#37 (Bill Bratton)

[Music] Reducing crime is a podcast featuring influential thinkers in the police service and leading crime and policing researchers. Bill Bratton has been chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, chief of the New York City Transit Police, Commissioner of the Boston Police Department and New York City Police Department Commissioner twice. We talk about his career and his new book "The Profession." [Music] Hi, this is Jerry Ratcliffe and welcome to Reducing Crime. If like me, you instantly recognize the television theme that just played, then I pretty much guarantee you have a few gray hairs, or like the eponymous hero of the show, an absence of hair. Across five seasons and 118 episodes in the mid-1970s, this slick NYPD homicide detective show, garnered a couple of awards and a couple of spin-off movies. If you know the show I'm talking about, then all I say is, who loves your baby. By the way, the guest theme for the last episode was the British Police Drama Juliet Bravo. My guest this month is Bill Bratton. Bill's on a virtual national tour, promoting his latest book written with Peter Nobler, titled "The Profession," a memoir of community, race and the arc of policing in America. As part of the promotional effort, he's appeared on national television, been interviewed on NPR, and featured in the New York Times. But with the help of Deb Peel and Bob Wasserman, I managed to convince his poor publicist that this is a legitimate podcast, you know, with production values and a team of people and stuff like that, and not just me chatting with folk while I sit in my bedroom. I'm bloody hell, it worked. So I got to zoom for an hour with Bill and talk about some interesting quotes I dug up from his book. Bratton served in the Military Police in Vietnam before returning home to Boston, where he joined the Police Department in 1970. He ultimately served as Chief for the Los Angeles Police Department, Chief for the New York City Transit Police, Commissioner of the Boston Police Department, and served two three year terms as New York City Police Department Commissioner in 1994 and 2014. For the last 20 years, he's been one of the most high profile police leaders in America. We talk about, well, Bill talks about, comparisons between the US and British policing, moving ideas between police departments, Peel's principles, Comstat, Accountability, George Kelling, Ivory Tower academics, Broken Windows, Protests, Defunding and Deep Policing. Oh yeah. And Angry White Kids with Really Good Teeth. So here's my chat with Bill Bratton. You know, I just hope his publicist girl gets to keep her job. She seemed really nice. Hey, Jerry. How are you? How are you, sir? Gary, can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. The technical issue is you've got an idiot at this end who's unable to press one damn button that says unmute. So we're all set now. All right. Great. Thanks very much for doing this. You must be exhausted. I've seen you doing like a hundred places. You are literally the 30th podcast in the last couple of weeks. Oh, agree. That's crazy. I had a good day yesterday. New York Times will be running what had been on there. Where the actual review of the book, which is very, very favorable, will be running this Sunday and the New York Times book review. That's fantastic. It's being very well received, very little negative criticism and generating a lot of positive discussion. So I'm very, very pleased with it. For a long time, I had to put together my colleague, Peter Noble, I really did a great job putting it all together. We've actually met before a couple of times because I've done some work with Chuck Ramsey and Bob Wasserman. I was sure Bob has been a colleague as I referenced in the book for 45 years and Chuck Ramsey had first met in 1991, both been presidents of Purf and Major City Chiefs. Chuck is actually working with me currently on two projects that I have in my company, one with Verizon and another one with the St. Louis County and City Police Departments. Does Bob know that you've described him as bug's funny at one point in the book, though? Yeah, he said there was the only negative connotation, but there was the book Ellie had an overbite that it was not meant in a demeaning way, but that basically that was how he was described in Boston. Bob is probably the most brilliant person met in policing in terms of overall all the issues. Chuck Maple was brilliant on crime, George Kelly, wonderful on his many, many theories. Bob wasn't his, thank God, he still is credible in his understanding of the many of the issues we discussed in the book. Yeah, you describe him as one, and I'm quoting from the book here, one of the underappreciated heroes of the evolution of American policing in the past 50 years. You know, I was saying, no, Bob, and it strikes me that people like Bob and Noah Joyce, and there are a whole bunch of these people who have just been beefering away at the background trying to move policing forward. He's purposely sought to stay in the background. He's never been anybody to want to get on the stage. He regretted that, and I've told him that many times that he would be the perfect person to actually provide a book because he's been involved in every major initiative in American policing in the last 50 years. So much of what I am in the sense of what I advocate with the opportunities that Bob created. We spent quite a bit of time working together in London, for example, with TFL. Transport for London. Yeah. Transport for London brought constant to that agency lobbied