euphoric and then it went down to catastrophe and this went on for months. And towards the end, I honestly thought the whole thing was gonna come apart. So inside, it was awful. At the end, I was delighted to be part of it but I cannot say that it was something that I would argue that everybody should be a part of. Problem-oriented policing, right. Yeah, for those of you who wanna pursue it further, if you go to the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing website, POPcenter.org, you can find out far more than you can learn in two years of a master's program. The process was messy as community processes always are. We had literally filed a lawsuit against the city of Cincinnati. They hated that. We had council persons at the time who would just totally disagree with our position that there was racially biased policing in the city of Cincinnati. They, we had council persons who said the city should not sit down at the table and negotiate with us in a collaborative effort. We should just go to court and fight. What we, the reason we wanted a collaborative effort, as I said earlier, I think is we wanted to, at the end, bring the community together. We had just noticed that Pittsburgh had gone through similar issues and came out with a consent decree. The feds came in and they ended it with a consent decree which brought about necessary reforms but didn't bring about better community police relations. And we really wanted that for the city of Cincinnati. Most of us are born and raised in the city and we'll be there after the agreement is done. So we had city leaders who fought us but we were able to get a favorable federal judge who fought and to keep us all at the table. Throughout the process, we had a mayor who continued to try to get us, the plaintiffs kicked off. We were the Black United Front because we were still doing the boycott and still doing the protest. And he felt, you know, hey, we're at the table. Why are you still boycotting us? And we said, well, because that keeps you at the table. So he tried numerous times to go to the judge and say, you know, kick these guys off and she wouldn't do it. The city brought in a high-powered attorney. He's got Billy Martin from Washington, D.C. He handles celebrities and... But we had a great set of attorneys. The agreement was actually written pretty much by our side because Billy Martin's not gonna sit down and write all this stuff. So every time we came to a meeting, we had experts like John Eck, we brought it to the table. They would argue it, but most of the times we would get what we wanted because we were actually the ones writing the agreement. So as John says, he wouldn't wish this process on anybody for us. It was a necessary process. It had to come from the ground up. It came from the community's perspective. So when it was a done deal and ended up in the hands of the community, we wanted them to see that this was their document. This is our fight for reforms, our fight for change. But it got real ugly sometimes. I mean, literally, we had attorneys almost come into physical blows. We had the judge sometimes calling us in and saying, hey, everybody in my chambers and we're gonna sit here all night. The final agreement, I think, was probably finished about three o'clock one morning and we were down in the judge's chambers that late before everybody agreed and we just, we had a victory for the city. And of course, after that is, how do you implement it? And that's where Mr. Saul Green comes in and that's a whole other story. From the police department's perspective, you gotta remember we had a double-edged sword going on here. We had the justice department conducting a pattern and practice investigation of the Cincinnati police department as well as the federal litigation, what eventually became the collaborative agreement started off as a federal lawsuit as Reverend Lynch just referenced. Police department was way more concerned with the pattern and practice investigation. The city lawyers, which was three blocks away and not our problem, were dealing with the federal litigation that was occurring. Eventually it was an evolution, it was a transition that brought those things together. But I can tell you from the police department's perspective, it was a very adversarial process. There were police departments around the country that had had justice department interventions similar to ours that had hired high-powered attorneys. And to some extent, beat it. Not chase justice out of town, but justice would eventually leave town without significant change occurring. There was thoughts of that entertained in our town, I'm sure, not so much with me in the room, but I'm sure we had some meetings like that and some thoughts like that. The persistent effort for a collaborative approach eventually won the day. And I was assigned as the police department's primary rep to the justice department. And so I negotiated, if you will, that side of it while others in the police department and the city, and then of course the parties, negotiated the collaborative part of it and eventually those were brought together. Literally the pattern in practicing ended two, three weeks before the collaborative piece ended, as the reverend said, at three in the morning. And then those were eventually brought together. The attorney general of the United States came to town, we had a big signing and it was kind of a big come-together moment for us to get started on it. We still had, in our minds, the police department's minds of their adversarial process on our hands and Saul will be able to elaborate. Saul is only 22 years old, but this process. 23. 23, my bad, he just had a birthday. But it was a very adversarial process and the police department was not accepting of it for a good couple of years into 03, 04, somewhere in there before we really kind of got it and started working towards it instead of fighting against it. So now you've got this agreement and it includes some of the kinds of things that a lot of these pattern and practice suits have like changing use of force guidelines, changing the complaint process, but it also has this point that John Eck mentioned of really changing the strategy of the police department to a problem-oriented policing. And so now the job is implement that and Saul Green is the court monitor supervising that. What would, tell me about that process of implementing this really ambitious agreement that among other things asked the police department to change the whole strategy of policing over the challenges involved in that. How did that process play out? It certainly wasn't a straight line from beginning to the end. The monitor's role is to take the, generally it's to take the federal agreements that have worked out and they're pretty straightforward. They come in, they investigate, they look at things like use of force, they look at things like investigations, they look at things like training and set forth and the parties agree on changing policy and then what steps will be done to implement. And as has been mentioned, that occurred. But along the side of this now is this collaborative agreement that says you will essentially change how you police the style of policing. And so it made the process