So we hear the ID Tech Act show and hi, so who are you? My name is Dean Taylor and I represent the Metallograph Thermal Transfer Ribbon Technology for Printed Electronics manufactured by EMAC of Amherst, New York. We have a range of materials for this. We use thermal transfer because it's easy, it's economical, it's fast and functional. So right here on the plastic? Yes, here we have an example of a radiant heater which is manufactured in with a thermal transfer printer that's produced at 25 millimeters a second and it's rated for 200 volts. It's been tested at 400 volts so this is around 4,000 ohm resistance and it's utilized in scientific equipment. So this is a this is a typical example of our larger format materials. We also have a second family of machines and we have and this is an example of one which is out we are introducing here today. Today is the debut of this printer. It is a single pass multi-layer roll-to-roll printer. We don't have the wind-up roll on it you'll notice but it runs continuously. It can print at 25 or 50 millimeters a second and we can have it run shortly but the goal with this one is that it can we print multiple layers so we can put down a base conductive circuit follow that with a and if it has gaps and we can put an insulator down and then go over the insulator for conduct to have bridges and we have this showing on the product that's coming out now you will notice on this one it is a oh okay that's the wrong one okay this is a an NFC tag so that is an example where we have to have a loop bridge across a loop. We have other ones such as this where we have and this is the basis for a switch with LEDs it's a demonstration so where my finger is is where the where a battery is connected and and on this one then so for the three separate circuits it's necessary for conductives to cross and this machine be by doing it in single pass makes it very easy to do that opens up a whole new field so i'm going to turn it over to a representative from the printer manufacturer and move on from here. So maybe you can clip it right up there yeah so hi so hi who are you hi how are you i'm kevin bresson a product manager from quick label systems division of astro nova incorporated what what is astro nova astro nova is a specialty printing systems manufacturer we manufacture printing devices for pressure sensitive labels as well as specialty printers for the aerospace industry you print in space we actually print in the cockpit of most aircraft so commercial airplanes will have in their cockpit one of our printers to print out various types of information that a pilot might need to pilot a plane and it prints on paper yes prints on paper directly on some paper and here some what is this those quick label quick label devices right here so these printers are used for printing labels that would be applied to any type of product so we enable manufacturers to customize their products do custom branding for a variety of different industries ranging from food and beverage to the chemical industry pharmaceutical medical devices and here says metallograph printed electronics so this at the show you're doing all about talking about the printed electronic stuff yes so with our qls 4100 xc printer this is a very well-established technology that we've had since the early 1990s we have a forestation thermal transfer process and we're printing conductive materials as well as dielectric isolating material and thereby we're able to create these multi-layer circuit since the 90s so more than 20 years of this stuff yes the company has been in existence for 50 years now and what's next what's the future really going to be all about well we're hoping to enter into this circuit printing market with with this device along with the metallographic ribbons all right this can print a whole a whole lot or it's just this is a small machine or do you have bigger ones no this is the only machine for this application but it's designed for printing short runs variable you know artwork or it can be used for high-volume production as well so it covers really a wide range of applications


All right, Glen Clark with Sarah Tarbert. Tough one for the Mustangs tonight, falling 61-55 to Albright. Sarah, good game for you, 21 points, 13 rebounds. I guess if you could get it every time, you'd be happy to take it, wouldn't you? Yeah, I mean, but obviously, teams are crashing in. And so I think it's important that we hit our outside shots to try to open the pane up. We got kind of a slow start again tonight. And we fought back, but unfortunately, we weren't able to hold on to that lead.  And it seemed like it was just a struggle to get over the hump a little bit. For a little while, you were right there. You're trailing by one. But it just seemed like nobody was really able to get that basket to get things going the other way. Yeah, I think we got a lot of momentum. And we took the lead. But then, you know, got to give it to Albright. They came down and hit big three-pointers when they needed them. So they definitely got the momentum shift they needed at the very end of the game. And we just weren't able to convert. Sarah, as a senior and a leader for this team, you lose the opener in conference play. Now you got to go on the road for a couple of tough games. What's your message to your teammates about what's ahead? I don't think we can really get down on this game. Like you said, it is the first conference game. Albright is always a very good competitor. It's always close games. So I think this is good to see that what kind of competition we'll have for the rest of the conference. And it'll keep us modest. So hopefully, we can take this and learn from it. Sarah, best of luck moving forward. Thanks for taking the time. Thank you. She's Sarah Tarbert. I'm Glenn Clark. This is Go Mustang Sports dot com.


Salam, you're watching the International Daily Roundup. People's dispatch is selection of some of the top stories from around the world. Let's first take a look at today's headlines. Yemen's Houthis declare a three-day ceasefire. South Africa's Abalali-based Mujandolo movement faces rising violence. Uruguay holds a referendum on its omnibus law. And grossly workers in the United States authorize a strike. The Houthis have declared a three-day ceasefire, as the war in Yemen enters its eighth year. The announcement came on the 26th of March, a day after a series of drone and missile attacks in Saudi Arabia. Houthi leader Mahdi Al-Mahsad stated that it was a sincere invitation and practical steps to rebuild trust. He added that the Houthis were ready to turn the declaration into a final and permanent commitment towards peace. This would depend on an end to the siege and raids by the Saudi-led military coalition. Just hours after the Houthis' announcement, though, the coalition carried out airstrikes on both Sana'a and Hudidah. At least seven people were killed. March 26 marked seven years since the U.S. and U.K.-backed Saudi-led forces invaded Yemen to support the Hadi government. Thousands of Yemenis held protests on Saturday to mark the national day of steadfastness. The war in Yemen has been described as the worst humanitarian disaster in the world. The U.N. has estimated that over 375,000 people have been killed by the end of 2021. This includes those killed directly, as well as hundreds of thousands killed due to the Saudi blockade. The coalition has recently escalated its attacks, reportedly launching as many as 700 airstrikes in Feb alone. Since 2015, the Yemen data project has documented over 25,000 airstrikes with almost 75,000 individual strikes. Over 9,000 civilians have been killed in these bombings. Casualties in air wars, more than tripled every month after the United Nations' war crimes investigation, was shut down in 2021. In South Africa, the militant Shackdweller's movement, or Abalali-based Mujandolo, has been condemning growing repression by the state. Earlier this month, heavily armed and masked police conducted a night raid on the Nkarnini occupation. Three members were arrested and several people were beaten up. Among them was women's league secretary Thandeka Sithunsa. When her husband Sibonga Mankele rushed to their home when she was being arrested, he was shot dead. Other residents who came out to protest the violence were attacked with tear gas and stun grenades. The occupation's members have built over 3,000 Shacks to house the urban poor. A hundred ABM members were stopped and searched on their way back from Sibonga's funeral. Three more members were arrested and all six have now been charged with murder. The latest round of violence follows the killing of ABM leader Ayanda Angela on March 8. Eye witnesses stated that gunmen led by the son of an African National Congress chief were behind the attack. Abalali-based Mujandolo has been organising the urban poor to sustain themselves independently of the state since as far back as 2005. 21 leaders of the movement have been killed by police or hitmen allegedly at the behest of the ANC. Others have been imprisoned on bogus charges and detained for extensive periods. Scores have been injured during armed demolition rives by the police and the anti-land invasion unit. These escalated during the pandemic, despite there being a moratorium on evictions. Uruguay held a referendum on the 27th of March to determine the fate of the Law of Urgent Consideration or LUC. The omnibus legislation proposed by the right-wing president, Luis La Calpo, was passed in 2020. It was condemned as unconstitutional, anti-people, and repressive by the left-wing broad front. The new liberal law contains 476 articles impacting sectors including health, education, and the economy. The law was one of Pakal's central campaign priorities. Its induction was met with mass protests in opposition by various social sectors and unions. These groups convened the National Commission, for yes, to push for the repeal of 135 articles contained in the omnibus legislation. The campaign gathered over 750,000 signatures in 2021. It finally resulted in the public consultation held just this Sunday. With all votes counted, the yes campaign secured 1,065,000 votes. However, there is no option won by a margin of just 22,000 votes. The National Commission for Yes stated later that while the results were not favourable, the referendum was a fundamentally democratic day. The LUC expanded police powers, including the use of force and created the crime of resistance. It also established a spending ceiling for state institutions. LUC included restrictions on workers' rights, including the right to strike. It eliminated compulsory initial education, promoted budget cuts in the public sector, and privatisation of public companies. And finally, grocery workers in the United States and the state of California have authorised a strike. As many as 47,000 workers at chain stores including RALFs, VONS, Albertsons and Pavilion cast their ballots last week. The results were announced on the 27th with 97% voting in favour. However, a date for the walkout has not yet been announced with contact negotiations set to resume this week. The potential strike action will involve meat cutters, clerks, pharmacists and technicians. The workers are members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. A three-year contract covering workers at 540 stores expired on the 6th of this month. Contract negotiations had been ongoing since January, but no deal was reached with the parent companies Kroger and Albertson. The union has stated that the proposed wage deal offers an increase of only $0.60 an hour for the next three years each. This falls far short of the $5 hourly increase demanded by the workers at the end of the contract. The companies have also refused to expand safety committees and offer proper health and welfare benefits. Other demands raised included higher minimum hours for part-timers. According to the LA Times, companies have moved more than two-thirds of their workforce to part-time status. The authorisation vote for a limited strike took place on the charge of unfair labour practices. The union has filed a complaint with the National Labour Relations Board citing intimidation as well as illegal influence on workers.


