So I'm in the middle of migrating a pretty complicated web app to Ember and I thought I'd share some of my experiences with you So I Work for claimable We make basically a web application for the insurance industry. So it's very niche very specific to be to be out and it basically helps Insurance companies manage the entire claim process. It's very process driven. The current version looks a bit like this Not bad looking for a business app, especially an insurance industry app These guys are hideously underserved when it comes to good software You'd be amazed at how many of our clients still use fax paper Excel spreadsheets and to think these guys run our economy It's pretty scary But this is claimable in its current form it basically lets The the back office staff so the claim handlers process a claim so the idea is that it's a smoother experience for the policy holder or the Person making the claim basically so you can see it lets people upload documents take notes that kind of thing It is written currently in cappuccino, which I don't know if anyone's heard of it's a fairly obscure framework It's basically coca for the web And we started using it maybe two or three years ago when it first came out at the time It was pretty revolutionary actually it did some things that Now we're kind of taking for granted, you know One of those I think was bindings And the other one was things like lazy loading and a really good table view component There was a lot about it that drew me to it So it seemed like the perfect thing to use for a big complicated B2B web application like this however as time has gone by in my opinion their direction has Lost focus or maybe it's got too much focus because I think the problem is that they're so religiously fanatical This is the core team members. I'm talking about about Porting coca to the web they've forgotten what is great about a web application basically HTML and CSS So a good example that I always fall back on is Recently well not recently but you know in the one of the final versions of the current current application I wanted to add a just a tag just a link and the way to do that was considered a hack because It was so strictly objective J and coca That you had to drop down into the DOM and add this a you inject this a tag into the HTML in a way that you wouldn't expect to And it kind of frustrated me So I started to look for other solutions and that's where ember comes in Ember So I think at the time Cappuccino was a good choice because it don't get me wrong. It's been great And it's pretty clever to be honest. There's some amazing things it does, but I think it does It fails mostly in one in one place and that is forgetting. What's great about the web The fact that you have to write objective J code the whole time And you don't even it abstract so far away from the DOM and CSS and HTML That it's very difficult to style anything or even for example if you wanted to hand your Your app to a web a front-end web designer. They wouldn't be able to interpret the DOM It injects all these divs all over the place with really weird class names and things So it's pretty unmaintainable from that point of view so I made the decision maybe six months ago to rewrite the whole thing in ember and I thought well, we're Not even halfway through that process yet. So this is fairly Embryonic what I'm about to tell you it's still fairly new. I'm still learning ember I know Cappuccino really well because I've been using it for two years But what I thought might be interesting is if I share kind of these three things that To me I don't want to take for granted about ember. I actually changed the name of my talk I started out with it being five lessons learned and I thought maybe that's too many So I made it down to three and as I started to think about the lessons I've learned in so far using ember I realized that those are actually the things that I started to take for granted and I don't want to so Fairly high level, but the router we all know about this to me. It's like magic. I think it's amazing Obviously, you've got things like it forcing your URL led design, but before that I have an experience with Writing my own. I didn't know at the time that I was writing my own router, but with my first experience with Cappuccino, I distinctly remember the moment where I had a tab working and you could change tabs and it was loading the content and it was all Ajax and then I reloaded the page and Reset to the to the root, you know the root root and I realized that okay, it's my responsibility as a developer to Change the URL and pass the URL. It seemed kind of I guess Expected at the time now in hindsight. It seems ridiculous. So there I was writing this What is probably a horrendous router? That every time I clicked anything in my app it would update the URL and Then pass that when it when it reloaded so for me I think one of the single best things about Ember is this this router and the fact that it forces you to think about your roots before anything else And for a big application like claimable That has to remember state It's perfect because it means that we can strictly Think about the different states the application can be in not as an afterthought So for me, I don't want to take this for granted you get this for free just from using ember So not only does it force you to think about how you architect your application? You get this great functionality as part of the package and you it turns out the users click back a lot So our users are real technophobes that some of the requests we get are crazy You know, it's it's pretty pretty difficult to support actually And they're clicking back the whole time in our current version if you click back It goes back to Google because that's probably what they were looking at before before using our app So yeah, we could we could mess around with the the history API and what have you but again you get it for free with ember So it's great for me. I don't want to take this for granted. It's perfect You know, we're we're delivering what we're promising it comes back to this whole thing about Cappuccino is a web framework, but it forgets that the single most defining thing about a web application or a website It's probably the URL So that's great, I love it and the other thing as well that we've learned is that You encounter all sorts of problems with long-running apps and by that I mean our users typically log in at 9 in the morning and use it All day without reloading Until like 5 p.m. And if I didn't know what a memory leak was before I do now, you know So again, I'm not wanting to Criticize Cappuccino because it's a fantastic framework, but it's huge the memory footprint. It's huge The payload is huge. So we would have these problems on less than ideal Browsers and hardware to be honest that wouldn't help where users would just it would crash It would just they'd get that weird script timeout error thing It was a big problem. So again with with ember. I think it really encourages architecting your app in a URL led way That helps you with all of these other problems that we've certainly encountered So the next thing Backend agnostic It was really interesting to hear the previous talk About how they're stuck with these legacy backends. We're fortunate that we we have our own back-end So we've always maintained that Even with the original version. There's strictly a restful API and a JavaScript UI, but because Because the original version there wasn't really any defaults Well, there wasn't the equivalent of ember data. There was talk of having core data But it never really happened So it meant that you're on your own basically So what we started doing was finding ourselves solving bugs in the UI by just changing the API Which is kind of cheating and it breaks away from that purity of having the two things completely separate because what we want to Be able to do is swap out the API right not only that but a lot of our customers use our API So it needs to be really well documented. It needs to be very consistent and almost So that a developer can discover the URLs without having to necessarily Dig around too much. It's kind of obvious, but we found that previously we had to break that and In my opinion corrupt the API a little bit in order to suit the front end But again, what I love about ember is that ember data means you It truly is back-end agnostic and not only that but it really Respects restful conventions and encourages an API led design, which again for me my I even view the Our main product as being the platform actually the the API rather than just the interface because we have Mobile apps in development as well. And like I said our customers consume our API So it's pretty important Okay, the last thing I wanted to mention was just this general concept of under promising and over delivering it It before I made the decision to move to ember It dawned on me that I was doing the opposite. I was over promising under delivering which really bothers me and I think I'm not just a developer part of my role is also involved with the marketing and The product design side of this application. So it's really important to me to be able to Deliver what we're promising or even better over promise. Sorry under promise over deliver And again, I think ember really helps with that because like I said We had this thing that looked like a native app because it was built that way but basic things like the back button didn't work and Know all these other things that these visual cues would kind of make the user think that they could do certain things Maybe it's drag-and-drop a particular element because it looked like a native app But they couldn't and it really sucked. So I think again by not having this obsession with porting a A native framework to the web and actually acknowledging what makes the web great So URLs and HTML and CSS but bringing in all the things that are good from native frameworks like bindings and things like that components you get the best of both worlds and for me, that's been really a really sort of encouraging approach that has I think improved our Sort of architecture of the of the product and the way we've structured the application And the last thing I'll mention is is just speed So we're used to I think 4.7 megabytes as the payload Which on anything less than chrome on like a decent machine doesn't run very fast Forget mobile So again, I think I'm not going to take for granted how quick ember is I've seen you know blog post about it not being quick But in my opinion it really is and I think what is it 47 kilobytes or something like that? It's pretty good. It's a small payload and you get a lot of functionality for that So that's it really I kind of just wanted to share what I've learned to date. Like I said, it's still in the early stages The bottom line is I really love ember and pleased I I sort of Took that approach and back the right horse So hopefully I'll come back at some point and share a bit more in-depth detail with you when I've gone further down the Process, we'll hopefully by the autumn have something well have it completely migrated as well