effectively to get a thousand meta-offices assigned to TFL to help with traffic and safety patrols. Again, at some point in time, you'll get some acknowledge when I tried to do that appropriately in the book. I've actually got a bunch of great quotes that I've pulled out of the book, the profession, and I'd like to chat about some of those with you, talk about the job when you started. When you say, when I joined the Boston Police Department, what I found was not a profession. Policing may have been called a profession, but it wasn't one. There was no body of knowledge, few highly educated people at the top, and by and large, this workforce were considered laborers rather than professionals, grunts, people who had to be controlled. This sounds just like when I joined the Metropolitan Police in London in the mid-1980s. It feels like we've come a long way. You could read the public rhetoric doesn't suggest as much, but it kind of feels like we've really improved since then. The difference with the Brits is that, and I'm very vying of the British Police Services and some respects. I'll be pleased to hear that. Well, you had Brams Hill. Your senior people are required to go through that unifying experience. Quick editors note here, just for folks that don't know. Brams Hill was a police college and the National Police Staff College for England and Wales for over 50 years until it closed in 2015. The senior officers selected for Brams Hill were picked from a very competitive pool. And they tended to be very well educated to begin with. But you had what a profession is, you had a body of knowledge, and even if the knowledge is flawed in certain areas. But it keeps growing. It was a think tank. You were always very good in Britain on technology advancements and acquisition. And you always wrestled as we did in the United States with base issues as you became less opportunity as a population and with the influx starting in the 40s and 50s from your various commonwealth nations. But what I found when I went over there is a very educated leadership in the force. But also just what was missing was some of the creative activity that we had in the stage. I've asked this officer, I've said you were 5 to 10 years behind our experiences, what positive and negative. And I enjoyed my experience. The CBE that I got from the Queen was in recognition of trying to draw the two police services. Oh, we all get one of those eventually. I've had two or three of them. Well, I finally understand what those initials are about. Right. That's pretty much it. It's a code. It inducted into a secret society. You actually know what the hell all this things mean. When I call restaurants when I'm over in London, I try to have all my letters about it. I don't know if it works or not. But it's nice to have their acknowledge. I make sure to never tell anybody the doctor side, otherwise they expect me to do CPR on some bloke that's dying in the corner of the restaurant. Yeah. So okay. So mentioning Brams Hill, they've morphed that and it's having some teething troubles, but it's heading on the right track into England and Wales now as a kind of national college of policing. Is that something that we need here? I would think that would be wonderful to have here. Starting in the 70s, the US began to invest in training for supervisors for managers. So I still remember attending at Boston's Logan Airport, a week-long course on managing investigations and another course on supervision. And these were some of the first course courses ever offered on a national basis by the national government. We also had a police foundation that Pat Murphy, former police commissioner in Newark, ended up heading up initially a grant, $20 million from the Ford Foundation, which in the 1970s was a huge amount of money. Yeah, it's not exactly a jump change today. That would be fantastic, right? First significant investment in American policing to create a profession. Subsequent to that, National Institute of Justice was created that in Perth, the police executive research form, which I was one of the first members of and been active with and president of twice. I would be very much in favor of something along the line of FBI Academy tries to do it. But a three-week course, which is really more about the FBI, try to win friends and influence future police chiefs as much as educating them. But it's not of the quality, if you will, of what would be truly a college or university. It doesn't have the caliber. Yeah, it's probably of the highest caliber in what we have in the United States, in the sense of instructors, et cetera. The reputation of the FBI, it's done at the FBI Academy. But I would be in favor of something that I was fortunately exposed to some of my contemporaries. If you will, a step-by-step move up in the organization training for supervisors, training for middle-level managers that would then prepare you with your real-life experiences for basically training to be a police chief. My kind of get sentence is that we need it for some of the benefits of the FBI National Academy. We get to meet, please, choose some other places, because you've had that capacity to work in Los Angeles and in Boston and in New York. But too many people have the tendency to spend their whole life perocally in just one organization. It seems like it becomes harder to make reforms happen if you can only ever see that you've done it one way, if that makes some sense. I just had a conversation this morning with a colleague who formerly worked with me in the NYPD talking about the selection process for