What I'm honestly what I try to achieve is to help our airmen see their ideas through Cuz I mean we've all been there Especially when we try to make things better and we've run into roadblocks, you know, or we haven't had the full solution, right? Some of the most successful refinery projects have come through like any our ops tempo in our fighter squadrons drives a lot of that and I think that pressure to be successful and Kind of having a no-fail mission with what we do for you safety and our NATO partners drives a lot of our airmen to Want to make their jobs better and make their lives easier so they can do more a Lot of airmen just see their immediate problem at their immediate base and their immediate unit and They focus there. That's their that's their focus and that's great because it's making their and our peers lives better But what can I do for the enterprise? What can I do for all the f-35 maintainers or all the f-35 pilots or all the firefighters? Or what have you out there? So I think that that's the big thing that the refinery brings is showing airmen the bigger picture and not just the tactical level, but the strategic level picture, you know and helping them navigate that so we We're trying to tackle a problem head-on that we'd kicked off the 22nd We miss switch and that's a weapons management switch sitting on top of the throttle here at Lake Neath and locally Without that switch you're you're making it extremely difficult for a pilot to do his job up there I started developing something that addressed all the pain points of a previous attempt at making a cover to protect the switch when Pilots and maintainers are getting in and out of the aircraft. I think I went through eight prototypes before I brought it out The refinery has been awesome for that working They've been awesome for getting us in front of the stakeholders for figuring out who we can talk to and connecting us with everyone That's relevant for the project that we're doing and essentially that's what's got us all the way here Now I have covers inside of every single f-35 on the ramp out there and we have the scope of bringing this enterprise wide


Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you guys are really excited about this panel. I certainly am. I'm Michael Barr. I'm the John and Sanford Wildein here at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. I am thrilled to welcome you all here for this special event. 911, What's Your Prejudice? Racial Bias and Call-Driven Policing. We've seen a national outcry over incidents in which police have been called to intervene in situations where people of color are actually just going about daily life. Sitting in a Starbucks, going to the pool, or as happens routinely on college campuses and here at the Ford School, just falling asleep in the common room. These moments that receive national attention represent a tiny fraction of the many calls that 911 centers receive every day. And these calls often result in police presence that could escalate a situation and cause enormous, enormous harm. These issues affect members of our own community, and they raise very broad issues of public policy. And that's why I'm just thrilled that we have our panel here to get today. The panel was conceived by our own PhD student, Jessica Gululi, who will address institutional structures behind call-driven policing and discuss alternatives to the current system. We're thrilled to welcome Sheriff Jerry Clayton and NYU Law Professor Barry Friedman to the Ford School as they join Jessica for this important conversation. Our moderator, my colleague David Thatcher, will introduce our panelists in more detail and will moderate what will surely be an interesting and provocative conversation. Let me just say a little bit about format. We're going to have some time towards the end for questions from the audience. Please fill out your question cards and our team will pick them up from you. For those of you watching online today, please tweet your questions using the hashtag policy talks. Ford School Professor Luke Schaefer and two Ford School students, Andrea Matai and Thong Phan, will sift through your question cards and pose them to the panel. Again, welcome to the Ford School, welcome to the University of Michigan, and now let me turn the podium over to David. Thank you. Do I have this right? Okay, thank you, Dean Barr, and thank you everybody for coming, and thanks especially to the awesome communication staff for putting the logistics of this panel together. So we've been struggling with the problem of race and policing in this country throughout our history, and the debate about that problem and the demands for change have been especially visible over the last five years or so. And that debate and those demands over the last five years have mostly focused on the choices that police themselves make about how and when to use their authority, the choices that police officers make about when to stop and frisk people on the street, when to raid their houses, when to put someone's name in a gang database, when to even when to shoot them. Obviously those are incredibly important questions, but they're not the only questions that we need to be asking if we want to understand and reduce the problem of racial disparities in policing. Most policing in this country and most places is reactive. Most police departments spend a lion's share of their time responding to 911 calls rather than making their own independent decisions about when to intervene. And what we're finding is that people call 911 for all sorts of crazy reasons. The moment that made that really vivid to a lot of people came last year and the incident Dean Barr already alluded to when a Starbucks manager called the police on two black men who were waiting in a coffee shop for a business partner. The police who made that arrest weren't entirely blameless and the police chief ended up apologizing for what they did. But the prime mover behind those arrests was a private individual. It was the manager of that Starbucks who called the police in the first place and then insisted that those two men were trespassers. That kind of thing happens all the time. We've seen a black university professor arrested when he was trying to get into his own apartment because a neighbor thought he looked suspicious and called the police to report a possible burglary in process. We've seen two Native American teenagers pulled off of a campus tour at Colorado State University because a woman called the campus police saying that they made her nervous. And we've seen an African-American man who runs a youth mentoring program for kids in Marietta, Georgia who was questioned by the police because a woman thought it was suspicious to see a black man with two white kids. So she called 911. This isn't a new problem, but since the Starbucks arrest we finally started to notice it and to talk about it and to think about what needs to be done about it. What should we do about the demands on police to check up on suspicious people or people who make them nervous when it turns out that the reason the caller considered those people suspicious or scary was that they were African-American or Native American or wore a headscarf. We set up the 911 system to make the police accessible to the public and that's a really important goal. But then we find that some non-trivial share of 911 calls are unfounded and possibly the product of racial bias and racial animus. What should we do about that? The question that our panelists are going to be talking about today they're each going to begin with about 10 minutes or so each offering their own thoughts on that issue that I have a question or two to pose to them and then finally we'll open it up to questions from the audience as Dean Barr mentioned fill out those question cards that were distributed and hand them to a staff person or tweet them at policy talks, hashtag policy talks. So let's get started. I'm not going to do a lot of introductions. The bios of our presenters are available in your program. Sheriff Clayton from the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office is to my left. In the middle we have Barry Friedman, Professor of Law at New York University and Director of the Policing Project.  She herself has already become one of the country's leading experts on this topic with this remarkably interesting work that she's done this two year long ethnography that she's done of a major call center. Her work has really changed the way I think about this issue and so she's going to start us off by offering her analysis of the Starbucks problem and what we should be doing about it. Jessica. Thank you for the introduction David and Dean Barr and thank you to my fellow panelists for being here to discuss racial bias in college urban policing. Calling 9-1-1 is the public's most common form of interaction with law enforcement. Over 240 million calls are made to 9-1-1 in the U.S. each year. These calls frequently lead to police citizen encounters. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2011 of the estimated 62.9 million U.S. residents who had one or more contacts with the police over half of those contacts were because a caller requested police services. Request however come from callers who have their own biases about people and places. As we have seen recently in the news and David just mentioned these calls can lead to excessive unjustified and racially motivated police citizen contacts. Despite the role of the 9-1-1 system in shaping much of police work it's often left out of conversations about policing. Lately though after incidents like the 9-1-1 call from a Philadelphia Starbucks about two black men not making a purchase which led to their arrest it has become clear that the caller can play a role in the problem. But the role that the 9-1-1 operator plays in handling such calls is still largely overlooked by the public and policymakers alike. This afternoon I'm going to tell you about my experience working as a 9-1-1 call taker and the role that I think dispatch could play in reducing racially motivated police encounters. It may not be surprising that dispatch is often overlooked in discussions about policing. 