of course bigger, more complicated, more parties at the table and the customary justice department agreement investigation. You have the city and you have the Department of Justice and they are the two parties that have to be pushed toward compliance. Here, as has been alluded to, you have the Black United Front as the plaintiff so you have the community involved. You have the police department, you had the union involved, the fraternal order of police. So you had all the parties to perhaps come to a successful conclusion but parties who had never gotten along together through decades of interaction in Cincinnati. The monitor, again, that person is appointed by the federal court and it's not a monitor, there was a monitoring team of 10 people who had different areas of expertise, whether it be use of force or training or problem-oriented policing and much of what you had to do initially was just administrative, you had to come in and learn the city, how do they keep records? Who's responsible for what in the police department? Who are you gonna be interacting with? And that in of itself takes a moment or two to get right. But then it gets down to actually trying to implement and what happened in Cincinnati is what I think happens actually all around the country with regard to these kind of agreements. I call it buyer's remorse. What happens is people come together, they work through the anger and frustration of getting to the agreement, everybody has their kumbaya moment and then you actually have to go from words to action. And so when our monitoring team came in, we were met with tremendous hostility. And we also noted the way you do things you effectuate the compliances by writing a report every 90 days and saying is the city and the police department coming into compliance. And so our first couple of reports were pretty dismal as it relates to the city and the police department. And the reaction from the city and the police department was fairly hostile toward us. And so it was a process through three years of the first three years of back and forth coming in on a regular basis. You're looking at files, you're looking at reports, you're looking at records, you're interviewing people, you're going to training sessions, you're doing ride-alongs, trying to figure out are they either in compliance, partially in compliance or not in compliance. And so my good friend Professor Sam Gross in the back here, he reminded me of a conversation we had in about 2003 or four where as friends talk, I said to him, I don't know what's gonna happen down there. I'm looking, I'm feeling pretty down and I don't know that this is gonna work. But what eventually happened, and this actually causes me some concern because arguably it may be serendipitous. These things work where there's leadership. There was leadership from the community. There was leadership ultimately, the input from academia. We fought with the police department until a city manager named Milton DeHoney was appointed. And Milton and police department responded to, reported to the city manager and essentially Milton, I believe, told you guys, we're going to implement this. We're gonna do it. And he started to attend meetings and he started and so understanding chain of command, the police started to listen and understand and respond to this process. When Jim talked said, with regard to problem-oriented policing, we didn't get it. Jim, one of the reasons you, CPD didn't get it, you all didn't want to get it. You wouldn't, you know, the heck with this. So if DeHoney had not come, if the pressure had not been kept up, if we didn't have all of the leadership come together at the same time, this room will be empty today because we would not have something positive to talk about. So I think that this process ultimately succeeds where there is leadership at every level who says and accepts the fact the policing has to change in a community. So after the Kumbaya moment of the grand signing of the documents, we had two documents on our hands that basically merged into one, but they were really two distinct documents. One was the Department of Justice agreement and the other one was the collaborative agreement. Looking back, I can tell you that the Justice Department was fairly, the agreement was fairly easy to comply with. As a matter of fact, there was a five-year monitoring period that was set on these and we got done with the Justice Department piece in about four years. You know, hardly ever see the Justice Department sign off on an agency before the full period is up and from the technical piece of it, we redrafted policies, we redrew the training, we changed the evaluations and then all the other things like that, that it was a checklist. It was a laundry list of things we had to do. We took what we used to do in training and put it into policy. We saw that as two different things. They saw it as one. We fought over that for a while. We went from having a procedure manual like this to a procedure manual like this because the training manual was shoved into the procedure manual. To us, that was kind of a whatever. But then as time went on, I got to understanding that. The collaborative agreement, there were parts of that that were, I'll say easy, we all suffered to get through this but weren't all that mountainous to get done. The Citizens Complaint Authority was something that needed to get done. Citizen oversight of police, something you still see resisted but it's a very good thing to have. There were some other pieces. The part that the police department literally choked on trying to get done was the thrust of problem-oriented policing, as John mentioned before. To change our focus. So here's the deal. This is gonna be so simple. You're gonna think, boy, they must be stupid. And I don't think we were stupid, but it was this simple. Policeman walks down the street every day. The same drunk is laying in the same doorway every day. Policeman has to get him up for whatever reason. So many complaints or whatever. Policeman gets him up every day and takes him to jail, the hospital or walks him down to the detox center or the homeless shelter or whatever it may be. And in the policemen's mind, problem solved. Problem solving. Done. I literally have had that conversation with people that were above me in the Cincinnati Police Department at the time. Other, I've done some consulting around the country. I've had that conversation. Problem solving is let's keep the guy from being drunk in the doorway tomorrow. It's just that simple. And that's when policing starts to change. When you start thinking about it that way, when you don't wait until he's laying there and covered in whatever he's covered in today and you do something about it beforehand and you reduce the vulnerabilities, you reduce the confrontation, you change the way the police think about service to the community. You're not providing a service by gigging people that roll through a stop sign. You're gigging, you're providing service to the community by doing something fundamental that keeps crashes from occurring in that intersection. That's the holistic sense that I talked about before, where I think we restricted our perspective to a very singular sense. And we grew up