That is it. Thank you very much We're gonna only be able to take a few questions because we need to get to the pub So when this is all done, it's the water poet it's left and then left and then left again And you'll see it straight there. We'll see you all there, but I was wondering curious That's That's a good question. I forgot to mention that maybe that's a topic of another talk, but in theory. Yes in practice. No Yeah, so I mean we intend to and I think I Don't know personally. I need to do some some research about testing in ember I Don't feel like qualified to comment on it only that I've heard that some people say it's bad Some people say it's really good. I'm inclined to believe the latter. Maybe it's just a documentation issue or something. So At the moment we're kind of Doing it without tests the API is tested, but the front-end isn't But we will that's the short answer. Maybe if I come back and talk again I can talk about testing yeah, because actually one thing That is important is because it's such a complicated application and we have because it's so process driven what our customers do We need to really test things. There's lots of Scope for regression bugs when we add a feature and then it breaks something else. So testing is absolutely a priority Really There we go, yeah Any more questions, yeah That's a really good question I did and at the back of my mind I was very conscious of Kind of making a wrong decision like I said because it's My position is that I'm also running the company as well as developing this thing at the back of my mind I'm always thinking about The business side of things and it felt me choosing cappuccino felt like a mistake basically to put it bluntly And it you know cost a lot of time and resources. So I was particularly sensitive to that. So I did Did make the point of being quite considered about it. I did review just angular really I sort of looked to I did some shallow research into most of them But I knew what I needed it needed to be like a big framework like What am I thinking of Well, it's a small framework but backbone backbone was clearly not going to cut it So I kind of discounted that and just narrowed it down to like and give it an ember And I kind of said to myself. I'm not going to rush this decision. My timing was actually ember comp in March Must be March. Yeah, that was my timing. I booked a ticket to that and said right by the end of this trip I would have decided one way or the other I think in reality and in hindsight my decision was already made one of the big factors was the community I can't Sort of have stress enough how important that is because the cappuccino community is minuscule like really tiny So seeing going to ember comp and seeing the the community and not just the size of it, but how How sort of thriving it is, you know really encouraged me to just take the plunge and say right We're going to rewrite this thing at Ember Doing a rewrite is always a big Question for a business and I don't know in the suit soon thereafter as you start to try to figure out ways There's a way to incrementally bring things in it. Did you ever discuss whether there was I mean seems like there's a lot of up Things that might block that from happening for the you are expected Native yeah, it would be I think it would be impossible with the way yeah with the way that one of the things Cappuccino's really bad at is integrating with any other frameworks. You can't even use jQuery with it really it just doesn't It's kind of a bit of a beast in that regard It's that or nothing Which at the time again, it seemed perfect because it's they even say to be fair they say on their website, you know This is meant for building like native class be up. You wouldn't use it to build a blob or something It's really for this very specific thing which seemed perfect But Yeah, I don't it wouldn't be possible to sort of do a little bit in ember Still have some of it in cappuccino. It has to be all or nothing really I think it and if it was possible, it would take more time and resources than just rewriting it. That would be the clincher So the timeframe for when you're done is as well. Well, I'm aiming for like mid-autumn. So I guess that's like October kind of time I mean one thing that's good about it in terms of the product point of view is that we know And this is what's different to when we were building the first versions We know what it should do. We have all the features and that's not the problem. The feature set isn't the problem Yeah, you know being in 2014 rather than 2012 has afforded us some new features and things But we actually know what we're doing. We have everything mapped out. So it's quite a different process It's more like we're building on what we all of the sort of I Don't know. I guess the sort of The design decisions that we made and spent so long agonizing over we're building on that and Rather than sort of I don't know from from my point of view I think that building an app like this is as much about Taking a step back and architecting it as it is writing the code So the kind of the architecture bit in my mind in terms of the layout the screens is done So it's less overwhelming than it was building it in the first place


What's up everyone doing the random here from the NT flawless and national tiered break We hit this card during the break and wanted to reach out to all of the owners before randoming it to You know contact and make sure that's what they wanted to do So we've got Carl Malone with the jazz Kevin Garnett with the T wolves in Shaquille O'Neal with the Lakers Again, you're gonna do the random whatever team ends up on top after the random will take home this car Thank you all so much Let's go over here to the random again jazz T wolves and Lakers. Let's roll the dice We've got nine times nine times on the random. Good luck to all the teams one Two three four five six seven eight nine Card is going to the Lakers with Shaquille O'Neal Lakers will take home this card again. Thank you all so much and we'll be getting this right out to you Lakers


You're shooter stance, right? So your aim is your urban rifle marksmanship qualifications with we're actually going over the basics for battling an urban environment. Okay, move out. Ready, up. Engage your target. Weapons on safe. Weapon comes down. Continue moving. Yeah, you good.


Films are our escape into another reality, or fantasy, that we can enjoy safely from the comfort of our living rooms. But do you ever get the feeling that the movies are watching you? I'm Matt Rogers and this is the art of breaking the fourth wall. For those that aren't familiar, the term fourth wall break comes from old time theatre plays, where the sets always had three walls and the fourth missing so that the audience could see the performance. Breaking the fourth wall was therefore a metaphor for performers to ignore this imaginary wall and let the audience in on what's going on, sometimes literally running through this metaphoric wall. This of course can translate to film and television, usually by having the actor barrel the camera. During a lot of these breaks, time stops for everyone surrounding the main character. However, this is not always the case. This technique is often used as a comedic device used in a lot of children's television. And movies that don't take themselves too seriously. In my opinion, it's funniest when unexpected, usually in cartoons. But sometimes even in live action. But let's talk about how it can be used well and not so well. Fourth wall breaks can be a really great way to add an interesting insight and add layers to our main character. Or even to break the rules of cinema as a whole. It's worst use is mainly in God awful kids movies where the star overacts and cracks jokes that are just an attempt for you to find them likeable. But if you ask me, it's best use is when it walks the audience through literally what's going on. Rather than explaining it through storytelling, which can take a lot more time. Take Fight Club for example, we have a constant voice over from Edward Norton's character explaining his inner thoughts, which would otherwise be very difficult by just showing us the things that happen to him. Then there's the projectionist scene where we learn a lot about Brad Pitt's character by having them both talk to the camera. Director David Fincher must be a fan of this convention as he's also used it in the Netflix original House of Cards. The main characters Frank and Claire Underwood are dark and sociopathic characters. However having them, especially Frank, break the fourth wall feels like he's talking to you as a friend and tells you his deepest, darkest secrets. Which somehow turns him from a hateable villain to someone that you want to talk to as a friend. If you didn't get a look at his innermost thoughts, it would be quite difficult to find him relatable. We make the terror. Moving on from film and television, it's good to see these breaks occur in other mediums. Video games have been pulling these off really well. A couple of examples I'll use are actually two of my favourite games from the last couple of years. Firstly, Doki Doki Literature Club. A seemingly innocent anime-style visual novel with a lot of characters, a seemingly innocent anime-style visual novel however stamped with a psychological horror warning which is definitely well earned. Now if you haven't played it, I'm going to ruin one of the main twists and this game is best played knowing nothing about it and I'd highly recommend it, especially since it's 100% free. Anyway, those of you that have played it know that one of the main girls breaks the game and talks to you, the player, even taking your name from the computer's system files and using it in dialogue. Going into that game seeing its cute visuals and light-hearted conversations but remembering the warning signs that showed up at the start of the game is an experience like no other. It lulls you into a sense of security and then shocks you with visuals that are with you a long time after you close the game. My favourite game of 2018 was Detroit Become Human by developer Quantic Dream. The game's storyline itself doesn't break the fourth wall however as soon as you launch the game for the first time you are introduced to your own personal android named Chloe who again talks to you, the player. I like your interior decorating. It really reflects your personality. I mean, I like it. and even tries to make you feel bad about your decisions in-game. You could have saved them. Remember, the lives of these androids are in your hands. And because of the game's incredible amount of choices you can make and even a survey she runs you through you feel like Chloe knows you. These interactions strangely make you feel empathy and even sympathy for her. But I want to know, what's your favourite fourth wall break and why? I'll be chatting with you guys in the comments. But until next time, thanks so much for hanging out. If you had a good time then spank that like button and if you subscribe during this video then walk them aboard. This is Matt Rogers and that is all.