9-1-1 operators do not visibly interact with the public the way the police do and the places they work are often intentionally unmarked. I remember the difficulty I had locating the 9-1-1 center when I was applying to work as a call taker. There are no signs on the doors, no businesses listed in Google Maps for the address I was given nor any mention of the location on the local police websites. Only once I walked onto the floor of Metro Dispatch in Washtenaw County did the voices behind 9-1-1 take shape. Inside Metro Dispatch between 6 and 8 9-1-1 operators work 8, 12, and sometimes 16-hour shifts. Between 1 and 3 call takers are tasked with answering calls, gathering pertinent information from callers, classifying calls, and entering all of that information into the computer system. The two dispatchers for the county then read that information on their own computers, assign police units, and relay the information over the radio to the responding officers. Metro Dispatch is a consolidated PSAP or public safety answering point, meaning it handles both 9-1-1 and non-emergency calls for over 90% of Washtenaw County, and it dispatches for six separate police agencies, each with their own policies and practices. So this means the center receives on average 1,300 calls per day. So a 9-1-1 operator can be answering a call every two minutes during a typical afternoon shift. I remember frequently having three or four calls on hold and picking up ringing 9-1-1 lines. So this means 9-1-1 call takers have seconds to perform a key job function, make sense of a caller's request, and determine if it merits police attention. Because Dispatch allocates a finite public resource to the police, it requires effective gatekeepers. Gatekeeping is difficult in an environment of uncertainty and confusion, and call takers understandably rely on the motto, when in doubt send them out than being the police. But this practice of indiscriminately sending out the police undermines the core gatekeeping function of the 9-1-1 operator and can be especially troubling when calls appear motivated by prejudice. Many people consider the hardest calls for the 9-1-1 operators as the ones where callers are hysterical, not providing needed information, and the callers in grave physical danger. Handling these calls is not easy. I would feel my heart rate rise, my hands start shaking a little bit, and my breath shorten in these moments. And undoubtedly, they are one of the reasons why emergency dispatching is ranked among the most stressful jobs. But one thing about these calls that is not stressful is that they clearly require a swift law enforcement response. There are no ambiguities about whether to send the police when a person has been shot, stabbed, or mugged. Racially motivated calls with little legitimate rationale, on the other hand, are uniquely stressful because they raise questions about whether police attention is warranted. About a year into working as a 9-1-1 call taker, I took a call on a late fall afternoon from a woman in a park.  When I asked her why she thought the woman was cooking drugs, she responded, quote, I saw her here before and she looked suspicious, and this time she looks more suspicious. That was her only justification for her call to the police. I didn't push back, even though I very much wanted to. Instead, I thanked the caller for the information, entered the call for a dispatch, and nervously waited for the dispatcher to see what I had entered. Moments later, I heard the dispatcher yell at me, Galooly, are you effing kidding me? This incident highlights a couple of things. Tensions arise inside dispatch over low-level calls that appear racially motivated and lack a convincing rationale. Dispatchers have a limited supply of police, and calls like these take resources away from other functions police could be serving. And more experienced dispatchers, who are pretty good at detecting these kinds of calls, get frustrated when new hires fail to do this and fail to question the caller, push back. But 911 operators take on liability if they reject calls that end up being legitimate, so many call takers will put these calls through to dispatch. I almost always did, fearful that if not, I would face disciplinary action. But that meant I often felt complicit in mobilizing the police against people of color. 911 and the police are supposed to provide public safety, but in cases like these, it's not clear that the public is any safer. And incidents like these are not infrequent. In fact, in 2015, in Washtenaw County, across all the agencies, suspicious person calls were the fourth most common call, following reckless drivers, car crashes, and disorderly behavior. Less than 1% of them led to an arrest. That means a lot of police resources are going into seemingly unfounded calls and leading to what seems to be unnecessary encounters with the police. So what can be done about these calls from a dispatch perspective? First, I think 911 operators need clearer protocols on how to handle ambiguous, potentially racially motivated calls. For example, black men walking down the street, trying to open car doors and look through house windows may meet the necessary criteria for a suspicious person call, whereas that same man sitting on a curb would not. Second, call takers need to be trained in pressing callers to articulate their underlying suspicion if they report that someone, quote, doesn't belong here. Many experienced call takers already do this well, and the organization should distribute their knowledge to less experienced call takers. If callers fail to articulate their suspicion on a recorded line, I think operators should record and pass along that information to responding officers or possibly reject the call. Third, 911 public awareness campaigns should align expectations between callers and call takers as to the types of questions callers will face when reporting suspicious activity. With such training and public awareness, I believe 911 operators can be empowered to be more effective gatekeepers for the police and the public. We'll just share a plate next. So good evening. Thanks for having me here.  So Jessica used to work for us, Washington County Metro dispatch. And it was a conversation that, so it was a couple things that occurred, the events that occurred nationally, conversations with her regarding an op-ed, and just our normal way of how we do business in Washington County that led us early on to believe that we have to address a lot of the issues that Jessica talked about. So let me frame Washington County for you. Sheriff's Office is responsible for delivering contract police services throughout the county. We're also responsible for the jail. But one of our primary responsibilities also is Metro dispatch. So for Metro dispatch and Jessica hit it, so I won't belabor it. We dispatch for not only the Sheriff's Office, but Ann Robert Police Department, Pitsville Township, Northville and MSP. And we cover closer to 95% of emergency calls that come into Washington County on an annual basis. So we have a tremendous impact on how dispatch services are delivered throughout the county. And Jessica's right to this degree, dispatch is often the forgotten piece of that first responder. We just did an episode of one of our series where we called dispatch the true first responders. Because they're the ones that get that initial call. And quite frankly, as we thought about bias-based policing and how do we approach it from a Sheriff's Office perspective, we address it with our deputies right away. Now we have identified the fact that we also have to address it with our dispatchers. So let me just give you our action step, our strategy for how an example we think is a model for how a police agency with a dispatch organization can actually address the issues that we're talking about. So let me start with this. We believe in taking what we call an ultimate outcomes approach. So anytime we're thinking about a significant initiative in the Sheriff's Office, we first think, what outcome do we want to achieve? So it's a mission-drive strategy-drive structure. So what we say is, if we do everything that we're supposed to do, if we put all the right mechanisms in place, what will the outcome look like? What will the experience be both for, in this case, our deputy sheriffs, our dispatchers, and the people that are calling into our center? We've articulated what we believe some of those ultimate outcomes. I won't read them all to you, but it's important because this is the foundation for the training we're going to put together. It makes us think about the policy implications associated with that, and it also impacts the supervision techniques and strategies we should put in place to make sure that we're doing the things we need to do and getting the outcomes that we want to get. So I just want to give you one ultimate outcome, and this is in draft form. So Metro Dispatch, so if we do everything right, if we incorporate the training, policy and supervision, Metro Dispatch will manage the suspected bias-influenced calls in a manner that minimizes the impact on the subject of the call, and in extreme cases, they will not dispatch police personnel to calls for service that are clearly the result of a call of bias. So after we do everything, we put everything in place, we think one of the outcomes will be two things. There will be some calls where we won't dispatch, and I'll talk a little bit about what that protocol will look like. The majority of the calls, we will triage and do all that stuff, we will dispatch, but the pieces, and in oftentimes, especially with suspicious persons, police officers oftentimes will arrive to the scene, they don't have to engage the person. You just watch and observe, and if there are behaviors that warrant you engaging them, then you engage. If you have a question about it, you engage, but there's a way to engage. There's a way to engage in a procedurally just way that even the person that gets contacted may be irritated by the fact that they have contact with the police, but the manner in which you engage them, the explanation that you provide for them, and all of those things help to mitigate that. Now, it's still, and I notice for those, so it's still an impact, because as an African-American man, I've been stopped by and contacted by the police, and they've been polite as anything. I'm still irritated by the fact that you called on me to begin with. So we have to strike that balance. So that's just one of the outcomes. So from that ultimate outcome, then we identify what behaviors or decisions do our internal stakeholders, deputies, dispatchers in this instance, what do they have to do to behave in a way to help contribute to those outcomes? And then the last piece is, all right, what knowledge and skills do they need to behave the way we want? And here's the key, folks. We understand the impact of training. So everything that we're talking about starts with making sure our staff have the knowledge and skills to behave the way we want them to behave to get to the kind of outcomes that we want them to get to. And I just, I want to frame it. I got a few more minutes. It's not just a policy. So here are our action steps, and we've already started this. So identify the job classes that are affected by the issues. Our dispatchers are and our call takers. Our deputy sheriffs, because they're responding. And then our operational protocol in situations where a dispatcher feels that it's a bias-influenced call and they're not going to dispatch someone, they're going to reroute that to a patrol supervisor.  