the next New York City Police Commissioner. Apparently, at least one of the candidates has indicated that he's basically wants a minority. There's a lot of speculation on one or two candidates in the NYPD. The limitation of those two candidates is that they've never really had outside experiences and law enforcement except in the NYPD. I'm not sure what outside experiences such as the FBI National Academy, SMIP, and Perth that they've had that would have increased their exposures to other creative minds around the country. The British perspective, you can't take on a chief's job as a commissioner or a chief constable unless you've spent some time as a deputy in another force. It's part of the educational experience because when you come in from outside or even if you go away and then come back again, you're often brought in as you've been brought in as a reformer. If you brought them from the outside, it's because people often are unhappy with what's going on at something internally. You're running the book. Among the cops and their union, there's a widespread belief that all police reformers are anti-police. This is wrongheaded. I'm a police reformer and I defy anyone to call me anti-police, which I completely get. Where does this myopic view that we're doing everything perfectly all the time come? Where does this defensive posture come from? It drives me nuts. I'm trying to think of the expression that there's two things that cop take, the status quo and change. In other words, you're never going to satisfy cops that's just the reality of the business isn't, but I constantly strive as the outside of. I benefit as an outside of, because I come in with experiences elsewhere that help me to identify deficiencies in a new organization as well as strengths. As I move around, and I'll use for a prime example, L.A. in New York, the two leading police departments in America, by none, there's a lot of very good police departments in America if those are just ill despite some of the deficiencies of both agencies, the two leading police forces in America. I can't agree with you, because I'm going to have to keep my mouth shut at this point. Otherwise, I'm going to get run out of Philadelphia, but yeah, carry on. Philadelphia has, unfortunately, despite having had John Timony and Chuck Ramsey, he's still fortunately a mess. I was asked to take over the Philadelphia police by Ed Mandel back in the, I couldn't take it at the time. It just takes me around the late '90s. I just take a very lucrative job in the private sector, actually, the NYPD, but I recommended John Timony, John Wrennan, and had a great time there, and was one of the great commissioners there, then Chuck came in after Washington, DC, but Philadelphia, it's still dealing with the legacy of Rizzo, fortunately. No, I'm very proud of both LAPD, NYPD, recognized the deficiencies in the strengths. What I tried to do with LAPD was bring some of the strengths of the NYPD to a constant, for example, better use of data, basically emulating after 9/11 what New York had developed for counterterrorism. And so myself and John Miller created a model to have to New York, counterterrorism and intelligence entity, NLA, coming to New York from LA. I brought the use of the Fire Moms investigation division that we had created in LA, which is still the leading entity in America, equal only by what New York now has to investigate use of force by police. I brought the senior lead officer program concept from LA in New York, which is now the NCO program. All of this is described in the book profession. Thirdly, right back from LA, the police academy training that we totally revamped the training at the NYPD to emulate much of what LA was doing. LA still has some of the best strength. And this is where Bob Wasserman's creativity can send Bob work with me at every department I've ever gone into. Did you give him advance warning? Or would you just say, "Hey, guess where I'm going and you're coming with me?" In some instances, he's already there. He was already there, for example, in New York City, Transit Police, and he and Kelly are the ones who recruited me there. He was already there in the NYPD with Lee Brown when I came in in 1984. LA, he was not there, so I brought Bob in to help with that transition. I'm just intrigued by the notion that at some point Bob picks up his phone and it's a text message from you saying, "How's your Japanese or something like that?" Well, in some respects, it's kind of like the Batman late in the sky. I look up at the sky, there's Batman late, so basically the semester is to come on down. One of the fun things about the second NYPD experience was that I recognized that was going to be my last significant police experience. I was able, in those three years to, I don't know if you familiar with the movie "The Sting" with Robert Redford in Paul's. It's a classic. Yeah. Classic, and the touching the nose. Everybody wanted in on that last thing. It was going to be the swan song. Well, in the NYPD, I think there was a recognition. This was my last adventure, and I was able to literally survive myself with 40 years of incredible talent. There's never been a team of people in one place at one time when I had in 2014 in New York City, except for 1994 in the NYPD Frisco round because then I had the magnificent Jack Maple, John Miller, John Timothy, Louis Animal. Which is great, but here's where there's kind of a bit of a problem with that. Because we've got 18,000 police departments, and some of them are in a shocking state and could do with reform and to do with change, and