So, as most of you heard, I'm David Plotts, I'm the editor of Slate, and I'm extremely delighted to welcome, fresh from Tim Geithner's office where she was learning things, Annie Lowry, who is a, what is your title, Annie, economics, economic policy reporter? I'm an economic policy reporter. Economic policy reporter for the New York Times. Annie is late of Slate, she was our money box columnist, she was our business and economics columnist for 2011, and she's just an incredibly brilliant writer and reporter, as any of you who've read her in Slate or in the Times knows. We're gonna talk today, it's slightly odd, because we're gonna talk about a story that Annie wrote for Slate that still has not been published, that we're gonna publish this week. The reason it hasn't been published is because Annie was really late getting it back to me. Let's be honest, Annie. Let's be true about this. So Annie, who literally worked, she got married and left Slate on the same day, and she literally worked until the day, like six hours before her wedding on all sorts of things, but the one thing she didn't quite finish was the story we're gonna talk about, which is gonna be up in Slate, and I'm gonna, it's gonna be, this is gonna serve as kind of a teaser for the story, which is a great story about learning to do things yourselves and about do-it-yourself culture, and so I really hope everybody gets a chance to look at the story, which I think we'll probably publish next week. So Annie, welcome. Thank you. I apologize to everybody for my blanket tardiness on all things, but... So the story that we're gonna publish is called Where's Why, and what is the story about? The story is about Slate gives all of its writers a month off to write one thing, which is, I can't even tell you how unusual it is among publications today that Slate gives its writers the opportunity to do this, so I decided to learn to computer program, just for the reason that I felt like I had a basic understanding of physics, I felt like I had a basic understanding of how the body works and planets, very, very superficial, of course, but the computer was magic. Nothing about the internet was magic, most things about telephones were magic also, but that's a different issue, and that felt kind of ridiculous. All I do is sit at a computer all day, and so I decided to learn computer programming, and there's a lot of things that you have to... The learning curve is really, really steep for programming, and I think it's the reason that a lot of us don't have the same sort of understanding of how computer programming works in the same way that we might. Your average educated person is gonna know a little bit about a lot of things, but generally not about computer programming, and that's because, despite the fact that programming languages are designed for the programmer to use, they're not actually what the computer speaks, there's a really steep learning curve, and so there's a lot of detail about me bumbling to get to learn it, and then the story is also about the computer language that I decided to learn is called Ruby, and it's a popular scripting language, a popular language used mostly for web apps, but one of its main... One of the people who I partially learned to program from who wrote one of the most famous Ruby tutorials disappeared two years ago, so I also went and tried to find him. So that's the second part of the story. So it's a story of a programmer named who goes only by the name of why, or why the lucky stiff. Yeah, it's W-H-Y. Who was a proselytizer to a community of... A community kind of of do-it-yourselfers, teaching people how to program and who one day decides he does not want to be... He doesn't want to be a person in the world or on the internet anymore and vanished, and so Annie is attempting to figure out what happened to him, where he went, why he disappeared, and in the process to learn Ruby, which she... So you had about a month to learn a programming language. In a month where you were probably doing other things, you were reporting and so forth as well, was that enough for you to become a master of this language or to have any skill that you could then apply in the world, or was it just enough to learn the equivalent of saying hello and thank you? So I think that probably I knew enough to know two things. So the first and the most important thing is you maybe learn enough to understand how complicated it is and how much programming there is out there and how brilliant some of it is. Maybe you can kind of start to understand how much work actually goes into these things and how difficult it can be and how amazing some of the things that computers now do are and also what computers are good at and what they're not good at and where you need people to direct computers. So that's one thing. And then what I could do by the end, I could write really simple programs. I could write little games and things and a lot of times, it's actually... One of the nice things is that once you've gotten the real basics of how to actually write a really, really short computer program, so even like a math problem can be a computer program, once you have the real absolute basics down, then there's like a lot of things that you can do kind of just really quickly and also you can go... Once you've kind of mastered that very beginning, you can go and there's a lot of program... There's actually a ton of stuff where people suggest little puzzles that you can figure out and programs that you can try and do. But no, I'm awful and I'm in awe of people who can actually do it and I think that that's one of the things I learned. So the subject of this conference that we're having is really it's about the maker movement, about do-it-yourself movement. If it takes a reasonably intelligent, if tardy woman cannot... That was enough. She's always on it. She's always at her deadline. But if a reasonably intelligent woman given a month to work on this can basically do a...  What hope is there for average citizens, for at least in terms of learning software or learning that, what hope do we have that average citizens can get anything out of this or do something useful with it? Well, I think that there's probably kind of a liberal arts argument that it's probably good for everybody to know something about this given our reliance on it and given how important it is. And I think that to a certain extent you don't need to... I don't think that everybody needs to become a programmer and do that professionally, but I do think it's a sort of thing where it can help you understand problems that you're having, things that you're seeing, it can help you sort of be more open to the wonder of the things that are actually out there. And so in that sense, I think that it would be a good thing. I also think that just in terms of making your brain work, it's kind of like the Suzuki method. They say that the Suzuki method not only teaches you violin but makes you a little bit smarter. I think that if you taught kids computer programming, it'd be really, really good in just enforcing logical thinking and making them detail-oriented. And the other thing is you hear a lot about kids and people who are learning to program who... It's not so much that they're writing programs from scratch themselves, it's that they're going in and they're tinkering with things that are open source and sort of changing things to their needs. And I think that that can help foster a lot of creativity because programming is like anything else. It's like literature. It's highly derivative. Most of it is very derivative. Most computer programmers are taking big chunks of things that other people do. And so I think that you can actually be pretty creative in very small ways if you can just have a sense of maybe a goal that you have and maybe start thinking about how to get there. So looking at the... Out in the world, there's a big flurry this year of stories and reporting about Code Academy. And I think there's another... Isn't there another... There's a bunch of competing ones. So Code Academy is something where you, you, average person can learn to program sort of an online course over the course of a year, I think.  I had full intention of doing it, and then I've done none of it. But they still are counting me on their email. I wonder what you think... When we look back at the end of this year, and if you assume some thousands of people have gone through Code Academy, what will the benefit to society be from that? Will it be economic or will it be something else? I mean, I don't think it'll necessarily be economic. I also think that you now have... Because technology is such an amazingly... It's a sector that's growing really quickly and is obviously really vital. I think that if you're a college kid, you probably want to work for Facebook or Google more than you want to work for any place else. So I do think that there's probably a lot of cultural alert getting people to program. But if you start making that easier... And Code Academy actually, I thought, was like, it's kind of tough. It takes a lot of time to kind of just get the real basics down.  But I think that it would be good if there was more ways for adults to do this. And so I think that Code Academy will get a lot better. When it first came out, there was only one language that you could learn to code in, and that was JavaScript, and they're now expanding it out, so that it'll be other languages like Python, and they're doing Ruby, too. And that'll be good as well. And so, yeah, I do think that if there's been some sort of sense that, you know, because programming-type jobs are going to be really, really important economically to the future, because there's, like, you know, you just really want to live in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and be around that energy, it's the sort of thing that I think that the next big step would be if school started teaching it, I didn't have to learn it in school when I was a kid. But if you had elementary schools being more focused to getting everybody the basics and doing it in a way that it was really easy, so it didn't seem hard, I think that that would be great. All right. We're going to have time for just one question here, and then, yes, in the classes. There's a mic, or you can scream. So I said, okay. And please say your name and who you are. Okay. Well, I'm Pam, and I'm a software engineer, and one of the things I was interested in was, well, one, you like briefly, so this article doesn't come out, but I mean, I code some in Ruby, and why is it really, so you should have shown the picture of the foxes, everyone should look up why is pointing a guide to Ruby with the foxes. You'll get it. I know it makes no sense now if you don't know what I'm talking about. But in terms of adults learning a program, there's a lot out there. And it's driving me a little nuts, like being on the instructor side of it, and teaching people, everyday people to program, especially librarians, artists, and hearing people say there aren't opportunities for a program, especially in the human space, like actual classes like PyStar, RailsBridge, there's tons of them. So I'm wondering, because you were kind of talking about your experience program, did you just learn online, did you use why's pointing guide? Yes, there's a lot about why's pointing guide in the piece. It's actually really, one thing that I talk about in the piece is that it's really hard to read, and I think anybody who knows something about programming here would probably agree with this, it's really hard to learn to program by reading about programming, it's like impossible, you don't absorb anything, it would be like trying to read a Spanish dictionary and then speak Spanish, but there's a lot of great, and more and more great interactive things, where they'll be like, okay, can you do this, and you do this, and if you don't do it, there's a ton of those, and I agree with you that, yeah, there's a ton, and I have to think that there's also a ton more options recently for getting folks to learn to code. I don't know what it was like 10 years ago, and I think that there's probably also a cultural sense that folks should make it as easy and as fun as possible and kind of remember that sometimes it can be a little bit difficult at the beginning, but realistically anybody can do it and should be able to do it. So you're right also that I think that, especially if you live in a city, where there's a lot of things online where people either tutor you, or there's online interactives, and Code Academy is just one of them, there's tons of them, yeah. Annie, thank you so much, and I can't wait to publish this piece. I hope everyone takes a look at it.