So we have to now train the supervisors to do that as well. Identify the job classes and then plan and implement our policy strategy. So what are the policies? We already have a bias-free policing policy. We already have some policies in dispatch. So we have to look at our policies to say, do our policies now cover this new initiative? You know, our responsibility as an administration to provide a direct, do we have to write a new policy? Do we have to modify the existing policy? And it's the same thing with training. So in our dispatchers, here's what we know. We do bias-free training. We've done it for our deputy shares. Now we have to do it for our dispatchers just so they know the role they play in that. We also do implicit and explicit bias. We're actually in the middle of a study because I want to know if the training that we have for our deputy shares right now are actually changing behavior. So I'm not really interested in checking the box. I'm actually interested in changing behavior for the right kind of outcomes. So we're right in the middle of that study. We will take that training to our dispatchers as well. Our deputy shares already get what we call procedural justice training, which is really a framework for how you interact with people from a dignity and equity standpoint. And then the last one, the training that we are developing right now, we just had a meeting today. They're not going to want me to say that. But some of our dispatch leadership is in the back of the room, and we had this discussion about what should, what we're going to call it, is managing bias-influenced calls for service. What should that look like? What should it entail? So again, if we work from our ultimate outcomes through the behaviors we want and the knowledge and skills, we can create the kind of training that we feel will have the kind of impact on behavior that will change the outcomes that we're looking for. Then I'll wrap it up with this. Then now you got to implement that we have to have a strategy for our supervisors in terms of how they manage it. And then we have to have internal communication. And for us, it's really important that our staff understand why we're doing what we're doing. It's not enough for me to say, I'm the sheriff, so I'm giving you this policy. I want to change the behavior. That's not it. We want to have a conversation and say, here's why we're doing this. Here's what our role and our mission is as an organization. And this is how this change supports us accomplishing our mission in connection with the community. We incorporate the existing training and we can do some stuff through some of our technology. And the last piece is, now how do we engage the community? Jessica talked about it. There has to be an alignment between what we do and the expectation in the community. Oh yeah, and by the way, whether we're doing bias-based policing, bias-influenced calls, those usually start from a community call. And we have to acknowledge the fact that although police often are the brunt of some of this because we're responsible for a lot of it because of what we can do, we've often been used as a tool to further societal bias. So we can do all that we want internally unless we have a really good, robust community conversation about what bias calls are and the fact that someone is black, walking in a white neighborhood might be unusual, but it doesn't make it suspicious. And vice versa. And we've conflated those two things. Something might be unusual, we call it suspicious, and we act on it. We need to have that level of conversation. And I'll end with that. But we have a strategy that we believe will achieve a lot of the outcomes that Jessica talked about in her presentation. So Professor Friedman. Good afternoon or evening, everyone. It's good to be here. I'm a professor at NYU Law School, but more importantly for present purposes, I'm the director of the policing project at NYU.  You might think that's why I'm here, but it's not. So I'm going to actually tell you why I'm here. It's because the world is a very small place. So first, I want to thank Dean Barr, who I've known for 100 million years, and David Thatcher, who I met several years ago at the University of Chicago. But the true answer to why I'm here is because one of my research assistants went to a wedding one day. And at that wedding, she met Jessica Galoulli. And they obviously had nothing better to talk about. And so they ended up talking about research that my research assistant was doing for me, which led Jessica to send me an op-ed. She had published in The Washington Post, which has led to us being co-authors and I'm hoping I'm knocking on what I assume is wood here that Jessica will be working at the policing project with us as a postdoc come this fall. After her dissertation is done, I hope that too. And finally, just to prove what a small world it is, I met Sheriff Clayton in the United Kingdom when we were there on a junket for policing officials. And he's a member of our advisory board. So it is a very small world and I'm glad to be here with everybody. I want to widen the lens here when David wrote us all about what we would be saying. He said Jessica's going to talk about racially biased 911 calls and Sheriff Clayton's going to talk about how the Sheriff's Department handles racially biased 911 calls and Barry's going to do something. He's going to widen the lens and it may be relevant and I hope it is, but maybe not. So David, I'm going to do my best. I'm going to widen the lens, but I promise at the end that I'm going to come back to dispatch whether it seems to relate or not. So I want to widen the lens because I think that what we're talking about here today is the tip of a very large iceberg. So there's lots of racial bias in policing beyond racially biased phone calls and in fact the entire criminal justice system, whatever metrics you want to look at, whether it's police stops, whether it's arrests, whether it's charging, whether it's pre-trial release decisions, whether it's incarceration is a heavily raised thing in our society. And though there are many reasons for that, there's overt racism, there's subconscious bias, there's socioeconomic status and poverty issues that we don't talk about nearly enough because there's a close relationship between people's folks' level of poverty or how they're doing in the world and race in this country. One of those things is policing. There's a lot of concern in the country right now about mass incarceration, but as I would like to tell folks very often, you can't talk about mass incarceration without policing. Most of the folks who end up in the criminal justice system end up there through the door that is opened by the police, though Jessica points out properly that it's the dispatchers who may be at the beginning of that. But so we have to look at this whole iceberg I think and get a handle on it. Now police come into contact with people lots of different ways. They come into contact through patrol, even through community policing, through proactive policing, which often involves criminogenic hotspots, but dispatch is surely, as Jessica tells us, one of the most important ways that folks come into contact with the police, and so we need to think about that. But what I want to think about for just a moment isn't necessarily how they come into contact with the police or how police come into contact with individuals, but who it is that's coming into contact with individuals when the police show up. So one of the things that we've been doing with the policing project is we've been asking policing agencies to send us their basic curriculum for people going to the police academy. And every state's got some set of standards when we've collected those, and then we've asked the top 10 policing agencies in the country, and most of them are giving us their information. And we've just been creating pie charts to ask how is it that officers are trained. And when you look at the pie chart, what you find out is that we've divided into I think five categories, and so one of the biggest hunks of the pie chart is use of force. Hopefully the use of force training isn't just using force, but knowing when not to use force and how to de-escalate and avoid using force, but that's a big part of the pie chart. A second big part of the pie chart is law enforcement. What are the laws? What are the things people can be cited for? What are the penalties? The law enforcement part of the job. A third big part of the pie chart is what you would expect it to be, which is just operational. How do you fill out reports? How do you interview witnesses? The protocols for policing agencies. And then there's two small slices of that pie chart in the way we've organized it, and we constructed this organization. It's not innate. One is on emergency medical services. That's a very tiny sliver of the pie chart. And then there's a part of the pie chart that varies from agency to agency or training academy to training academy, but it's typically less than 10%. One of the most things that we refer to as social services or mediation. So when you encounter folks on the street in the course of your responsibilities, have you been trained in how to resolve disputes? Have you been trained in the social services that people might need to receive? And it's important because of some work that Jessica and I are doing together, which is that we are trying to go back to a set of old data sets, and then we're going to try to collect some information from computer assist to dispatch, and frankly wherever we can get information about what it is that police actually do all day long. What are the incidents in which they find themselves involved? And when you start to look at that information, it paints a very, very, very different picture of policing than what you might think of if, for example, you watch television and see what it is that the police do because a very small part of their time is spent actively crime fighting. Now to be fair, because I was asked this question at a workshop at the law school earlier today, it may well be true that the very presence of police out on the streets is a deterrent to crime, and I certainly don't deny that, and that would be interesting to think about. But when it comes to what cops have to deal with when they answer dispatch calls, it's animal questions. There's a cat in a tree, there's a dog loose on the street. Lots of noise complaints, you know, people calling about