you often need to bring that reform and change in from outside. But you had the capacity to bring all of these people with you. You could form a team. How do you do that when you come in as a police commissioner somewhere or as a police chief, and you can maybe bring one person, one or two people, but largely you're coming in and the team that you inherit is the team that you are stuck with. How do you make those kinds of changes and reforms? Effectively, that's what happened at the MBTA, the 68 person organization that I took over in 1983. I was able to bring in Al Sweeney. I was able to bring in as a consultant for Abwasaman. But I had to basically work with what I had, which was a force, much too small for the responsibilities it had. This is one of the hallmarks of being a leader. The idea, you're given a set of circumstances, but with that set of circumstances, you should not feel yourself totally limited by it. So what I've been able to do is basically identify additional resources that allow me to bring in consultants, additional opportunities that give me access to people who not necessarily came in as paid consultants, but who willing to lend their expertise. And a hallmark of my time as a leader is always being able to start with the organization and crises, which is what I look for. I don't want to go into something that's being well done. I want to go into something that's a message. At that point, you can only fail, right? Or just maintain somebody else's status quo. Little successes mean so much more than magnified, but out of crises, I've often said in such sharp one expression, comes opportunity to meet the challenges that you're going to have to face in an organization crisis. The skill of a police leader, and this is the idea of exposing upcoming police leadership to experiences in the sense of other chiefs who have been there before them, who have had challenges and how they met those challenges. And that's what SMIP Purse Program offers that in three weeks, these up and coming captains, Deputy Chiefs, are exposed to the Bill Braden as the Chuck Ramsey said, some of the leading people in the profession, some still in the profession, others like myself and the outside. I don't think anybody's going to claim that you're on the outside, Bill. Well, I'm not outside, but I'm like a bee pollinating. I heard a quote at the beginning of the book, John Timothy's favorite quote, "Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it, and those who know police know we don't know our history." Yeah, that's the truth. We don't teach history. I happen to be a history buff, so I know a lot about policing history, your country, here in the U.S., and I'm informed by it, and thank God that I'm a history buff because I was exposed to so Robert Peale's nine principles, that it is the foundation of what a modern police department should aim to be. Absolutely. The primary objective of the police is the prevention of crime. Right. Well, the basic mission, and I indicate those five most important words in policing, to prevent crime in disorder, for men in crime disorder. 70s and 80s, we were responding to crime, 90s with community policing, we started focusing on prevention, partnership, problem solving, the three P's, if you will. And it was the idea, also, in the 70s and 80s, we gave up focusing on disorder as the streets were becoming more chaotic. Nobody was really recognizing the deception of myself and a couple of others, Bob Wasman and others, that George Kelly, certainly Wilson, that you had a deal with both at the same time. What strikes me about that piece of history, and I was reading about it more in the book, is that Comstat was a role to bring these things forward. But you've just talked from a moment ago about identifying these young leaders. And you talked initially about Comstat being about data, but it was about more than data, because I read, and I really like this quote, is that Comstat ultimately became extremely useful, not only for crime fighting accountability, but also for pinpointing how effectively those leaders were managing the resources, and they're precinct, they're platoon, they're squad. It's a helper mechanism for identifying which people have got the skill sets to actually be the managers that, you know, if you think about a precinct captain in New York or a district captain in Philadelphia, you're the equivalent of a police chief in a moderate-sized city. Well, but basically what I emphasize on decentralization of power in large organizations, appropriate level is usually the district precinct of division, I described that as basically being a captain on a very large ship and going down into the engine room to really understand which moving that ship forward. Comstat initially was one side of the sheet of paper talking about all the crime issues, but I had them add on the second side of profile sheet. And the profile sheet looked at the captain, his executive officer, and eventually brought into play many of the squad commanders, and it had detailed information about them, how they been on the job, et cetera. So that when promotion time came and I got a list of names, I had over a thousand captains and above in the NYPD, so impossible to effectively know all these people, but in Comstat, I could sit there and just watch and listen and then add on that profile sheet photograph. So basically when I went to promotion lists, I went to the profile sheet with the crime numbers on one side and on the other side, background of this person. So Comstat was multifaceted in the sense it was a