in that regard. Again, not perfect, but we got a lot better. So could I go just tiny bit off script here and ask maybe Sol and John and Jim just very briefly. I mean, so you're describing what this goal for problem-oriented policing, what the officer should be doing is, but I'm still struggling with what's the process of getting him to take it seriously. You talk about how there's so much resistance at the beginning of all this. So I'll talk to about the limited tools he has as a monitor to really oversee whether things are really changing. I don't know, is there anything more to say about how you were able to win over enough of the officers to feel like there was a change in what people were doing in the department on a day-to-day basis? I think there were two pieces and I'll be real quick and let these other guys talk. One was a shift to, we do not require college to be a Cincinnati police officer, but we're naturally getting more and more people with more and more education. We're getting people that are a little bit older instead of everybody being 21, 22, 23 years old when they come on. Our average age of a recruit now is in their late 20s, so people have a little bit more world experience and have a greater perspective on the community. That's one. Number two, and I mentioned this before, but it's the truth. What do you evaluate your people on? If you evaluate your people on basic 1960s law enforcement then that's exactly what you're gonna get. If you evaluate on a higher plane then that's what you're gonna get. When you mix those two together, you take people with a little bit more education, a little bit more of a world perspective and you give them a diagram that they need to complete, their daily work or their monthly work, whichever way you wanna look at it, and tell them to bring something home that fits this picture and not this picture, you get a better result. And I think the things that Jim has just described were important. I just think the process of getting there is different. I don't believe and I've also been involved in the consented decree in Detroit that went on for 11 years. I don't think, unfortunately the light doesn't kind of just go on. It doesn't just there where police sit around and one day they all say, you know what, that does make sense. Let's start doing that tomorrow. What happens is pressure starts to build. It's somebody at a high enough level who says tomorrow you all need to start getting this. And I am the person, the city manager evaluated the chief and so he has something that is now at stake and that's his future. And so, and then the other thing that happened and it was very momentous was the CPD was doing, was essentially just thumbing their nose at the collaborative agreement. We had a member of our monitoring team who was supposed to go on a ride along one day and she went to meet at CPD with the higher ups and it had been arranged and the consented and the collaborative agreement allowed ride alongs. And they essentially told her, get out of police station and leave. And so we brought a special report to the judge for material breach in the collaborative agreement and to hold the chief in contempt. Now we didn't have to go that far. Suddenly we were able to start talking to each other more. So there is, if there is not pressure from the folks who care about better policing, these things either take forever or you do not get a result. This leads quite naturally, I think, into both two questions. And so the first being, we get this reform package, how does one sustain it? And if the panelists each could briefly speak to that for the sake of time, that would be fantastic. And then the second, just to bring James White into the discussion is to think about how what lessons could be learned, what lessons could be applied in Detroit. Well, I was actually enjoying listening to my colleagues here. Thank you for inviting me to the conversation. Well, Cincinnati PD certainly has made great strides and reaching their goal of completing the requirements of their agreement. But certainly the work is not done. I mean, when I look at lessons learned, there's no magic in some of the aspects of the things that they've accomplished. What it really boils down to is treating people right, treating the community the right way. So certainly looking at some of the requirements and some of the successes they've had, we've adopted similar practices, but not as a result of Cincinnati's requirements but on our own through our own consent judgment. When you look at engaging the community, certainly training cornerstones to a successful organization. When the police departments historically are murd in tradition, the ways that we've always done things. And when you look at it, you've got officers who teach other officers who teach other officers. So if you have a situation where you have conduct that is questionable, sometimes that conduct can be questionable, but it could be within policy. So what we find in Detroit in particular, we had to take a look at all of our policies. We had policies on the books from 40, 50 years ago that we were teaching new officers. We were teaching bad ways of policing. So you have to be progressive. Whether you're looking at Cincinnati, whether you're looking at New Orleans, you have to be progressive in policing and you have to honestly look at the issues impacting your community. There is no one size fit all type approach to policing. You have to measure your community and your community needs against your ability to provide those services. Can I ask just for all of us, an idea of a bad way of policing that police used to do that we shouldn't or don't do anymore? Sure. I mean, I can take up another hour telling you some of the bad ways of policing that we identified, but I'll keep it very simple. We'll talk about a firearms training. Initially, we trained once a year for firearms. We didn't require, well, we didn't enforce our training requirement. So we had officers that we would find after they were involved in the shooting had been trained in two, three years in firearms proficiency. So can they shoot a gun? Yes, but can they shoot a gun to our standard? Well, we were finding that there were some that needed remedial training. That was a bad practice. We had to practice our conditions of confinement decree spoke specifically to a pattern in practice of what we call roundups. And this is what I was taught when I joined the police department some 20 years ago, where if you had a homicide scene and you had witnesses of the homicide that were present when the homicide took place, you brought them in and you questioned them. And they were not free to go. Now, we thought that that was policing. I didn't know that that was a problem. But after reading it in the consent judgment and having it be identified, I said, wow, I participated in that. We had a practice in conditions of confinement. And let me say for the record, those things aren't present now. But we had a practice in our cell block where if you were what we call the doorman's position, which mean that you housed the prisoners in the jail and you prepared the sandwiches, you fed everybody the same thing. So I literally would fingerprint a prisoner if I had that