Welcome to this Democracy Town Hall on Reimagining Policing. My name is Dan Lindheim. I'm a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy and the faculty director of its Center on Civility and Democratic Engagement. The Center is committed to training current and future leaders to engage a wide and diverse range of perspectives and communities in finding solutions to pressing public policy issues. This event is co-sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Social Science Matrix at UC Berkeley and is part of the university's Reimagining Democracy Town Hall series. Through its like-the-way fundraising campaign, UC Berkeley is highlighting university's teaching and research related to the themes of democracy and equality. We open this conversation by acknowledging that UC Berkeley sits on the ancestral land of the Ohlone people. We recognize that the Berkeley community benefits from the use and occupation of this land. To learn more, we encourage you to visit the Sogareté Land Trust website. In recent months, particularly following the police murder of George Floyd, there's been a call to abolish, defund, and or reform the police. Many elected officials have called for 50% reductions in police budgets that account for substantial local government spending. At the same time, there's less agreement on the meaning of what could or should be abolished or defunded or what can be meaningfully reformed. And the very language of abolish or defund has both advanced, as well as complicated, the crucial debate about the appropriate role of police and policing in our society. We have an extraordinary panel today that brings together experienced police, elected officials, and UC Berkeley experts to address these critical issues. Daniel Outlaw is commissioner, which means chief of police in Philadelphia. Nicky Fortunato-Bass is president of the Oakland City Council and co-chair of Oakland's Reimagining Public Safety Task Force. Jack Glazer is a professor at Goldman and an expert on police bias and uses of force. You can read their bios on the event website. I've asked panelists to briefly discuss their views on the appropriate meanings of abolishing, defunding, or reforming policing. In particular, can and should police spending be substantially reduced? Can functions now done by police be replaced by non-police? And how does all of this relate to addressing the major crime and violence that disproportionately impacts low income and communities of color? Following the presentations and panel discussion, we'll take questions from the audience. To submit questions, Google GSPP, that's Goldman School of Public Policy, GSPP. And on the homepage, click on the event, this event under the event section, and there's a submit question button. Our first panelist is commissioner, Daniel Outlaw. Daniel Outlaw is currently the Philadelphia commissioner of police. She was previously chief in Portland and a long time police officer in Oakland, rising to the rank of deputy chief. She runs the nation's fourth largest police department, employing more than 6,500 sworn officers and 800 civilians. She is the first African-American woman to lead the Philadelphia police department.  Her boss has required her presence. Commissioner Outlaw. Thank you, Mr. Linheim. Good afternoon, everyone. Just to give some brief remarks, when we're talking about the topics of abolishment or defunding the police, I think it's really important for us to get a shared understanding of what that means. The terms are being put out there frequently, but no one really knows exactly what we're talking about. What exactly does the community want? Just to give a little context, going back to this summer, I think a lot of us, whether they're in the Bay Area or here on the east coast, specifically in Philadelphia, we all had to deal with a period of civil unrest, which began for us here on the 31st of May and extended for several weeks after that. We knew that in various parts of the country, starting in Minneapolis, that there was not only unrest, but there was looting, there was violence, there was rioting, there was violence against police officers. And then shortly before the 31st of May in the city of Atlanta, we saw that they were also experiencing unrest. But traditionally here in this region, Philadelphia had not experienced that level or that type of unrest. And so we had a protest scheduled during the day, downtown, and we knew that we needed to prepare for this particular protest. But what we didn't do, and of course, looking back in hindsight, everything is always perfect in hindsight, we know now that we needed to contingency plan far beyond that protest, not only for any hangers on that might have come to the protest during the day and maybe linger it on as it got darker downtown, but we now know that we needed to be prepared to have folks deployed mobily throughout the city because what we saw was the same thing that had been happening in other parts of the country. And because we were not prepared on the front end, we found ourselves over the next few days bolstering our resources so that we could now respond citywide to simultaneous acts of violence all throughout the city and making sure that not only we had people available to answer calls for service, but to also be available to address the unrest or anything that might have just popped up because it was posted on social media. As a result of that, like many other cities, whether small, mid-size or large, we did deploy less lethal munitions, we deployed tear gas, and it was not in the traditional areas of the city. Actually quite frankly, tear gas had not been used in many, many years, but tear gas was also used in a residential area in West Philadelphia, an area of the city that had been long under-served from various agencies. You have, of course, your African-American residents, some of your poorest communities, and again, just over time, historically, had not had the best relationship quite frankly with the Philadelphia Police Department. So as such, not only were tensions really high, but ironically, a poll was done, Pew poll 2020, from the dates polling by the Pew Charitable Trust, and there was a poll that was conducted from July 27th through August 24th, and again, this was shortly after the period of civil unrest. And the reason why I asked the question of what does the community really want, whether we're talking about abolishing or defunding, divesting, reimagining public safety, what this poll found was not surprisingly, given the time period that this poll was taken, what was found was that attitudes toward police, especially among non-Hispanic white people, had become less positive. And there's no secret that the mayor and I got some pretty bad ratings for our handling of the May and June local demonstrations, specifically around, one, our preparedness, and two, the use of tear gas, and two specific instances, one, up on 676, which is a freeway or highway as we call them here, and also in West Philadelphia in the residential neighborhood. But what's surprising is that, okay, we're not at the surprising part yet. The poll said nearly three out of five residents, say the police department needs some reforms, five, while another three and 10 want a complete overhaul. But here's the surprising part, at least it was for me. At the same time, only 14% of residents and just 6% of black respondents wanted to reduce the size of the department, and 45% say the department isn't large enough. So with that said, it was made very clear that our relationships, historically, although they've been strained, and the trust was strained even more during this time period because of our response to the civil unrest, we still have a vast majority of residents here, specifically those of color wanting more police on their police department. In fact, respondents listed public safety as the top issue facing the city. So the reason why I share that is, again, what do community members want? Is it a small vocal group that's saying abolish? Is it another group over here saying defund? Who is really the true voice of the community? And I think we found that there are varying perspectives. There are many, there are many. So with that said, 2020 ended here for us with record numbers of crime, not much different again than other cities in the country. We ended last year with a little one under 500. We had 499 homicides, a couple thousand non-fatal shootings. And even today, because it's still trending upward, even today we are up 41% in our homicides. There was a research study that was put out by Temple, I think recently that showed some correlation between the pandemic and how those factors is driving crime here. But also at the same time, we are noticing that when we look back in 2020, there were a lot of themes and patterns amongst the types of crimes that we were seeing and what was driving them, right? So even though we recovered last year a record amount of illegal guns off the street, around 5,000 last year, and even year to date we've recovered close to 500, which is amazing, 500 illegal guns and gun arrests. We're still seeing the trend lines for our homicides and shootings going opposite direction. What's going on here? So 2020 showed us some themes around domestic violence, related shootings and homicides. We saw some nexus between open-air drug markets, and then we also knew that social media, the use of social media, social media to be more specific, was driving a lot of our crime. And so with that, whether it's community, whether it's local electives, council members, folks want to know what are you doing, Commissioner Howell Law, PPD, what are you doing differently to adapt now that you know that these are some of the main drivers that are causing our numbers to trend upward? In addition to that, shortly after the incident, the tragedy around George Floyd, we also committed to a lot of reform efforts, not just policy-wise, but having a really strong look at not only how we deploy, but doing a really honest assessment of our technology and how we're using data and intelligence to inform our deployment strategies and our decision and making sure that we do that through an equity lens, right?  