efficient use of data to drive the organization, but it was a tremendously efficient tool to identify who could drive the organization. People wanted you to remember them in Comstat, but ideally for good things. Well, it's never been shy about raising my hand, and that's how I get noticed, and sometimes I'm being accused of being too ambitious, and Boston Ambition was a dirty word. New York was something we celebrated in LA, the whole town is ambitious. Everybody comes to LA to become a movie star, to become a more successful police chief. So I am ambitious and one of the ways ambitious people get noticed is to get noticed. And all the places that you've been, you've often had to do with issues around discipline and oversight, and that's come up a lot in conversation recently around policing, especially after the murder of George Floyd, I don't think we're ever really going to be able to quantify how much damage Derek Chauvin did when he murdered George Floyd, and how far it's put American policing back, and in fact arguably put policing back in many countries. But this area around discipline and oversight has come up in pretty much everywhere you've been to. If you had carte blanche, you could control the Union contract, you could decide whether you were going to have in-house oversight, investigations or civilian or external. Is there an ideal discipline system that you could design? No. The reality is that you have more of an opportunity for that and great Britain with you. What are the 49 agencies over there? You have an inspector and constabulary for all of them. Here in America with those 18,000 police departments with the average about 25 or fewer offices. You've got state laws and interfere with things, you've got city and town ordinances. So even if you were to advocate a best case scenario, it would be inapplicable in the Basque majority of American police departments. And it creates phenomenal confusion, and I'll give you an example, the case of Derek Chauvin. The fact that the police chief there was able to dismiss those four offices within a few hours, basically, of the murder. Everybody applauded them, and then everybody applauded that he testified in the trial. Police chiefs in America would not have that power. I cannot fire somebody outright in the NYPD or the Los Angeles Police Department. They have to go through a whole disciplinary process that oftentimes is controlled by an outside entity. And so in the case of that particular Miss Valley, he had that power. In Los Angeles, in New York, you could not go to court because you are the administrative officer who's going to oversee the administrative discipline process. So you could not go into a criminal court prior to the administrative hearing, because it would taint your ability to be impartial in that administrative hearing. So there really is no one perfect system then, you have to try and design the best system given the legal constraints of where you are. Exactly. That's crazy. In LA, I was a chief police reporting to a board of five commissioners. So all of my disciplinary decisions would be reviewed by them. They could make recommendations that would be counted in the final analysis. I was the final determinant of that that was the power I had, but I had significant oversight. In the NYPD, the police commissioner is the final say. We have a civilian complaint review board that's assumed more powers recently, and there's even a move to take the disciplinary powers away from the police commissioner, which would be disastrous. Because as a chief or a commissioner, you have to have that power over your people, otherwise you are a toothless saga, if it's controlled by an outside entity. Well, the outside entity one is interesting because this is going in a really logical direction here, but this is how my mind works, is that when you have internal investigations that's in it's done by police officers, they know the system. They know how people sneak around the system. They know how people cheat the system. They know where the floors are. It's a little bit like George Kelly in his work. What I loved about George was that he would actually get out and go on the ground. I have a bunch of PhD students, and say, "Well, you're going to work with me. Here's a vest. We're going to go out." Because you have to see what's really going on. You have to see policing on the street. You have to throw on a vest. You have to go and see the crime victims and not just a dot on the map. There's somebody weeping on a police officer's shoulder because they've lost their life savings. It was tiny. They imagine. Speaking of George and that comment about going out and walking the talk, he was frequently vilified by the Ampshire academics who'd ever get out of their offices. The air conditioning is very comfortable in the ivory town. Yeah. And George basically wrote in easily understandable sentences. Anytime I would look at a criminologist paper that had formulas x plus y equals z, closed the book. The average American police chief is not going to get into algorithms, etc. George wrote in wonderfully articulate language based on real life experiences. He liked cops, which was a big help, that he started with the premise of understanding cops and that the majority of them want to do good. He also recognized the many flaws that they had. That's why George and I got along so well, I'm a walk around chief. He was a walk around academic. Yeah. And as you say, the armchair academics in IC, a lot of critiques coming from people I've never heard of them ever stepping outside of the