somebody having a party next door. There's folks hanging out on the corner or on the stoop drinking. There's a traffic accident. There's an issue with somebody having a substance abuse problem, maybe an overdose. Very often the calls involve mental illness. And the point of domestic arguments, domestic violence, one of the largest categories of calls and frankly one of the most difficult. And the point I want to raise in making, as I describe this, is you need to ask yourself all of these situations. If the primary training of the police in force and in law is the right response for the thing they're being called and asked to do, because it's no discredit to the police but should not be a surprise. That if when a situation arises, the people that you bring to that situation to help are trained primarily in force and law enforcement, that you are going to get a certain amount of force and law enforcement, though what you might very well need is mediation or is social services. And that is not the way we are necessarily constructed as a system to deal with the social problems, sometimes very, very serious social problems that need to be dealt with. As I want to say, just because police are the first responders, which they are, doesn't mean that they are the right responders. And the question I want people to ask, it's going to sound like one question, but actually is three, and I'm going to give them to you so that you can think about them and then I am going to actually bring this back to dispatch. So the first question is, what are the police doing here? Which is to say, are the police the right people to be responding to deal with this particular situation? And the second question is, what are the police doing here? When they respond, what is it that they actually do and what are they trained to do? And finally, and incredibly importantly, what are the police doing here? Is there something about this place that is problematic from a social perspective that we need to address in some way other than with the police? When you look at data, it is incredibly interesting and deeply troubling. The number of times, for example, that the police will be called to the same address because of a substance abuse problem or because of a domestic argument problem. And when that happens, what you can know is that we as a society are failing. We're failing to address the underlying problem that is causing the call and the dispatch in the first place. And these two, I just want to return to the point I made about the iceberg, have a huge racialized effect. Very often the calls come from more underprivileged and more challenged neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods and the folks that live in them lack some of the resources that folks in better off neighborhoods have to deal with this range of problems. And so we get these outcomes in the criminal justice system because we have not thought deeply enough about who we send and what skills they have. And to be clear, an exercise that Jessica and I entered into, particularly because we're the least competent people on the planet to do it, is we took the panoply of calls and we broke them into three categories. And I'm going to ultimately call on some of my law enforcement friends to go through the same exercise, which is to say, when you look at these incidents, is this the kind of situation where force and law are absolutely needed? Are they situations where force and law are absolutely not the right response? Or are they situations where you might want force available, take a domestic argument which could turn into a very serious situation, but you might want it in the background, which is not how we construct things. We don't often enough have co-response, where you might need force there, but that should not be the primary actor.  I often talk about optimal outcomes, which is if we take the incident, what is the best we can hope for as a society in that situation? Which brings me back to dispatch, because as Jessica's pointed out, and as the sheriff's pointed out, what matters at some level is triage. And I don't know how successful we can be at triage at that stage. I think we're going to talk some about it. You know, I'm struck by the fact that Jessica says we have seconds to make a decision, so that's not very long, but there are areas in the world where we do triage, and where we do it I think better than we do it in the dispatch area. Triage assumes that they're going to be other responses, or a panoply of responses to the problems, but I think that we need to start a dispatch with that kind of triage response and then work out from there to figure out how we can get optimal outcomes in all of these different situations. Thank you. Great, thank you very much everybody. So I'm just going to ask one question here and then we'll turn it over to those audience questions. So if you have one that you haven't already sent to the staff, you know, on your index card handed to somebody walking by in the aisles or tweeted to hashtag policy talks. So the question I want to pose is about some of the early responses that we've seen in the policy world over the last year to this problem that we've been talking about. As this issue has gotten more attention across the country over the past several months, we've started to see policymakers start to take action. Maybe not a lot of concrete policy changes, but certainly some attempt to frame the issue with some strong statements about what should happen next. And so for example, a few months ago, partly inspired by op-eds like the one Jessica wrote, the Alexandria Democratic Committee passed a resolution calling on 9-1-1 centers to do three things. To do more to encourage call takers to push back on calls in the way Jessica described. To ask call takers, dispatchers to tell officers when they have reason to doubt what the caller told them to go and then finally to do more the kind of public outreach work that all the panelists have mentioned to discourage improper calls. And so I want to be concrete here and just read a couple of passages from that resolution. Be it resolved that the Alexandria Democratic Committee urges 9-1-1 centers to continue to train dispatchers to attempt to determine if there's a reasonable concern for a caller's safety or the safety of others or if a person is calling only or implicit bias towards minority group members. It goes on to urge 9-1-1 dispatchers to continue to convey to officers information about a call that suggests they have reason to doubt the facts reported by the caller. It urges police departments to publicize that quote factors such as race, ethnicity and or religious affiliation are not suspicious in that they will fully enforce statutes regarding false reports to law enforcement and finally it urges them to mount public relations efforts in traditional and social media to discourage improper and illegal use of the 9-1-1 system. What do you think of that message? Would you have voted for that resolution if you were on that committee? I'll start. Not as written. I think... So, I've read the resolution. I think the intent is good. I think where they want to go is okay. But, you know, the devil's in the details. So, I'll give you an example. I think the second one you talked about, second point was tell the officer the reasons why they doubt the facts. They're not in a position to doubt the facts as related to them. If, you know, what we're saying is so we're going to set a reasonable suspicion threshold. So, our dispatchers should ask a series of questions very similar to what an officer is going to utilize when they get there to determine whether there's reasonable suspicion, probable cause. What we don't want them to do is to have someone articulate a set of facts and for them to try to determine whether those facts are influenced by a bias or not. What could be objective facts, but to try to see if they're subjective facts and then not send a resource for that for that reason. So, I think the intent is good. I just think there are some issues. And then the pushback. You better be really, really comfortable with alignment with the community's expectations about what dispatch will and will not do before you just you know, so I could tomorrow have a policy and say we're not going to dispatch these type of calls. That's not the expectation in the community right now. So, that's going to cause maybe a greater issue than what we're facing now or a different kind of issue. Let me say it that way. So, as we work through what we're working through, we also have a parallel path to work with the community to make sure that we're in agreement at least from not everybody, but enough people in agreement that this is the path we should follow. I agree with the Sheriff for the most part. I think that seems to be a good first step toward recognizing dispatch is playing a role and callers is playing a role in these sorts of problem situations. I think that it does require a lot of buy in from different stakeholders and even the writer of this resolution said that he faced a lot of pushback from the local police before it was pushed. They wanted police to just respond and sort things out once they got there. So, I think that the idea of having these thresholds and criteria around suspicious person calls is something I'd be interested to see exactly what that set of criteria looks like and they don't talk about that because I think there is a fine line between challenging the caller and then just disbelieving what a caller says. I think trying to train them to ask the right questions to figure out the underlying reason of the call is really important but not just doubting what the person's reason is. So, I think two points. One is relates to the point of the policing project, so I'll just say a word about it, which is what we're about is trying to bring democratic accountability to policing and when we talk about democratic accountability what we mean is what we call front end accountability. In most of government when you think about accountability what you actually think about is calling up your representatives and telling them what you want and getting laws that reflect the will of the people and in policing for some reason all of accountability seems to be on the back end about holding people responsible with things that go wrong and so what the policing project is about is trying to bring that same kind of front end responsiveness to policing. To that end I commend the resolution I commend the sentiment of a polity of a community to say there's a problem and here's how we ought to think about addressing it on the front end and we ought to have front end ways to address it. I share the skepticism here that unconscious racial bias is a complicated