assignment that day and make them a baloney sandwich on the same table that I fingerprinted them. Why did I do that? Because I was taught to do that. So when we looked at our practices, we went back and we stripped down a lot of our policies and we made the appropriate adjustments. But the other thing it took, and to be frank, you have to be courageous and you have to look at your organization and you have to say from the very basic sense of appropriate conduct, is this right? Regardless of if you have a policy that supports it, is the conduct appropriate? And when we had that courageous conversation and we looked inward at the organization, we were able to have the difficult conversations with the leaders in the organization. A lot of times law enforcement organizations look at, well, the policy says we can do it. Well, if the policy doesn't make sense, you have to have the strength, if you will, to change the policy. Now, let me say this. Policing in general, we do a pretty good job. We do a really good job. But to look at what's happening in the country right now and say that we've got it all right, that's a problem. That's not a realistic courageous look at the issues. I think what has to happen, and what we do in Detroit, and we try to do in Detroit, is we try to engage our community and we don't make it a thing. We don't make, I really don't like themes. I don't like community policing from the standpoint of, it's a concept. The community is what we police. I mean, that's what we do. We have very difficult jobs, but we're not extraordinary people. We have extraordinary jobs. We live in the community. We are the community. We are the people that we police. And overwhelmingly, people are good people. Now we have knuckleheads, and unfortunately, policing is a bad business where bad things happen. And if you're gonna have the honest conversation, and I don't mean to stay on this box too long, but if you're gonna have the honest conversation, I think it starts with engaging the community and saying, listen, we're in a bad business. And the business that we're in gets ugly sometimes, but here's why we do what we do and here's how you can help us. We can't just impose our will on the community. And I think that from our philosophy in Detroit is that we engage the community, not just in times of crisis, but when the waters are calm, so when crisis happens, they're supporting us. We had a discussion earlier in the back. We were talking about police forces who are now saying that they won't offer security at a Beyonce concert. And I watched the Super Bowl, I watched the halftime show, and I obviously missed what I missed it. I mean, I watched and I had no clue. It was a ode to the Black Panthers or, you know, I'm like, and so, but what does that say when you have police forces around the country because of whatever Beyonce did on that Sunday Super Bowl halftime party, we're not gonna offer security at one of her concerts. And if it was an ode to the Black Panthers or I don't know, she was too sexy or I don't know what it was, but it speaks to, again, this racial divide in our country. You know, in our city for years, we had our police officers protect the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan would come to Cincinnati like every year put up a cross on the Fountain Square and our police force would offer protection. So you can protect the Klan, which has a history of putting ropes around Black people's necks, but you won't offer protection at a Beyonce concert or security at a Beyonce concert. That's a mindset that continues this divide and this thinking about in the African American community, we are policed while other communities are protected. And so it's still a divide that we have to break down. So again, if you saw the Super Bowl halftime show, maybe you saw it, but I missed it. But the reaction to me just speaks a whole lot about how far we have not yet come in this country. I mean, America's a great experiment of a melting pot. I mean, we're different than almost every other country in the world. We have some of everybody here, but we have to learn how to treat everybody the same with the same dignity and the same respect. And again, as I said earlier, police officers, blanket or not, are oftentimes the face and the front line of how people are treated in this country. If I could piggyback that, I totally agree. I didn't see it either. And what's concerning to me is the fact that we've had such a great divide as a result of halftime performance, which speaks to an even bigger issue that's not being discussed. I don't know if we can have this discussion without bringing in race. And race is always a very uncomfortable discussion, but it's certainly something that's needed when you talk about policing our community, particularly urban communities, where that's getting a lot of the attention now with regards to the shootings and some of the other things that are happening. So I think as we go through this conversation, whether today, tomorrow, whenever, the race discussion has to be had. And when we refuse to acknowledge the fact that policing in urban America is different, I think we miss an opportunity for a discussion, a very useful discussion. Whether it be media packaging of crime, I mean, you can watch the news in any major city and the way that it's framed is even different. You talk about a robbery in Detroit that will be packaged as a mugging in the suburbs. And people don't know the impact of the words that happen, the people that are interviewed at crime scenes. It gives you pause and makes you wonder is this by design or is this just acceptable? There are certain things, and I watched the news almost too much, I lived the news, but then I go home and watch it. And you see how the design on certain areas of our community are. The people that are interviewed, the way that, in some instances, I feel that they're disrespected even during the interview process, the people that are chosen to be interviewed. So the race discussion has to be had. Now with that being said, I don't know any officer, and I've worked with a number of officers for over 20 years. I've been in this business for 25, I've worked for Detroit for 20, that stands up every morning and says, you know, I'm gonna go in and violate some rights and humiliate myself and get my family on the news and try to go to prison. But what happens is when these incidents happen, we have to be open and honest about them. And if we make a mistake or we get it wrong, I think we can gain instant credibility with the community by acknowledging it. And then going back and correcting the behavior with the officer in Detroit, and I'll be brief, we have a management awareness system that I'm very proud of. And one of the things that a management awareness system does for us is, let's say you got an officer who gets citizens' complaints and all the citizens' complaints are unfounded. So I've got an officer who gets 10 citizens' complaints a year and he's done nothing wrong. Well, in times past, we would say, well, he's done nothing wrong. He got 10 citizens' complaints. And basically the investigation revealed that he didn't do anything wrong. Well, what we do now is we look at an officer that's in the