hollow grounds of a university. But the absence of academics who are actually prepared to work with police is a challenge for moving the profession forward. There is now a division of policing with the American Society of Criminology, but it's pretty much on first name terms, all the academics, you know, and even fewer of them are like me. I'm an ex-police officer who became an academic and we're on like first name terms. We could sit around one dining room table. I still remember with great delight as police commissioner of the New York going up to the American Academy of Criminology meeting in Boston and to take them on because they were attacking a Comstead. And the reason they were attacking Comstead was that I had implemented it in every precinct in the city at the same time. They would have preferred that a placebo and half the precincts and fought crime in the other half. So I could watch the rising death cow in one place and basically only take care of half the city. But I said to them in that meeting, that's the flaw where academia is in the sense to think in the verified air of the laboratory. I breed the small field there of the streets. It's one of the reasons I've been attacking a lot of the things that would put into place for the attack because they want to research things for years and years and years. And as a practitioner, you don't have years and years. You've got to make split second decisions that is basically dealing with lives. You're dealing with lives that can be lost in a moment. Yeah, the average Chenier police chief is less than four years. It's actually down under three years now. Listen, now under three. With the current environment, the last chapter of the book you talk about, the defund movement and essentially the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. It had been building going back to Trayvon Mott. The young man who was killed by that neighborhood watch patrol character. And that was when the Black Lives Matter movement began, the three women who basically started it. They were slow to get traction. Then Ferguson happened. And then if you're Ferguson, because every kind of happen in the same year is Ferguson, but it happened much earlier in the year, it attracted a lot of attention in New York demonstrations matches. It had then quieted down. But then when Ferguson happened, it was like a match was strong that gave BLM a stronger platform to stand on. George Floyd was the straw that broke the camel's back. It was a match and there was gasoline everywhere. It was just a truth. It was kindling everywhere. I thought we were doing so much better. New York, the fact that we got through Ghana because we had relationships with the African-American community. I had a mayor that had good standing with them that we were implementing in New York. Everything that Obama had recommended in this 21st century paper. That's become politicized, but it's a really good report. It's a really interesting and insightful piece of work. A lot of good recommendations. I didn't have, if you will, a plan for going forward, it was just, it was like Sir Robert Peele's nine principles, it served as a good foundation, but then it required implementation, implementation, advertising, requires funding. So it effectively was launched, but then we entered the Trump years and the last thing he was going to do was fund a Obama initiative. Is the job of a chief, I mean, is it even tenable nowadays? Can anybody survive? It actually is becoming increasingly untenable for several reasons. The caliber of some chiefs are just up to dealing with the credible challenges of the 21st century. Some of the best are leaving, aging out or just worn out. We still have not got that pendulum back to center. The pendulum is still wiggling over to the file left, the attacks on police, et cetera. I will say there was one part of your book that actually had me laughing out loud. You were writing about the rights and the disturbances after George Floyd. And then you wrote, "When the scissor between the black leadership and the anarchist caused both to temporarily quit the field, cops noticed that suddenly most of the marches could be characterized as angry white kids with really good teeth." And I'm sorry, but that just made me laugh out loud. Well, actually, I purposely put that line in. That line actually was from John Miller, who was at all those demonstrations. And one of the things that we've discussed police chiefs and those of us who still associate with them is that we fail to detect that the race issue was still as explosive in the black community. Because in New York, things were going along pretty well. We had dealt with Ghana, which would normally be as explosive as a George Floyd, but because we had developed the relationships, we got through it. But then where did the anger come from from all these white people that are the 20 million that were out there demonstrating that probably 80% of them were whites? And if you look at the age of them, the old college crowd, the older people with gray hair, all these young kids, 19, 20, 21, 22, part of it was that they had only lived in the 21st century. And the 21st century was a relatively safe period in America, except in some inner cities. That no memory of the 80s and the 90s? Yeah. And so that anger toward the police, what would the police ever do to them? And I think it's a reflective of the challenge frustration for so many professions in the 21st century is social media. All these kids live on those devices, the ability to attract a flash mob at an instant, and an