thing. Everywhere you go everybody wants to know where can we get some unconscious racial bias training so we can just get rid of our biases. Would that it was so simple we could all just sit around and have three days of training and then all of a sudden it would be a color blind neutral world. I wish it was that simple it's not so I think implementing this is complicated. An area where I have question and the folks on left and right of me would know way better than I do is the first time I started to talk in public about this idea of front end accountability about having rules and policies and statutes in place that were democratically formulated about policing some of my most progressive colleagues pushed back at me and said oh but policing you can't have rules and I would sort of look around and say aren't we in a law school isn't that what we do we write rules to guide discretion that's the whole point of law you know and I have never believed for a moment that policing is so special that you can't have rules to guide this right I don't get that I mean if anything like because police officers have to respond so quickly to situations that's when you need protocols. I mean I guess I would respond to that right away so that's shocking to me and that's part of the fallacy I think out in maybe in our profession and outside of the profession police officers can do what they want whenever they want no they have discretion some situations are low low discretion is I'm responding to a call for service I know I have to go to that high discretion is whether I decide to stop one of you tonight after we all leave for a traffic stop I have that discretion but those are all framed the law helps frame the use of discretion the policy and procedure helps frame the discretion and what you should get is supervisor feedback in some observation that helps frame that discretion so I mean that's how you move the profession I will say this I think one of the problems we have in our profession and we can be our worst enemy is just that thinking not only do we not have rules but how dare we to get their feedback for how we should do a policy that's what we should be doing we if we're thinking I'll just give you an example we wrote an immigration policy or started writing immigration policy we brought in our immigration advocates what do you think about this how does this work let's get some feedback when we roll it out they're gonna have feedback anyway right let's get it on the front end and they have a view and a lens that we don't have so a long way of saying yes I agree and so the question then becomes you know can that happen for dispatch I mean is it possible to formulate the rules to triage and to limit the discretion of the dispatch folks and the call takers or maybe it sounds like an able discretion at some level instead of just reporting everything and I have no expertise to know whether it's possible to formulate those rules and I'm gonna shut up in a second and let you say something but but before I do let me mansplain just one more because it seems to me that what you'd want to do in any situation and what the law tries to do is think what are all the cases and then can we sit back and look at the cases and think about some generalized rules for dealing with those cases so I think there are some rules inside dispatch that guide some of the discretion so for example most agencies in the county don't respond if you lock yourself out of your car anymore and that's become a policy that we have in our handbook and we look at dispatch that you tell the person that's not something the police provide we can transfer you to a tow company and they can come out and do it for you so there are types of calls where there are other responses possible but having that rule is actually really nice sometimes because it protects you from making a decision on the phone that can later you can later get in trouble for if you didn't dispatch police so I think having protocols around suspicious people calls would be beneficial to a lot of people inside dispatch we are really quickly I'm only supposed to ask one question but I want to follow up on this because this issue of discretion is really interesting and it's what I've learned most of all from Jessica's fieldwork is Jessica you've taught me the extent to which there is discretion already existing within call centers that your coworkers in the call center are making decisions about the same kind of situation in different ways what are the areas in which you see that discretion playing out within dispatch what are within the call center what are some of the kinds of situations that a call taker is facing where there aren't rules already and where a little bit of extra guidance might be helpful you just gave us an example where there is a clear rule and how it was helpful what are some of the outstanding areas where the rules are not yet developed and it might be helpful to have more guidance I think the calls we're talking about today here are the ones that would be the most beneficial to have some sort of rules around those some people might decide to not put the call in right the dispatcher who yelled at me that day probably would have not entered that call for service and just moved on with their day but as a new call taker someone who hasn't been there that long there's that risk of getting you know being liable if something went wrong you didn't put the call in so I think there are different decisions people make inside dispatch I don't think the company policy is to reject calls but sometimes it gets busy and someone you know doesn't want to enter a call in because they think it's racially motivated but having those rules for that would be helpful why don't we turn to the audience questions if you guys are ready here are you going to get us started here are the students going to jump right in Andrea and Tom Tom fan second year MPP student here's a question from twitter how can we empower 9-1-1 operators who are short staffed and underpaid lack of job security motivates dispatcher behavior could you repeat that end of the question I didn't hear it sorry that was a statement lack of job security but I think there's some job security for dispatchers a lot of dispatchers are full-time they're unionized staff you need to have gross negligence to lose some of that job security so there is some level of security but there's still ways in which you can be disciplined by the agency for rejecting calls or doing other things the agency doesn't approve I mean forgive my being a lawyer but a lack of job security strikes me as an excellent motivator so it's actually the opposite problem that you're facing with a unionized labor force but I don't you know anybody that's employed and that faces incentives I think you know around policing the incentives questions are really difficult the issue doesn't strike me as much about incentives as it does about rules and protocols I'm Andrea Matei I'm also a second year MPP and I'm very interested in criminal justice reform I actually had this question and I apologize if it comes off leading in any way but I was curious to what extent does the 911 response kind of expose how the criminal justice system enters social problems and that our first response to like mental health and different other issues are responded by police first so I think and I'll just start off I think it really is an example of how we've invested our resources so the police respond to mental health issues because they are the 24 7365 operation and you know we've had this discussion well should it be someone else well yeah probably it should be someone else are we at the local level whether it's county or city willing to invest the financial resources necessary to have a different group respond to some of those calls and very nice start this conversation a little bit yesterday I've had this I mean early today and I've had conversation with other folks look there are finite resources at the county and the city level public safety takes up in most budgets 50% of municipal government budget if I have that little bit of resources now we're going to have someone else respond where you more likely to take that money probably from police what's the chief going to say about that or the sheriff going to say about that so it's really it's an exercise in priorities is an exercise in who's the right group to respond but it's really an exercise in budget where you going to place those those dollars and I think in the sheriff's office sheriff knows more about this than me but there has been some corresponds projects around mental health right so community mental health goes out with deputies and so that might be an example of having force in the background like Barry was talking about earlier yeah but again you know and then yeah you're right your question around I guess you said you know dispatch those calls that come in what does it say from a societal standpoint about how we value or not value I think that does say at all that our disinvestment in programs especially front end programs proactive programs to help people address mental health disorder substance use disorder all the behavioral disorder issues has resulted in a default to police responding to those things so we as a society are criminalizing behaviors and situations that shouldn't be criminalized and we see that manifest itself and and it's actually the worst investment of dollars it costs far more to have someone in your jail if you are a taxpayer in washington county at a hundred plus a day then it takes to manage that person outside of the jail and give them some treatment at far less than that and it's just hard to know we were talking about this at lunch I was doing a paper at the law school on roughly the subject and one of the faculty members there and a former student he says with pride asked a really hard question and I think it's one we kind of need to debug so you know her question was this is great this sounds utopian what makes you think we're going to actually move to this place in the world sort of the public choice question if you live in the world of public choice theory what I don't fully know and understand is the extent to which we respond to things the way we do because of path dependence we've just done it that way for a long time so gosh let's keep doing it or whether there's an attitude in the body politic and I think there is here in the United States that has a kind of retributive response to almost everything so you know we spent a lot of energy in the during the Reagan presidency and they're after de-institutionalizing folks from mental institutions and those institutions were not good places there were real problems with them but then they ended up on the street and whatever