I incorporated a lot of what I learned from my time growing up in the Oakland Police Department, a lot of what I had done as Police Chief in Portland, Oregon, who was also under a consent decree. I incorporated that into an action plan or a strategic plan because we know we can't address crime prevention and reduction without focusing internally, making sure that we give people the time, people money, the resources that they need in order to thrive and be successful. And we can't engage and include our community without putting our best foot forward, right? Making sure that we invest in ourselves so that we can provide the optimal service and so that people are now willing to, you know, reestablish a trusting relationship with us because they see not only we're investing in ourselves, but we are enhancing our legitimacy in their eyes because we're following through and we're doing what we can to improve our clearance rates. We're doing what we can to ensure their safety when they do come forward as witnesses. So because all of these things are related, interrelated, I would say, I don't think we can commit to just any one thing. We can't commit to just saying, I'm gonna, you know, have more implicit bias training or procedural justice training and call it a day without focusing on how we, again, use technology, our research analysts, you know, our crime analysts, the use of intelligence through our divot, our real-time crime center to combat crime, and then therefore garner these relationships in the community and adapt to engaging community in a new way because if the pandemic doesn't allow us the same face-to-face social interaction as we have before. So I say all that to say, because we're not sitting on a blank checkbook. Gone are the days where we can just throw officers in all of our hotspots and say, okay, it might displace the crime. So we'll just shift our officers over here and we'll just put more officers in the same spot. We have to be very targeted and intentional and very focused, very strategic with how we deploy because we don't have the luxury of just spending money. We have to be accountable for our overtime as we all, you know, we always should have been, but even more so now than ever because the pandemic is causing a lot of us to have to present budget cut scenarios. So when I started here, I came in a budget deficit because 30 days later, the pandemic hit, right? And then now a year into this, the budget is even worse. The pitfalls are even worse. So cuts to police budgets when you talk about defunding or even abolishing, let's talk about defunding. When you're talking about cutting police budgets for us, because of the majority of our costs, our personnel costs, when you're cutting the police budget, you're cutting personnel, which means layoffs. Now, don't get me wrong, we have to do our part to look internally to make sure that we're working as efficiently as we can, right? Looking for any redundancies that may exist, taking a look at our organizational structure to see if it's top heavy in some places, do we have some positions just kind of sitting there and quite frankly, are you negotiating? When you go to the negotiating table with a lot of our contracts, are you looking at how you can civilianize a lot of your positions to get as many sworn positions out on the street? We have to do that internally. But the reality is, is that when we cut police budgets, we have to cut cops. And we've already heard at least here in Philadelphia that the majority of our residents want more cops on the street and not less. I also add that folks I think would be surprised that many of my people like me, my colleagues and I across the country, we agree quite frankly that we shouldn't be responding to a lot of the calls that we respond to. And in fact, and I've said this before, that just our mere presence when we respond to certain types of calls, you're automatically criminalizing whatever that incident is, even if a crime didn't occur. And we often find ourselves, you know, the dissonance kind of kicks in and we'll respond to a call and like, how do we document this? All I have is a crime report, but it wasn't a crime. So you may find yourself scratching out the header and writing something else just because it's, we need to document it. To me, that tells us maybe this isn't the type of crime that we shouldn't, that we shouldn't be responding to. Should we, depending on the nature and what we know, should we be responding to clear out homeless encampments? A lot of folks will say no. Are there any weapons involved? Are there other ways, and you know, that was done here in Philadelphia. Are there other ways to negotiate a resolution to get these folks to leave on their own through voluntary compliance without bringing in the police? Because when you call the police, you know what you're calling, right? I'd also go on to say that, you know, we also agree that further investment should be made in social services. So we agree there. We agree that the police should not be called to a lot of the calls that we currently respond to. And we also agree that certain social services and community-based organizations need help financially. Excuse me, but what we don't agree is that the money should come from our budget for the reasons that I said, right? Again, when you cut our budget, you're cutting bodies. And you know, when we're talking about more training, more, for example, for us, I mean, for a department our size, Oakland's a little different. Before a department our size, it's very costly to outfit everyone with a taser. We're still in a process of rolling that out, but we too had a very critical incident, a very critical officer-involved shooting in which there was a person with a knife and the officers used lethal force. And shortly after that, there was a call for everyone to be outfitted with tasers. Now over four to five years in order to do that cost at least $14 to $15 million, right? So it's not as easy as, you know, yeah, just give them this. Same thing with buying more cameras. We believe everyone should have them, but the larger the department, the more expensive it becomes. That costs money. Preparedness, right? A lot of the criticisms and constructive feedback that we got around the civil unrest last summer was about our preparedness and lack thereof on the front end in order to prepare, in order to get air support up, in order to cancel days off and bring people in, in order to feed these folks, in order to ensure that all the logistics are in place, that costs money. implicit bias training costs money. It's usually justice training costs money. We are early adopters of ABLE, which is active bystandership for law enforcement training. All of this costs money. These are all things that we've committed to doing. I have committed to introducing as part of my pledge to reform early in the summer to creating stronger systems of accountability, which includes an early intervention system. That program costs money. So I'm saying all that to say, you know, we hear over here we're being asked to do more, which is great in the sense that my goal is to create a performance organization. I want to shift the culture from that of being a disciplined culture to that of performance. So we're rewarding the type of behavior that we want to see, but in order to do that, we have to invest. So in closing, I'll just wrap up by saying that I think it's going to take everyone in our community, not just residents, but our local state, federal, all of our stakeholders, including everyone in the criminal justice system, because we're just the entryway, right? There's so many touch points in the criminal justice system, but it's going to take everyone coming to the table with solutions. It's going to take the community also being on board with identifying the role of their police and really what public safety means and what it looks like to them. And we can't just finger point, right? And then lastly, you know, I think as we're doing that, we have to recognize that our roles have evolved. The social, political and economic environment today is completely different than that of what it was five years ago. I'd even say it was different than what it was a year ago, not just because of how we now have to interact, but the community's expectations have changed. And so we have to evolve as law enforcement and be willing to make the investment to do that. So thank you. I'll open it up for any questions if you have any. Do either of the panelists have any questions for commissioner before she has to depart. So I would just like to pose one thing in another venue. You've said that if you call 911, you get a badge in the gun. And not every problem is a badge in the gun. How do you figure out which are the appropriate things for police to respond to and, and not. And the typical things that people talk about are mental health cases. But even in some instances around the country, mental health teams, which have psychiatric social workers have backup from police in other places they don't. How do you figure this out? And what is Philadelphia doing in that regard? I think that one is, it's, it's a challenging one here also because oftentimes we don't know what we have until we get there. Meaning the police, right? We don't have the full picture of the details of this call until we're actually there on scene. And so what we've done actually beginning in the summer, we have someone and I rolled this out in Portland also, we have someone in radio doing triage for us. It's a clinician, a licensed clinician sitting in radio. Right now it's not around the clock. Hopefully we can expand it to that, but they're helping with triage to determine if someone is in crisis, whether or not the best response or the best first response is that of a sworn police officer. We are also looking at rolling out a pilot program of a co-responder model here in the next couple months or so. But I think what that pilot will show us or tell us is whether or not a co-responder model is the best, or like in other places what they're rolling out in Portland now and what they've done in Eugene, for example, with directly sending out clinicians and then they call the police if in fact there's an escalated risk, right? And then we come after the fact, or you could actually have a hybrid of both. But I think in order to come up with whatever that is, there has to be community at the table because there will still be a pocket of community that says, I dialed 911, I wanted 911, meaning I wanted the cops to come and the cops didn't come and I have a problem with that. So there has to be some shared understanding of what public safety will look like. I'll also add that we've included a different line of questionings for our dispatchers because it's new. It's taking them a little bit longer, the call takers a little bit longer to get all of the information. But the whole purpose behind that is to include prompts in there to get the information that we need. So what's questions like or I'm paraphrasing, is there anything, is the person that you're calling for, is there anything that would hinder their ability to understand what the police are saying to them? And it's not just a language barrier, it could be a developmental disability, for example, right? Or someone actually in crisis, it is helping us paint the best picture that we can possibly have and then help us determine who to deploy. Do we need to send somebody that's crisis intervention trained? Do we need to ensure that a supervisor is also en route? So we can be as best prepared on the front end prior to our arrival as opposed to figuring it out as we all go. But I still think that one is a challenging one. And at some point here, we're just going to have to pilot what we're going to pilot our co-responder program and then see how it goes from there. Thank you very much. And I appreciate your willingness to be here. And you can go respond to your boss. I will do that. Thanks, everybody. Our next panelist is Nikki Fortunato Bass. She's president of the Oakland city council and co-chair of Oakland's reimagining public safety task force, which has the goal of redirecting 50% of the police budget towards programs and services. Sorry, I thought I was muted. That has the redirect, as the goal of redirecting 50% of police budget towards programs and services that address the root causes of violence. Council President Bass has been active in enhancing Oakland or its public safety through really leading the passage of the strongest co-fit eviction moratorium in the state and a hazard pay bonus for grocery workers. She authored fair chance housing protections for the formerly incarcerated and created a fund for community land trust to prevent displacement and create permanent affordable community on housing. For two