equal position. So a five-year officer working day shift on another part of town. How many complaints does he have? We measure that officer against another officer and we say, well, that officer has two complaints. So we look at this officer and say, well, what are you doing that's different? And we're not necessarily saying that you're doing something wrong, but maybe we can help you with the goal of keeping good police officers good. We get them into verbal judo. We do things for them to help them maintain their position because certainly we want them. We want them to be good. We want them to maintain their professionalism and maintain their position with the police department. But if they're unable to do that and they're unable to operate at the standards that we have set, we will not massage those standards down to accommodate an officer who is not meeting our minimum standards. Just wanting to briefly return to a point that's all raised and then go to the questions from the audience is that change in some ways must come from above was or at least the edict for change must come from above, which I think is fascinating and important. And given the challenges, I wonder what happens when the players from above change. And so how then do we maintain a change? How do we maintain the reforms that happen? And so if the panelists, particularly Sal, if you could speak to this or any of the other panelists as well. And it goes to sustainability. I felt in Cincinnati, the most important document as we were coming to a close of the efforts down there was the final order that everybody signed in Cincinnati. And what it talked about was going forward because what can happen is, yes, when you're under the review of a federal court and the Department of Justice, folks will, sooner or later, we'll get it together. There's been a few departments who still haven't, but mostly they'll get it together. But when justice leaves town and the judges no longer has oversight, and so what they did in Cincinnati was to put in place what will happen going forward. And they call for continual meetings between community and the city manager and the police to constantly talk about the issues and be able to bring up new issues, because they change. And people do come and go and they forget. Now, I understand that these meetings still occur, that like everything else, there's ebbs and ties, but because they're already at the table, I think they've realized recently, we need to talk, we need to get this, and you didn't have to reform everything. So it's bring people back together. So one of the things is, don't just go through this process and everybody go away and say, and pat themselves on the back. You plan for the future to make sure that there is continued input, exchange, and hopefully sustainability. The sustainability process that Salt has described has survived three mayors, couple city managers, handful of police chiefs, three city managers, and it's still there. It involves a manager's advisory group is what it's called. It was created as a self-monitoring device. It meets every other month. The city manager presides over it. And on the committee, it's a dozen 15-ish or so people. John's still on it. The FOP is still on it. The Black United Front representatives are still on it. And any key issues that are on the table get discussed. The biggest enemy to that kind of sustainability, quite frankly, is a law and activity because as Saul mentioned before, it's the pressure that keeps everybody's toes to the fire and keeps everybody honest about the process. But I can tell you that when a police officer shoots a citizen in the city of Cincinnati, in the first couple of hours, the city manager reaches out to everybody on that group. And the group is very diverse and representative of the various segments of the city. Black representatives, Hispanic, nonprofit, big business all the way around the horn, faith community, and they get an inside view within a couple of hours of what happened, what it looks like, whether a gun was recovered, what was the race of the officer, what was the race of the person that was shot, et cetera, et cetera, so that that information can filter out to the community at least in a factual fashion in that process. As Saul mentioned, that process has ebbed and flowed. I sat on it for 15 years. The only reason I left is because I retired a few months ago. And there were meetings where we would talk about the Big Sewer Project in town or whether the ball team won last month. It was silly sometimes. But then when things would happen around town that would cause the collaborative agreement to be implemented or invoked, it would be right back to the table. The meeting's already set. The players are already at the table. And that's been a huge key to sustainability. Let me illustrate another thing that's important. Reverend Lynch talked about the need for this outside pressure here. After going through multiple mayors, multiple city managers, Al Gerhardstein, who is one of our attorneys, came to me and said, would you be interested in doing an outside assessment of how well the police are doing with implementing problem solving? I can get you some funding from a local philanthropic group. And I said, yes. And so I quickly wrote a report based on interviews with Jim and half a dozen other people in the police and several people in the community. And the police gave me access to their data. What I found was that the problem solving stuff had slowed down considerably. And I asked Jim why. And he says, that's when I left patrol and I went off to do something else. But what was interesting was talking to the community members and members of the police department is that there was strong interest in both groups in sustaining this. And both groups felt very put upon that they had somehow backed away in the process of switching city managers and mayors and so forth. So two things. One is there is an inside group within the police department. Police departments are not a uniform mass, although they look that way from the outside who are interested in this. But just as importantly, maybe more importantly, there were outside people who were willing to take the time and effort to collect the data and push it and continue to push it. And we're not willing to let it go. Without that, I don't think any of this is sustainable. If there is any magic to what's going on in Cincinnati, it's that consistent, dogged day after day showing up and saying, this is what we signed. This is what we agreed to. Are we living up to this? And if we're not, how do we do it? That's, it's as simple and as complex as that. When we move to the audience questions, so Salam and Brittany, do you want to introduce yourselves? Hi, my name is Salam Husqamo. I'm a graduate student in the School for Public Health and also a graduate of the School of Public Policy. Our first question comes from various people but according to Twitter, we want to know sort of where is Cincinnati now and how is progress being monitored and evaluated? So if you can speak to sort of the data and statistics that's being managed in order to track sort of how things are progressing. I'll lead off just with some quick numbers. Our, I'd say our, because