ability to gin up anger. And this is something the chiefs are wrestling with. How do we effectively deal with the 21st century? And it was back to my point about the myriad of challenges that police chiefs have to face and many of them are not prepared to face them. Seems like the last chapter is especially you're shooting to provide a road map as a way out, because I think police chiefs right now need it. I think there's a real struggle to figure out. How do we get out of where we are? How do we appease some or at least tempest some of the angry white kids with really good teeth? I'm sorry, I'm stealing that and I'm going to keep using it. How do we move forward? It is a memoir. Random House wanted through my eyes experiences, a history of policing over the last 50 years, the act, if you will. It's also a lot of wonderful stories of events and people. And it's also a tutorial, a tutorial in the sense what I've tried to provide is to my perspective, definitions of the contemporary language of the 21st century, stop question and frisk. What is it in reality versus the hype, defund the police? What is that? What is it's real potential impact? One of the things that you say about it is that you can't take the money from the cops and throw it to other failed agencies that don't know what they're doing. And this phrase, I really like, you can't defund an institution to punish it and think that this action is going to make it better. And that's still what some of these cities and politicians are trying to do. Also the idea of, for example, the hotpot issue that's holding up the George Floyd Bill in Congress, qualified immunity, I would be willing to bet US nine out of ten politicians who are advocating to do away with it or change it to define it. They couldn't tell you anything about what they're actually advocating for. And as you say in the book, there's certainly no call to advocate that we should be taking away complete immunity that seems to be, we give it to judges and prosecutors. And politicians. Yeah. Can you, can you sue a congressman? They basically have absolute immunity for bills, they pass actions that they take. No, so qualified immunity really comes down to two terms. It's the idea of lawful, that the officer is engaged in lawful police action and that his actions were reasonable. The courts, however, over time have made it so restricted that you have to be at a show, a similar case in the same jurisdiction, all for criminal justice reform it's needed. Qualified immunity can be reformed but taken away and the disincentivization of new people that come into the business and the encouragement existing people to flee the business, it's going to be a potentially significant negative impact on the police profession. It's striking that balance, though, isn't it? It's striking that balance between having some degree of oversight, but also understanding that people have got to make, in many cases, split second decisions and human beings sometimes make mistakes. And I don't think we're in a world in 2021 where there is much tolerance for honest and genuine mistakes. Well, the case in point is going back to the smartphones. The ericana case is a prime example that snippet of their 10 second take down. New York won one night, I counted it in the space of a minute. They played that snippet six times in the space of a minute. That's so it sinks into the public mind. But the gun amount has spread over a number of minutes. Its coffers are striking to me for a period of time. Right at the back end of the book, page 472, something like that. It's an interesting way to finish, because I'm wondering what it's like to look back on a career that's lasted 50 years. To write, sadly, at some point I came to feel that despite the efforts of so many highly talented, wise, sensitive, and positive thinkers with whom I've worked, all of our gains have been erased. I fight that uncomfortable thought every day and I refuse to allow it to take hold. Is that where we are? Let me give you the example. I've been said a little early in a discussion about going to this point, about 50 year arc, we're kind of back where we started. In the 70s, George Kelly writes and talks, he's only about this, and I use his comments and break it down. It's a shame that so many people don't have the opportunity to see him speak, because he was a fantastic speaker who gave talk about victims and just the support and the need to support victims in the worst hit communities. He was a fantastic speaker with real passion. In some respects, the frustration I have at the back of that book echoes some of his frustration. And his great frustration was the effort on the part of many of the anti-kelings to a quite broken window with racial policing. Broken windows is all about community policing, it's true community policing, because what are police responding to when they're dealing with 3-1-1 calls to deal with the substitute and the con of the gang acting up in the park? The dice game that attracts shootings. All the stuff that makes quality of life in the neighborhood is a great fear. Where all it's going on now, down in Times Square, with the intimidation of tourists and so on. George talks about, in the 70s, that three things happen that are basically being repeated right now. We de-institutionalized in the 1970s. Well-intended, as government policies often are, to let the mentally ill out of the institutions, get them in a neighborhood treatment center, get them back in the homes with self-meditation. Hundreds of thousands of out in the country, well-intended, but what