decades prior to becoming elected to the council, President Bass was a successful organizer for worker, environmental, gender, and racial justice. Council President Bass. Thank you, Professor Linheim. So I want to start with a little bit of context in terms of where we are. And clearly our country is at a crossroads regarding policing. Here in Oakland, we know that it's been 18 years of non-compliance with the negotiated settlement agreement to achieve constitutional policing. We've had a police commission over the past four years, which has been struggling to have the necessary city resources to do its job. And then of course we've had the deaths of Oscar grant, Richard Perkins, Damaria Hogg, Eric Salgado, and so many others to law enforcement. And with all of that, I believe it's the political moment here in Oakland as well as across the country to act as part of a police accountability for investments in our communities and for transformative safety solutions. The other thing I want to share is that nationally after the uprisings following the murder of George Floyd and after taking the White House from Trump, it's really important for us to recognize that the federal government has been dismantling our social safety net for decades. And it's cities that are at the front lines of dealing with this crisis of underinvestment, disinvestment in public housing, job training, healthcare, and other critical services. And so at every level of government, from the federal level to the local level, we have to restore and reinvest in these services for a just recovery from the pandemic and the recession. And we also have to do that to begin addressing the systems that create poverty and violence. And so here in Oakland, last summer, many of you all know, thousands of people reached out to the Oakland City Council expressing concerns that 44% of our general purpose fund budget goes towards policing. And that's much more than cities of comparable size. For example, Atlanta spends 30% of their budget on policing. Baltimore 26%, Detroit 30%, Nashville 21%. And so that amount of funding compared to just 2.4% towards Parks and Rec, 2.3 towards human service, and even less to other services that meet the important basic needs of our community, that's a huge disparity. And so the calls to divest and policing and invest in community recognize that BIPOC communities have been historically overpoliced and under-resourced. And it's really focused on, this movement is really focused on investments in those root causes of poverty and violence. And study after study shows that a living wage, access to holistic health services and treatment, educational opportunities, stable housing, investments in these things are far more successful in reducing crime than incarceration. And that's really what I understand this movement to be about as I've been a part of this Oakland community for over two decades, and a part of working towards making sure that our communities have the basics in order to not just survive, but to thrive. And so here in Oakland, and I certainly appreciated hearing from Commissioner Outlaw knowing her history here in the city, we've heard over and over from police officers themselves say that we can't arrest ourselves out of the problems. And over the two years I've been in office, I've been able to do ride-alongs with OPD in my district. One of the beats in my district, 19X, which includes the San Antonio neighborhood, is one of the top three beats with violent crime. And so I've done ride-alongs and I've witnessed operations on human trafficking, targeting johns. I've been at the scene of illegal gambling where guns and drugs have been confiscated. I've seen drug dealing in our parks and on our streets. And these are the types of things that OPD is working on and should be working on. And at the same time, there are numerous calls for service about mental health issues, about homelessness, about neighborhood disputes, about quality of life issues, and other nonviolent and non-crime issues. And to address those nonviolent and non-crime issues, our residents need alternative responses, crisis responders, mediators who are trusted by the community. And that's one focus of this re-imagining task force in Oakland as well as this broader movement. And then to address the root causes of violent and serious crime, our residents need mental health and health services as many cities are talking about, youth programs, safe and stable housing, and real job opportunities. And so in Oakland, we've been working to address this larger call to reimagine public safety by being very intentional about what that can look like here in Oakland. In July, our city council formed a task force to reimagine public safety. And again, that's recognizing that the status quo is not keeping all of us safe. And so there are 17 members of this task force who are charged with making recommendations to council for our two-year budget. And there are three goals or guiding principles that the task force has. The first is to increase safety. Again, knowing that safety is not delivered equitably in our city and our 2018 equity indicators report showed that with an average score of 13 out of 100 in terms of public safety. Secondly, to create alternative responses to non-criminal, nonviolent calls for service. And then thirdly, to invest in the root causes of violence and poverty. And the goal of the task force in response to the local and the national movement is to reduce our general purpose fund budget for policing by 50% or $150 million. And as you can imagine, this has not been an easy process and that's largely because a lot of this work, whether it's in Oakland or other cities like Philadelphia, it's really happening for the first time in terms of really moving towards a broader reimagining, a broader dialogue about transforming our public safety system. So in Oakland since September, we've had 17 volunteer task force members together with literally hundreds of volunteers participating in five advisory boards. Doing incredible research, asking hard questions and really digging into how we're currently spending our police resources and how we could shift those investments from enforcement and punishment to prevention and wellness. And that work has also been supported by incredible community engagement. And I think one of the important things about this process is that it's, it's a thoughtful and transparent public process. You know, these decisions are made with a recognition that there's violence and trauma that exists and that has been exacerbated in our communities of color. We're seeing that through increases in shootings and homicides during this pandemic. And this task force is also rooted in data and research along with deep listening in terms of the needs and the ideas of our BIPOC communities. So again, we've been in this process officially since the end of September. And just last week, the advisory boards delivered 114 draft recommendations out into the broader community for feedback and engagement. And there's a lot to dig into regarding these recommendations. I'll highlight just a few of them. There's a set of recommendations that are about reducing BIPOC communities contact with policing, knowing that often that can lead to harm, if not, if not worse. So there are a set of recommendations that point to civilianization of traditional policing. So one recommendation, for example, calls for moving most traffic enforcement to our Department of Transportation. And as many of you know, our stop data indicates racial disparities in how traffic stops are done. So that's a really important issue in terms of more accountability and more equity in our communities. Another recommendation that points towards taking positions out of the police department and putting them into non-police departments is moving internal affairs to our community police review agency. A lot of us feel like that would create less duplication as well as more accountability, more independence. There's a set of recommendations that pertain to alternatives, alternative responses, again, to nonviolent, non-criminal issues. Mental health has been something that we have been very interested in doing here in Oakland, like many other cities, and we are on the verge of moving forward more concretely to develop that program. There's also a recommendation for community safety ambassadors. This has been getting a little bit more attention given some of the violence that has been witnessed in Chinatown, for example. And these, you know, these, again, are programs that have existed in the Laurel District, for example. There is an ambassador program that has existed that was co-founded by the Community Ready Corps, which is a Black-led organization that does training and de-escalation and other types of safety techniques. There's a downtown ambassadors program that's related to that business improvement district. And in Chinatown, there's been a program since 2017 that includes members of our Chinatown community who are formerly incarcerated, who build relationships with the merchants, the neighbors, escorting seniors to their appointments, providing eyes and ears, services to our unhoused residents, help with graffiti or trash. So these are important ways that we can take what we typically call 911 for and find alternatives that are more appropriate. And then finally, there's a set of recommendations around investments in the root causes of crime and poverty. Those include things like restorative justice, really continuing to push for focusing on young people, focusing on reducing the school to prison pipeline and preventing recidivism. There's also more investments that are being called for around homelessness. So there's a set of recommendations that I really encourage people to look into. And the timeline for us moving forward with the task force is that we'll be having our final community listening session on March 9th at 6pm. There'll be two task force meetings, March 10th and 17th, where the task force will be reviewing and then approving recommendations that will ultimately go to council April 1st for consideration by our public safety committee and then the city council. And then of course by May 1st, May 1st the mayor will produce her budget. And so I do hope that she will also take into consideration these recommendations. And then from there, I'll be leading the process for the council's budget and we'll have to approve our budget by the end of June. So we're now at the point where there's concrete recommendations on the table, and we're going to be taking into consideration the process of transforming Oakland's public safety system and really getting at some of the root causes of violence and poverty here in Oakland. And I do hope that through this process we'll be able, as Oakland often does, to be on the leading edge of protecting our communities and creating more solutions that are community-led and community-driven. Thank you. Great, thank you so much. Our next panelist is Jack Glazer. He's a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy. As the author of suspect race causes and consequences of racial profiling, you literally wrote the book on police bias. He's currently the research advisor on the governor's working group on statewide reform of police use of force policy. And he's a consultant to the AG's office on the analysis of police stop data. He's also an expert for the plaintiffs in the New York stop and frisk case. He's on the board of directors of the