I was there forever even though I'm gone. Our arrest numbers have declined substantially and remain declining or at a substantially low degree. We've had good success in reducing crime. We had a terrible 2015 for gun violence like every other city in the country. And I'm waiting on John, you and your cohorts to figure that out and tell us why. So that continues. I think our discussion of sustainability goes to that question to a large degree of where we're at in the sustainability of the effort that goes into not backsliding and not becoming another city that had progress and is now back in the throes of demise. But we still recognize and this is part of the discussion we had before. I don't wanna speak for Reverend Lynch, but he's right. There's a number of people in the community that'll say, well, nothing's changed, nothing's any better. Police just shot and killed somebody last week. Look at that. And if you look at it in a singular nature, it's tough to see. If you look at it over a long period of time, there's been a lot of progress made and there's been a lot of effort that's gone into it that I think still exists today. All right, I'm just gonna, oh, it worked, okay. My name is Brittany Foxall. I'm a second year MPP here at the Ford School and I'm from Detroit, Michigan. And the next question we have for you all is, how does problem-oriented policing differ from or overlap with the Justice Department's community-oriented policing services? And how do these services contribute to solutions that are implemented at the local level? Sure, give me that one. Thank you. To be quite honest with you, I don't know what the Justice Department's notion of community policing is. One of the reasons I left Washington back in the 90s is I was sitting for years on a committee to define community policing and I was bored out of my mind. In some respects, community policing is fairly straightforward. It's treat people decently, pay attention to them, listen to them. I think Jim said, this is policing. It shouldn't be any other way. I think there is a difference and it's a difference that makes them complimentary as opposed to oppositional. When you're doing community policing well, you are actually listening to people. You're listening to the hard things and you as in the police are thinking of yourself as a police organization, not a law enforcement organization. That provides a basis for solving problems. So solving problems is in some sense technical, in some sense an art. It involves officers and supervisors and command staff looking at their data, listening to people and saying in a simple case, why are we constantly removing this person from the stoop who's drunk? Why are there many people like this who we have to deal with on a routine basis? Who do we need to partner with to resolve this issue and then actually going back and collecting the data and find out whether you actually made any progress or whether you were just blowing smoke? That's in a nutshell what that is. Now, some police departments can do that kind of thing or think they can without talking to the community. They identify their own problem. Their crime analysis units are pretty good. They say, ah, there's a hotspot here. We've got some ideas. We'll bring in whoever and we'll solve it and the community's none the wiser. That is doing problem solving without the community and it has some utility, but it is a long way from what we wanted in Cincinnati. That's a very short way of trying to answer that question. And I think also, and again, I'm not sure what the federal government's idea of community policing is, but I remember years ago when community policing was a term and the thought process at that point was, we just need officers back walking the beat. Let's just get some officers walking the streets. And people would, cities would do that for six months and find that we really needed the officers in the cars and be able to make the runs. And that was something nice for them. It was nostalgic. We were going back to maybe if we just get officers back on the streets and they can meet Miss Sally and meet Mr. Jones and get to know the community. That was the idea of community policing. Problem, community problem oriented policing is having police on the community solving issues of problems that lessens crime happening in the community, lessens interactions between police and communities that may turn out bad, and then rewarding officers for solving problems as opposed to how many arrests you made. We're gonna give you a metal or a pin or just a pat on the back for helping solve a community issue, a community problem, which makes the community safer in the end. So I think that's to me, if there is a difference, that would be the difference. Okay, so the next question is around the police workforce. And the question is, has there been any change in focus in a way that police officers are trained and educated for the work? And along with that is what is the racial makeup of the Cincinnati Police Department has it changed in the last 15 years? I can do most of that, I think. The Cincinnati Police Department is in the low 30% African-American officers, 32, 33, something's roughly a third maybe of African-American officers. Gender diversity, I wanna say, it's probably in the high 20s, 25, 27, 28% female officers. And so there's that. The training has changed a lot. If you look at every state requires basic certification training, and there's a lot of police departments that that's it, other than the state in service training that's required every year, that's it. When you look beyond that and you look at best practice training of missing persons, de-escalation, mental health, addicted people, domestic violence, sexual assault, there are best practice training things out there for all of those key topics. And those are all things that hit communities very hard. I'm very proud of the training that the Cincinnati Police Department does. As a matter of fact, in my new role as the safety director at the University of Cincinnati, I'm stealing every little bit of that. And our officers will be going through this training over this year because that is the difference. John mentioned the everyday grind, the everyday showing up and living up to what you signed up to do. That's the backbone, that's the training that has to go into that kind of an approach. And so that's the training shift that has occurred there. You guys talked about earlier the culture within the Cincinnati Police Department and kind of the pushback that you experienced early on as you were trying to implement a lot of these reforms. So we also know on the other hand that there's also a culture within the community of distrust. So what is the community feel currently towards the Cincinnati Police Department? What are some effective mechanisms of building trust between the community and local law enforcement? I think we mentioned the word here a couple of times, sustainability. And sustaining these agreements and sustaining the strength of the agreements is actually easier on the police forces side because it becomes part of their training, part of how they operate, becomes ingrained. They have, as Mr. Saul Green said, you can have a chief of police who