ends up on the street falls into the hands of the police to deal with but it does require us in our rhetoric which is not the rhetoric I see in my twitter feed every day you know saying is to be social problems or public health problems because many of the things that fall into the lap of the police and that we think of as policing problems in this country really are public health problems but then you need a mentality in the public to treat them as that and to fund them as that and for some reason it's you know what's easy to get funded as cops relative to a lot of other things and that's that's a mistake in fairness and we all had this conversation at lunch at great length you know we don't know whether what we're talking about is shifting around money to deal with things more efficiently or whether it would be just way more expensive to do the things that we're doing and as Sheriff Clayton says there are limited resources and so there's always a struggle over who gets that money here's another question from twitter do you feel it is helpful to acknowledge and or denounce many well intended policies that contribute to racial bias and policing through policies like the Clinton Obama's crime bill as well as the broken windows policy yes I mean broken windows is a disaster and so I'll add some data just because we're a policy school the the there have been too few studies done but a number of interesting studies about police response to criminogenic places and they show that actually if you put policing resources in those places you can bring down crime not as much as you might think from reading popular press but you can but what some of those studies have shown is that you can do a better job by addressing situational issues you know what's the state of the topography is there adequate lighting is there a abandoned home that needs to be dealt with and again it's this if you go back and read the broken windows piece which I recommend by the way it's a terrific piece of something policy journalism extremely well written and persuasive and you just feel like you know society's ills have been solved it's really unclear from that piece what they expected to happen in this model of broken windows policing and George Kelling who's you know worked for years in this space himself has kind of spoken about it in different ways but I think now ruse the fact that the solution to broken windows policing was misdemeanor arrests rather than fixing broken windows and so there's your denunciation I think in general with policies I remember a professor in a different policy school not Ford School said all bad policies were good ideas yesterday and so this idea even this conversation about crafting policies around suspicious people calls which I feel fairly passionate about is still always concerning to implement a policy you don't know the outcome so I think it's important to have evaluations of what happens as places start implementing these kind of rules and criteria around calls I think the sheriff's office is doing that I think that that that's an important step with the process Eric Severide famously said the chief cause of problems is solutions so it's sort of the same idea so the next question is do police need different training or does the police or the public need to change its expectations of what police do or both in other words should we be trying to get the public to contact the right responder instead of the police or should we be turning the police into the right responders so I always pause because you know I got an opinion but I want to make sure I'm not dominating I think that is a great question and I'll say it's both so as we talk about this reimagining police and thinking about police in a new way I think the focus has to be internal to the police profession external to the community we're talking about culture change there are basic assumptions that we have in society about the role that police play and keeping us safe Barry mentioned this earlier today I've even been tinkering with just the definition of public safety is public safety just a law enforcement police issue or is public safety an issue around you know my basic needs we all remember Maslow is public safety the first three levels of my basic needs being met that I'm safe I got shelter, clean water all of those things if we change the definition of public safety we change who's a part of the government response to help maintain public safety doesn't mean police go away some of what our responsibilities are so I think that's part of it we have to change the expectation just like with the call people expect if you call 911 you're sending the police I have chief friends maybe not in Washtenaw County but elsewhere if they implement a policy like this and don't send anyone they won't be the chief for law because the mayor won't be the mayor for law city manager won't be the city manager for law that's community driven that's not government driven that's not a public conversation and I'll end with this piece yes you need to change some of the training we've already changed the generation of police officer from the time I started 30 years ago versus the kind of police officer we bring in today totally different people competency based we're looking for people that are look and some people don't want to hear they are sometimes more social work than they are in forces so I will take issue with one thing that Barry says I hear him say police equals force and law I don't believe police does not have to equal force and law that's not all we do use of force subject control should just be a small piece I'll end with this piece look at a police agency's allocation of funds and resources and hours in the training where are they spending most of their money is it use of force and driving what we have cultural understanding understanding implicit bias managing interpersonal interactions managing mental health crisis the kind of things that on a day to day basis that you don't see on TV police officers do everyday that's more in line with the social worker than a special forces person in army yeah just to be clear I was going to actually pipe down on this question but we don't I think we completely agree and I just want to be clear about it the my claim isn't that so I think during the course of the day most of what police officers get asked to do is mediation, social work, what not that is what we as a society call on them to do now sometimes police will say this all got dumped on us I want to be out there fighting crime and I'm not I don't know when it got dumped it's gone on for many years that it's been this way that police officers to do and the Sheriff and I were talking earlier today and we're going to put up on our website these pie charts that show what a lot of agencies are doing and where they're spending their training dollars and washtenaw county is an exception to what I've seen so far in that they're investing more money in social work and mediation interpersonal skills and I think that's entirely commendable the problem, the challenge is you still want the officers to be well trained in the use of force it means you know there's more expense they're just training your officers but I think that's the goal is to have well rounded individuals who can deal with all these problems as first responders I think your question also mentioned if callers should know to call other people instead of 911 and so I often think the moment of interaction between the caller and call taker could be a moment for legal socialization a little bit of the person calling some people calling definitely want the police and are set on that and say that people frequently are like I don't know if I should have called I don't know if this is an emergency I'm not really sure and in those moments if what they're asking for could be handled by another agency like an animal control issue or a critter control if it's an animal in your own house or Michigan Department of Transportation will go out for broken down vehicles on highways like taking the time even though it's busy in these centers to explain to the caller what you're doing it could help them understand what police do and don't do in some way and hopefully give them that knowledge in the future when they think about calling this next question asks I understand focus the focus for this talk is about bias in terms of responding by sending law enforcement however are people of color less likely to get adequate responses to their emergencies I don't think that that's the case inside dispatch I think that incidents come in and depending on what type of incident the person is having that dictates the response not necessarily where they're calling from or who they are as a caller I don't think that that's the driving force in the call takers decision about whether they're going to reject a call I think that type of incident that the caller is saying drives that decision or the desire to be able to reject a call even if they don't I think I'll just say I'm talking broadly not Washington County but just broadly it's the resources so you have communities that are just economically challenged with your first responder resources some of those communities may be communities of color so you may see a longer response time to a call for service a legitimate call for service is it because it's community of color or is it because that it's a social economic issue we know those things so often times go hand in hand but you may see that kind of is it intentional I would hope not but if you see it a lot of times you see it it's because of a resource issue this question is from Twitter do examples exist of municipal units that have developed an alternative to police responses to mental health and social work problems yeah there are a number of different national models a lot of them are co-responding models so that's what you see mostly you'll see police and a mental health professional working together you'll see a lot of CIT crisis intervention teams where especially in critical situations where someone's in mental health crisis you'll see a police response but they co-respond with a mental health professional there is this desire in a lot of discussion that it should be a single response and if it's a mental health issue then it should just be a mental health response the trick with that is what if it's a mental health response and that person is in such crisis that he or she poses a danger to him or herself maybe they can be talked now maybe there might have to be some control techniques used to maintain the safety for everybody involved so if you just send the non-police person might that be enough I'm not sure I'm not advocating one way or the other you know this takes us to the one in doubt just send