did we unintentionally create? Most of those self-treatment centers in the neighborhoods went funded. Many of those poor souls ended up on our streets. We created, what was called, 50 years later, the homeless problem, which is now exploding. Secondly, we also decriminalizing a lot of activities in our public streets. Public drunkenness now along was a crime, it was an illness. Efforts to deal with loitering, all types of behavioral issues were now effectively decriminalized. The police were told, don't pay attention to that. You have more important things to focus on, more serious crime. Don't pay attention to the graffiti, don't bother about those dice games, don't bother about the drinking in public. So we were decriminalizing a lot of that effort behavior. So we got the compounding of the emotionally ill on the streets, decriminalizing of a lot of things that went on on the streets, and we were adding also, as the drug problem was starting to experience many more drug addicted people onto the streets. Thirdly, we were depolicing many police departments shrunk during the 1970s. That burgeoning of the disorder problem disproportionately affected the communities that weren't able to police themselves, and that's the part that I think is lost on how people interpret George's work, because he was really about trying to do something for the disorder problem in the communities that didn't have the. He understood how to do it, because the depolicing also was the idea that we no longer had cops walking the beat. So did I. And then in '77, '78 we got air-conditioned cars, we could roll the windows up and we got even more isolators. I don't think we have those in Britain yet, yeah. So depolicing was literally fewer police, but police policing differently in cars, and being consumed with nine or one calls, the majority of those nine or one calls were about the increasing disorder on the streets, which police advantages administrators had pushed off to the side. We had to focus on serious crime. So that's 1970s, and we saw the results of that in the '80s, leading to 1999 in the worst crime and disorder year-ever. What is going on in 2021 that is exploded in the last year? We have de-institutionalization of what prisons and jails. We are pushing people out, and similar to 1970 with the mentally ill, there were no facilities for them. So de-institutionalization is happening once again, depolicing, defund the police. We are cutting budgets of police departments around the country. In the 1990s, with the crime bill of 1994, we had 800,000 police. The latest head count is 670,000 in declining. So we have fewer police to deal with, the de-institutionalization issues, but we also have the decriminalization, so many of the laws that were left for police to work with, prosecutors are no longer willing to prosecute legislators, and I was more intent on basically passing laws that penalize the police and the criminals. So Deja Vu, all over again, back in the '70s, '80s and '90s, I had the answers. I'm not sure that I've been given the opportunity in 2021 to get back on the stage, that I could basically have a hit on Broadway, because I just don't think we have the necessary orchestration to put on a hit. We don't have the answers that we had in the '90s, and that's what worries me at the moment. Which is why you wrote all of our gains have been erased? If you think of it, everything that I think was beneficial, community policing is being attacked as racist, com-stat is being attacked as racist, stop questioning frisk is being attacked as racist. We have become so racially conscious that we're losing sight of the people that benefited most from these gains worth the minority population. Are you going to solve a problem when it's kind of like Congress, the United States, they can't get together on anything? Well, on the issue of race, we're having difficulty getting together on the central issue in America today, and it's somewhat I speak to in the book. I've got to say, 50 years, an incredible commitment to life dedicated to public service, to be back where we started, how does that feel? Isn't that great, because every way it looked as a problem to be fixed, you're going to finish on a glass half full. This is an opportunity situation. Somebody who looks for crises to basically celebrate change, that crisis is building. At some point in time, it will celebrate change. I just hope that some of my contemporaries basically have some of the answers I believe we had in the '70s, '80s, '90s, and particularly going into the 21st century. We've been there before, we've succeeded before, we'll be there again and hopefully we'll succeed again. I've got to tell you, I don't normally fluff people this much, but as a kind of history of 50 years of policing from some of these made those kind of commitments, I read the book in three days. It's a fantastic read. The profession. Bill, thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it. Well, it's been a pleasure talking with you and good luck to the broadcasts, okay? All the best. Cheers, Bill. That was episode 37 of Reducing Crime, recorded online in July 2021. New episodes are announced on Twitter at Underscore Reducing Crime. When they become available, I also announce new three-day Police Commanders Crime Reduction courses there. The transcript of this and every episode can be found at ReducingCrime.com/podcast. If you are a college instructor planning a class or two around any of the podcasts, DM me @jerry_rackliff for a free spreadsheet of multiple choice questions. Be safe and best of luck.