center for policing equity and on the board of ABLE, which was mentioned by commissioner outlaw. Professor Glazer. Thank you, Professor Lindheim. And thank you for your time. Thank you, Professor Lindheim. And thank you for including me in this conversation. And I'm going to try to keep my comments brief, because I'm really looking forward to the discussion. And I just want to make a couple of points that I think I can express with a reasonable degree of confidence based on 20 years of research in this area. And that I think are particularly relevant. One comment is simply that racial and ethnic bias in policing is real. It appears in decisions about who gets surveilled and stopped and questioned and searched. And used force against and arrested, et cetera. And, you know, that's not an indictment of policing in particular. It's part of the human condition. Bias is widespread. But police have a particular responsibility and they have unusual authority and power. And they literally have the power to take, take human life. And so it's especially important in that domain. But, but we shouldn't be under the illusion that there aren't racial disparities that are caused by bias in policing. But another clear and important insight is that policing is extremely hard. And it takes a tremendous emotional toll on officers. And on their families and their relationships. And so we need to bear in mind the costs that officers bear. For having to do this extremely difficult job in its, and it's an often relatively thankless job as well. Turning to the notion of defunding policing and reimagining policing. I don't have any easy answers there. But I think, you know, one thing to bear in mind is what are the things that officers do on a daily basis? And much of what they do is responding to calls for service. And so the discussion around how to reimagine responses to 911 calls and calls for service is, is well, is well conceived. And there's going to have to be a lot of work. And we heard from commissioner outlaw that they're doing this work in, in Philadelphia. And they've been doing this work for a very long time in Portland. And, and different cities are, are trying things, but it, it will take time and probably years to figure out how to effectively reallocate and redesign the 911 call 911 reporting system so that non armed non police responses can be made. Another part of what police officers do is what's called proactive policing. And it's, it takes up less of their time depending on the city than, than responding to calls, but it takes up a substantial amount of their time. And in some cities it takes up quite a bit. And by that I mean the discretionary stops, mostly vehicle stops, but sometimes pedestrian stops like, like stop and frisk in New York city, where police are using their discretion to make stops of an investigatory nature. And the overwhelming majority of which statistically turned out to be fruitless. And they also end up being racially disproportionate. And one particularly compelling piece of evidence for the racial bias, racial and ethnic bias that I referenced earlier is that looking across many jurisdictions and now with data statewide data from California, it's clear that whites who are searched by police are quickly more likely to yield contraband weapons than blacks and Latinos who are searched by police suggesting strongly that they are subjected to a higher threshold of suspiciousness in order to get stopped and searched in the first place. And one of the recent findings from the California wide data from the racial and identity profiling act is that that's driven almost completely by relatively high discretion stops like consent searches, high discretion searches. And so it's these discretionary behaviors, this proactive policing where a lot of the bias finds a foothold and causes disparities. And so that's in a way good news for reimagining policing because a lot of that, those kinds of activities are not particularly fruitful. And a lot of it can be eliminated. And in cities like New York, which used to stop almost 700,000 pedestrians a year for the first purposes and is down to under 20,000 a year and does not see a corresponding increase in crime. It shows that police departments can operate that way without those kinds of activities. So there's a lot of opportunity for reallocating police time and resources. One thing that I worry about though, is that if a lot of police community contact is altered so that it's increasingly, a greater proportion of it is increasingly crime related and investigation related as opposed to the kinds of things that end up where police are helping people, that this could actually have an unattended consequence of hardening police officers and making their job, having even greater emotional toll. So that I think is something that reformers need to bear in mind. And I think that a fairly straightforward answer to that is to build in positive community oriented policing activities for police, which is something they should be doing anyway, and that every department will tell you they are doing, but rarely is theoretically coherent in the sense that it could be driven, for example, by the psychological research on intergroup contact, which is a very robust literature that shows that putting people into positive contact with each other tends to reduce biases and promote trust. So that's something that I think some of the reallocating of police resources could be done within departments to make their jobs more positive so that we don't see that kind of emotional hardening that I worry about. And I will leave my comments at that and look forward to the discussion. Thank you. So let me just pursue a little bit. We haven't really talked about use of force. This has been an issue for decades, for centuries, the completely inappropriate use of force on African-Americans. And it's been major news obviously in the last years. Who should make use of force rules until recently, police drafted their own rules and everybody sort of said, okay, given this importance, shouldn't this be policy at the local level? Shouldn't it be debated by the governing body, the city council? What are your respective thoughts on this? Nikki, you want to start? I'm sorry, council member Bass. Sure, I can start and definitely appreciate Professor Glazer's remarks as well as your thoughts on this too, given your many years of studying this issue. You know, in Oakland, we have a police commission. You know, we just passed a ballot measure in November to bolster the police commission through an independent inspector general. So we are continuing to work to improve the capacity and the ability of the police commission to do its oversight job. So I think for Oakland, that's where we would go first. Recognizing, you know, what's been moving forward at the state level, and trying to adapt to Oakland's particular context, we would go to our police commission first, and they would forward a policy recommendation to the council. And of course, I believe use of force is one of the five outstanding issues that we need to resolve in the negotiated settlement agreement. So it provides a little bit more complication for Oakland and certainly for myself, I really look to the expertise, not only among our city staff, but also out in the community because I know there's such a wealth of people with lived experience as well as academic experience that can help inform us. Mr. Glazer. Yeah, I'll add that it's important to bear in mind that policing in America is highly decentralized and that it is overwhelmingly locally regulated to the extent that it's federally regulated, it's primarily just based on Supreme Court precedent about what what officers can do and what will cause search results to be excluded as evidence and things like that. In California, we're starting to see movement in terms of the state regulating policing more, more aggressively. We have AB 392 and SB 230 that are changing the law on use of force and on use of lethal force in particular. But there's still a regulatory vacuum, which is often the case when there's new legislation, which is, you know, how is that going to be implemented? And that question remains to be answered for the most part. And so use of force is something that is remarkably variable in terms of the rules for police. It's remarkably variable from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. And there's a lot of room for improvement in that regard. And I am encouraged to see California legislature and the governor starting to actually change things there. But another dimension of this is that when officers are trained on things like use of force, but also stop and search, they are typically trained to the legal standard, which is overwhelmingly governed by Supreme Court precedent. And so often it's a matter of training to what you can do and what will be legal. But that raises the concern about what's, as police will say, lawful but awful. And the regulations don't always handle the awful so well. They handle the lawful better. But can a community basically determine what its own rules are? They can't do that from a legal perspective in the sense of you can't be prosecuted for violating those rules if there are Supreme Court precedents. But isn't it really up to a community rather than, let's say, a police department to determine, you know, what are acceptable rules for engagement in a city? And I know that there was a lot of effort in Oakland to try to get police to understand that they shouldn't put themselves in situations where they were going to have to use force and that people did this last frame analysis in which possibly in the last frame, the use of force might have been justified. But if police didn't put themselves in that kind of position that you never be in that position. So isn't that something that a city itself can really address? Either of you. I'll just quickly say that I, you know, that's been a difficult task for cities to do. Part of it is a political challenge that police unions wield a lot of political power and they push back hard against, against these kinds of things. And, and, and then the Supreme Court, again, precedent on qualified immunity and, and on the final frame analysis tends to carry the day. Although there's very recent Supreme Court ruling that suggests some movement on qualified immunity. So, so there's, it's, it's, it's a strange issue. I mean, you would think that local governments would be able to regulate this more effectively, but it ends up being challenging. And I would, I would be very curious to hear what council member Bass thinks about that. Yeah, I would just add that one of the challenges is how, how we go from policy to training to what happens out on the street. So we had, we had a recent example on the city council where you know, we wanted to, you know, actualize a policy on preventing the use of chokeholds, carotid chokeholds. And that really boiled down to, you know, two sets of recommendations from our police commission and from OPD around how the training would happen. And we had to really work to reconcile that. So these are incredibly complex issues. And, you know, getting involved as a council member in understanding how to make good decisions, you know, it's really illuminating to see that, you know, some of these decisions get down to, how are we going to train on this, you know, where can, where can an officer actually place their shin? So it's incredibly complex. And, you know, that's also partly why I