says, this is how we're going to do it. It's a little harder on the community side though. Again, this agreement is almost 15 years old. There's a whole new generation of young people who don't remember or were five years old when they were riots in Cincinnati in 2001 who may still have a sense of distrust among police officers. So the community still has to do its job in saying, look, there is an agreement here. There is a way to file a complaint if you think an officer has disrespected you or mistreated you. And the difference is, is that community members aren't paid to do this. It's not their daily job. They go to work from nine to five and then they have to do this as part of their activism or community involvement. And that's been probably the, if the agreement has laxed in any way, it's been on the community side, especially as it relates to, we used to have something called a partnering center that I think was really the push, the problem-oriented policing part. That has not been up to par. And so the community really needs to wake up 15 years later and say, we want to re-engage. So for the generation coming behind us, that they don't have to go through what we went through. So that's the hard part. In some sense, this speaks to the whole tragedy of the matter. What we're asking members of the African-American community to do is step up and put a lot of pressure on the police after hours without overtime pay. Where the police go, they're paid for it. They get overtime. And... Including the protests. Yeah, yeah, including the protests. And those of us in largely white communities, we show up and we can moan about some frivolous thing, but it's really not very taxing at all. This sort of goes along with the question earlier. We asked about the difference between community-oriented versus problem-oriented. What are some of the concrete examples of how problem-oriented policing makes a difference in improving community relations? Does it work? And if it did, in Cincinnati's case, how did it really play out on how did it improve relations? Yeah, I'm not certain I can answer the second part of that all that well with any kind of precision, but let me give you some kind of examples for how this would work. So let's say you have an apartment building with a lot of crime. The typical way that you do it on a standard police is you just respond to each of those calls, do whatever you need to do, arrest someone or not, and those calls would mount up. Under a community policing strategy, what you might do would be try and organize the tenants and meet with them, but it's then unclear where that goes. One of the things that Cincinnati has been increasingly focused on is the idea that a very small percentage of addresses have most of the crime. And that if we're able to address that, that we can make huge impacts on the safety of citizens and their welfare without burdening a lot of people with stops and so forth. The people who own those properties control those properties. So a lot of the emphasis is increasingly going to what can we do with the landlord? And if the landlord is not going to work with the police, what kind of legal pressure can be put on the landlord up through various civil suits? There's several properties in the city that are under various court orders and being litigated at this moment. That's one chunk of this. This is not the only way of doing it. But what that does is if you can change that property ownership, either the way the owner currently operates or a new owner, one can reduce the need for actually sending police there. The people who live on that property get not only the benefit of less crime and disorder, but they probably also get their toilet fixed. They probably also get the bugs eradicated and all sorts of other things which we really didn't think about when we walked into a panel on policing. So that's one element. Another one is the fact that a large number of people end up coming into conflict with the police because they're mentally ill. And one of the things that the city has done is partner with various mental illness experts and resources within the city to help divert those people so that they're handled by professionals who really know what they're doing and taken out of the hands of the cops who really feel uncomfortable in this situation. So now how the citizens know this? Well, most citizens won't know it unless they're the brother, sister, mother, daughter of the mentally ill person. They won't know. Unless they live in that apartment building, they won't know. So this is a real dilemma. Is that how do you tell people about this kind of stuff when they're exposed to very little of it? If much racially biased policing is the result of unconscious bias, how do you practically then change the policing? What strategies are available to fight the results of unconscious prejudices? There's a professor from Florida, Lori Fredel, Florida, right? That if you go to fair and impartialpolicing.com, she's made an entire training regimen out of the study, the scientific study of bias. And bias is an interesting thing. My police colleague here talked about the discomfort that comes with talking about race, having a frank discussion about race. You wanna really make cops uncomfortable, talk about bias. The thing that Lori Fredel was successful in doing in the session that she did for the University of Cincinnati Police, for the entire University Police Department, was to break bias down into scientific terms. When you think about bias, right away, my brain goes to good people versus bad people. Bad people are biased, good people aren't biased, and that's all there is to it. But she started the whole thing off with a real quick example. If you're walking down the street at night by yourself, and there was some group of people walking towards you, she asked us, tell me some characteristics of that group of people walking towards you, that would make you have zero fear for yourself. And so we were saying things like, obviously, faith community people, nuns and priests, or small children or elderly people. And she said, hey, implicit bias, there you go. You're making an assumption that something's gonna happen based on what somebody looks like or what your preconceived notion is. Like, oh, okay, I get it. So when you have explicit bias, people that are bigots, racists, people that hate someone because of their race, their religion, their skin color, whatever it may be, entry level into policing needs to do a really, really good job of screening those people out of the process. And if they do make it through getting them out before they get off probation, et cetera, because fighting with the unions and the civil service rules is tough once you get past all that. Educating police officers around implicit bias and not letting, understanding that it's natural, and not letting it interfere in your decision-making process as you go about your business. Raising it to an educational level is a key advance in looking at biased policing. So in this story that you guys have told us today, sort of the catalyst was a strategy, that took place in Cincinnati. And so in terms of activism and in terms of sort of the political action that took place, that seemed to be an important piece of it. The question asks, does it always take this kind of dramatic event to happen in order for us to sort of make the changes that we need to make? And so in terms of like, are there other ways to get this process started, not just some of the dramatic, really terrible happenings? Yeah, good question. It's hard. I would wanna say yes, that you don't always have to have some kind of critical incident. But I'm thinking back over history. I just know in Cincinnati it took that when we had years and years of problems. And I think it took that happening for the broader community to understand. And Cincinnati's pretty much black and white. We have very little other ethnic groups. And we're like 50, 50 black and white. So when I say the broader community, I really mean the white community to see that, wow, we do have an issue. I think sometimes it takes that for those in denial to see that there's really a problem. But I would love to say that it doesn't always have to be that kind of incident. And maybe Saul can speak to that, something. What I would add is that unfortunately that seems to be what the course that things have taken in this country. I've been involved in this Cincinnati situation, very much involved in the Detroit consent decrees there. And there wasn't a civil disturbance, but there was a consent decree for our way we conducted our holding sales, but a number of people died. There was a consent decree for use of force. Number of people were shot and it gradually built up to the need to take action. And what's sad to me is we haven't figured out a way for convincing departments to kind of self correct, to take a look at themselves in a way that's objective and fair and within some context, some of the context that Damon referred to earlier, that the purpose they've served in this country. And so there's a tragedy and then there's an investigation. And then the other problem with that is you have to understand that, well I'm trying to remember, what are their 17, 18,000 police departments in the United States so that, so often it's the Department of Justice who kind of reacts and goes in and does the investigation. If you looked at the size of the special lit section of the Department of Justice who conducts these investigations, I think they may have 25 people. And so the resources that are necessary to respond to the magnitude of this issue just aren't there. But my response would be based on everything I've looked at over the years. It's almost always based on some type of extreme occurrence or occurrences over a period of time. And let me say this, and Saul mentioned it would be good if police forces could just proactively do this. We went to Ferguson and we go as a team and we actually go with CPD. We went with the former president of the FOP, we went with a lady named Maris Harold who pretty much does the problem-oriented policing in Cincinnati. We went to Ferguson, we met with the commission, but we also met with a number of police chiefs from around the area. And in the Ferguson, Missouri area, there's like a whole bunch of little police divisions. I actually went into the room because I thought I was invited, but I wasn't, so I was kicked out of the room. But our police, Maris and Kathy went into the room and they spoke to all these chiefs about problem-oriented policing. When they came out, they said, and these are two white women. This is the most racist bunch of people I've ever seen. And they were disrespected, maybe because they were women, I'm not sure. But these officers, these police chiefs from the Ferguson area said we don't wanna hear that garbage. We're not gonna change how we police, and we're not doing any of that. Now, eventually they will because they're gonna have an incident. And sadly, that's what it's gonna take. But that's how these two police women from Cincinnati were treated in the Ferguson community. Yeah, I think one way of thinking about this is that if you think about things are going around roughly swimmingly and then something happens and then you have to fix it, then it sounds awful. But actually, that's how I looked at things up until around 2001. And the thing that I learned most of this was that I don't know much about what's going on in my city most of the time. And that's why I'm very careful about explaining that since I'm a good, I don't know honestly, you know? So if you think about crap is happening most of the time, but we're not hearing about it, then these crises are actually opportunities. And I think that's one of the things to take away from it. There are plenty of opportunities out there to do good. There's not a cadre of policy analysts sitting around monitoring things who can basically write a report and hand it to someone else in a bureaucracy who will then take action. No, shit will happen and then someone has to fix it. And you should look for that opportunity to fix. This question is for you, Reverend Lynch. It seems like you and the Black United Front specifically represented the Black community in the Cincinnati reform process. So what sort of intra-community negotiations or disagreements took place during that time? Oh, wow, a lot. Because the Black United Front wasn't the only grassroots activist group in the city at that time. Wow, we had battles within the front, first of all. I was the president and I'm a pastor of a Christian church, but I had Black nationalists in the group. I had atheists in the group. I kept talking about non-violent social change. So they thought I was Kingian and they were Malcolm and we battled and we met every week for three years. That's a lot in our church. But then there were other activist groups that were not part of us who were also helping with the boycott. But we were the ones getting the attention. We were the ones at the table. So there was some jealousy with that. It is not easy. It was not easy. We had personal losses during that time. You lose a lot of friends. I always say I lost a lot of white friends because before that, I was like a nice guy. It's like Damon's on the board of this and he's on this committee and now what's he doing in the street with these radicals? And it's funny being people that you thought were friends walk away over these issues and it's even funnier now that they're coming back. So it's not easy. Being out front is, and it's almost forced on you because somebody has to step up. And what I say is this, and it's the last thing I say, is that somebody has to climb the flagpole. And I say that as an ode to Bry Newsom whose father runs the Freedom Center in the city of Cincinnati. And Bry Newsom is a young lady who climbed the flagpole in South Carolina and pulled down the rebel flag. And you will always need somebody willing to climb the flagpole. And I say that to anybody in this room. You know, you may one day find yourself being that person to make this country a better place. So at that time, we were the ones who climbed the flagpole. Well, I'm glad to end on a note of personal responsibility and an opportunity for all of us to take the message to heart. I would like us to thank our moderators, our panel, our questioners and really appreciate people's attention and focus today. Thank you very much. Really.