think this reimagining work is trying to really focus on how do we meet people's basic needs and prevent crime so that there's less opportunity for these types of interactions and less opportunity for, for crime. So, you know, I'll just stop there. Let me, we've got a bunch of questions from the audience. Let me pose one commissioner outlaw had mentioned about the poll results indicating that African-Americans were less interested in the defund and the loss of police officers. Somebody is posing the question that the five black members on Oakland's reimagining board were particularly concerned about the uptick in crime and violence in flat land and communities of color and actually said that this was not the appropriate time to defund the police. How do you frame that issue? How do you talk about that issue? So we had our last task force meeting on Wednesday. And for that particular meeting, we had some report backs on the community engagement that we've been doing. And specifically, there were report backs on surveys that were done by urban peace movement as well as with the young women's freedom center. And both of those surveys were deeply engaging the black community in particular folks who have been involved in the criminal legal system or are more high risk of being involved in the criminal legal system. And I think that's really instructive. And those results should be on our website. If they're not already on there, they will be soon. It's oaklandca.gov slash reimagined safety. When we have engaged people who have been personally impacted by violent crime or in the criminal criminal legal system, we get a different response, which is about reducing the potentially harmful interactions between the community and policing and also investing in, you know, again, some of the basic things that might cause people to get involved in criminal issues, you know, quality education, good jobs, stable housing. So I think there's a very important voice of the impacted community that also needs to be broadly heard as well as, you know, as we look at these recommendations, you know, looking at how we spend officers time more effectively. I think there's a lot to be said when we analyze calls for service data, when we analyze how patrols are deployed and how to best utilize the expertise of sworn officers to really get at violent crime versus being diverted to the many, many things that police have been called to do over many decades of dismantling our social safety net. I mean, now we call 911 for everything, but we could very well be calling a different number for mental health and other types of things. And so, you know, I think as we look at these recommendations and we really understand how police are using their time, there's more that could be done to focus those resources on responding to violent crime, investigating violent crime and really conducting that intelligent policing that we were talking about before we went live so that we're really getting to the source of the problems. We have another question that how do we change the organizational culture of police departments to better serve communities of color? Either of you have thoughts on that? A really hard question. I mean, it's a good question. It's a really hard problem. And policing experts will tell you that culture trumps policy every day of the week. And that the cultures which are inculcated over many decades are very hard to change. And that is that it remains a big part of the problem. And it takes time, but it has to be, it takes leadership and it takes time and it takes concerted effort. And I think, but I think that's whoever asked that question has put their finger on something crucially important because as council member Bass pointed out, you can change the policies, but there's this path from policy to training to accountability to street level behavior. And it's not a direct path. There's a lot of disturbance in the middle. So that's a crucial question. There are no easy answers for that. I'll say in knowing that we're almost at time, leadership is really important. So, you know, we've had so many police chiefs, police chiefs rather in the past couple of decades, three police chiefs over my two year tenure as a council member. So leadership both at the chief of police level for Oakland, as well as at the mayoral level, because the chief reports to the mayor, the leadership that comes at that level, the mayor and our police chief is so important to really start to shift the culture. And it really is, as professor Glaser said, it's very embedded. It's very important to really take a lot of effort and commitment as well as time. Well, we're at time. I'd like to thank all of the panelists. Council President Bass, Professor Glaser and commissioner outlaw for their comments. This is a conversation that's just beginning. It's going to be continual and probably the most important thing is the involvement of all of the stakeholder members in this conversation. And it's going to be really important to really take into account the various decisions. People can say, we want to do this or we want to do that. But unless there's really community buy-in, it's really not going to take place and it's not going to be well received. So again, I would like to thank everybody for their involvement in this. And I'd like to thank our sponsors for this event. And see you at the next event. Thank you.


Education. You have named education as a leading cause in the decline of the U.S. What is the best way to change it? About 20% of voters voted for this question. And stumped to private education. I'm not sure what that means. So what is the best way to change it? So I think the best way to change it is to privatize it. So what is the most realistic way to change it? What is the way to get education to be privatized? And I think I've covered this in past shows, but might as well cover it again. So first I think what you need is a private education market. I think you need competition in education. I think you need the profit motive in education. I think what you create when you have the profit motive in education is you get competing schools, you get parents choosing based on their preferences, based on their research, you get marketing and advertising. And then schools having to excel in order to justify the marketing and advertising costs and therefore getting good teachers and therefore digging and making sure that they have the best curriculum. One of the shocking things we covered yesterday on the show with Amy was the fact that in spite of the fact that every scientific study shows that phonics is the best way to teach reading. Many American schools still use the old sightseeing method that has been proven to be a failure and yet they keep using it. So no, you need to get rid of public education. You need to get rid of one size for all education. You need a variety of schools. You need competition. You need entrepreneurs to experiment and try different things and try to create the best kind of environment possible for students to study and for different types of students to study differently. So I would say absolutely privatize all of them, all of them, not no public schools. I don't believe in charters. I don't believe in vouchers. I don't believe in anything other than private schools because then, well, morally, it's wrong to take from people who don't want to send their kids to a particular high school and force them to send their kids to a particular high school and force them to support the public schools. I mean, the whole public school system is based on coercion. Government is coercion. So by having government schools, you're having schools in which there is coercion. So the whole course of system and education needs to be eliminated. Now, how do you get from here to there? I think the best innovation with regard to this is something called the Education Saving Accounts. These are accounts that the state puts the money in account that they would have spent on a public education education. So let's say a kid costs in the city of Chicago $15,000 to educate in one day. This is the inner city of Chicago, the worst place on the planet. So what Chicago does, it takes $15,000 a year and it puts it into a bank account for the parent. The parent can now take that money and they can use it to pay for private school. They can use it to homeschool. They can use it to do education on the web. They can use it for anything educational related. If they send their kid to the archdiocese across the street and it only costs $7,500, they get to keep $7,500, roll it over into the next year, and ultimately roll it into a college fund that they can use in order to pay for college. Now private educators would realize that our parents have all this money. Entrepreneurs would come to Chicago and they would bid for their money. They would open schools and try to attract parents. They would engage in marketing and advertising and they would compete on the best product available for parents to choose from. So it's basically how everything under capitalism works. It improves over time and the cost goes down, which is what would happen in education. Now it's not pure capitalism because you're still having the state fund it, but the funding does not go to the school and the funding does not involve control over the school. The funding goes to the parent to do with the money as you see fit. Now there's still an immorality here because the money is redistributed, right? So money taken from some parents and given to other parents. But I'm willing to do that for a while, right? So I would say for 10 years, for 10 years we would have this system. During those 10 years entrepreneurs would encourage to start their own schools and to slowly replace all the public schools through competition. In 10 years what would happen is the amount given to each parent for educational purposes would decline by let's say $1,000 a year until it was zero sometime in the future and every state would be a little different. So for 10 years you get the steal or let's say eight years you get the steal. And then after the eight years, two terms of Congress, of the president, I guess it would be 12 years for Senate, four two year terms for Congress, by which time it would be phased out over another, it would depend, $1,000 a year. So every state would phase out at a different point. Make sense? I think so. I think that would be great. Now, so we should be advocating for that. A bill such as this passed Nevada, passed the House, the Senate, and was signed by the governor. It's in the courts because the school teachers, school unions sued. So I don't know how that's going to come out. There's a bastardized version of this that provides these accounts, but only to parents of disabled kids, only to parents of kids with learning disabilities, only certain fraction of students. And that's in Arizona and I think in a number of other states. The original proposal for saving accounts came out of the Goldwater Institute in Arizona. So the way to promote privatizing education is to promote education saving accounts as a first step. And a lot of states have considered this. A lot of states have looked at this. So it is possible at the state level to promote this. At the federal level, the federal government just should get out of education completely 100%. The Department of Education should be closed and that's it. The curriculum would be set by the schools and the best curriculum would win through competition. All right.