them right so we all will be safer I don't advocate that approach we just have to be a little more thoughtful if it's going to be a new model what should that model look like how should we do it I know in this county there's also a community mental health hotline that runs 24-7 so there have been times where a caller says that they don't feel like they just want to talk to someone about what's going on so sometimes that caller can be transferred to that hotline and talk to someone about their problems and then if a response is needed or the person on the 24-7 hotline decides that they can call into the center and have the police go out to that address it's not common to only transfer the call and not send police but it is an interesting idea to think about if that could be leveraged more I just want to add one more piece I want us to walk away from this thinking that the police are incapable of managing a mental health crisis they're not diagnosing they're not treating but can they be trained and skilled enough to respond to a situation deescalate that situation understand enough about mental health issues understand enough about stigma to manage it to a point where that person is stable so we can get them to the right location I argue that we can we've developed a two-day managing mental health crisis training that's been adopted by the state of Michigan that we're trying to do a statewide immersion to get all police officers trained in the basics of mental health to recognize the behaviors and to gain some additional skills so they can manage that situation and bring it to the kind of resolution where everybody is safe so I don't want us to think that police are incapable we just got to invest the right training you need the handoff then and that's part of the problem that I think too often we think that the police are going to solve the problem because they respond to the call but the call is just the immediate need which sometimes is then resolved with the call but sometimes you identify then a deeper problem whether it's a mental health issue whether it's a difficult living situation where there's repeated domestic arguments where other social services need to step in and you need a better handoff I just get on a soapbox which is that I there are interesting programs happening all over the country and there are 18,000 policing agencies so there's all kinds of innovation and in fact this is more particularly the soapbox of Nina Vinnick at the Joyce Foundation which is to say we think police just keep doing things the same way but they don't, they innovate we don't fund nearly enough and study nearly enough and I am again at the White School to be saying this to figure out whether the different things that agencies and jurisdictions are trying are effective and we ought to try to diffuse through the many agencies that are out there and so we have a lot of learning that we need to do for Sheriff Clayton and Professor Friedman how receptive have officers been in your experience and studies to the kind of training that reduces bias in policing how do you overcome resistance to bias for your training? I don't know if I'm in the best position to answer that question some people are open to it and some people are not open to it and you're going to know way better I'll just say this when you call everybody to a meeting and you say we're going to deal with your racism in this meeting people are like oh good I'm a good person and this is going to help and so you know we need to think about how we talk about this in a way that make people receptive to being part of the solution I think very conservative is really how we talk about it I've been in trainings and around training where they set it up almost just like that and it's accusatory and people have shut down and then the other thing is so give me some practical skills and so I used to teach bias based policing I used to work with John Lamberth we should do racial profiling studies so I remember going all across the country teaching this to police officers you know the thing that worked the best is to challenge the assumptions about what's the most effective practices searches who to search and then when we started to highlight for them was hit rates and I'll just be really quick we did a lot of studies we found the hit rate and the hit rate is simply this you do a search of a vehicle we do a lot of searches of vehicles looking for guns and drugs what's the percentage of times you get a hit study after study after study 5%, 6%, 7% wait a minute let's start doing the math how many do you do how much time does it take the resources and all that and your success rate is 5% if you were CEO of a business you'd be 5% so if that is one of the things that we do we must not be doing it right so we started talking about the bias black person white neighborhood or white guys in a black neighborhood at this time of day they can only be doing this we should search so challenging some of the old basic assumptions so if not only say it's not the right thing to do it's not even effective so it's about how you engage it and have the discussions where you start to at least minimize the resistance and open people up to maybe there's some value in the discussion so police departments have used nuisance calls fines for limiting the use of calling 911 all the time have they been used for bias calls and if so are they successful in trying to limit those calls I have not heard about them used for bias calls and I do worry sometimes about the call finding the sociologist Matt Desmond has written a piece about 911 calls in Milwaukee and landlords incurred fines if tenants call more than three times a month to 911 and what and he ended up finding is that the women are being evicted from where they're living because they were calling 911 more than three times a month because they're victims of violence and so this policy created a very difficult situation for these women who felt like if they call 911 they might get evicted if they didn't they're going to get abused so I think call fines are a potentially dangerous policy based on his findings the framework and laws around discretion seem heavily tilted towards police i.e. they're essentially writing their own rules so when force is used unjustifiably and wrongful arrests are made there's little accountability how do we create more balanced rules and frameworks I'm glad you asked I mean that question betrays what I think is the misconception about what it means to have accountability in a democratic system so in any well functioning governance system you have to have a front end and a back end you have to have an adequate legitimate set of rules to guide behavior and then you have to have consequences for violations of the rules around policing there are lots of calls for consequences but we don't have a well developed set of rules in the first place and without that well developed set of rules we're all living in a fantasy world to think that there's going to be accountability on the back end once you have that system in place functioning as it ought to then in fact the back end is super helpful because you can learn things on the back end and by the way accountability doesn't always mean someone gets punished it also means sentinel review we sit around and figure out what went wrong can we debug the problem that the back end can help you put in place procedures and policies on the front end and the error we have made in this country and I'm deeply sympathetic to the passion around calls for punishment and back end accountability when terrible things have happened I still look at it and I say it's just not going to happen you're never going to be satisfied until we do a good job on the front end of having legitimate acceptable democratically formulated rules and policies and protocols that people can agree are the way that things need to be done last question no pressure I'm sorry if I didn't pick anyone else's pressure this question is if dispatchers do need to pass these calls on to the police and they are fearful that these are bias based calls is there any communication that happens within the dispatcher and police to kind of signal we're not sure we're going to send it out but we're afraid that this might be a bias call yeah so when call takers enter calls into the computer system there's a notes field where they can type up notes about the call and in that field things could be passed on and sometimes are that caller has no explanation for why the person's behavior is suspicious and that information then can be relayed on from the dispatcher to the responding police officer which I think is a different sort of response than if a police officer gets a call that says suspicious activity at this location but having that information that caller was not able to give a reason why this person was suspicious I think changes the idea of what that call might be about so I think that communication is actually really important I agree and our the protocol we're developing that's what we're going to do so we're going to establish what we're calling right now that reasonable suspicion threshold what those criteria are and then if it's not met and then the dispatcher asking a couple questions or the call taker asking a couple questions the response that they get try to get that information into the computer so the officer knows or deputy knows going in what they're facing I'll say one more thing in Washington County because we dispatch for different agencies it's going to be our protocol but each agency decides whether they want us to send a resource or not so part of our job is now once we start to lay it all out is to engage each one of those agencies and say here's how we're looking at this dispatch protocol for managing bias influence calls how do you want us to work with you I'm just going to stand up even if David could have said this and say thank you what a what a great and rich and interesting conversation I just have a thousand more questions to ask afterwards but learned a ton please join us all and our wonderful guests for a reception in the great hall the guests will be happy to hang out for a bit and thanks all for being here


All right you guys, how you guys doing? It is time for another hair related video girl, my hair. I'm embarrassed to say that this hair is a mess. And even with my hair being like this, I've gotten compliments. So I'm going to go ahead and section my hair off. I'm going to wet my hair slightly. Oh, that's cute. That side girl. And then I'm going to apply the hair. I'm going to really focus on my scalp and then work that oil, excuse me, all the way down. Now in this container, I have, what do I have? What's this color? You guys, I'm so sorry. It's an oil that's very new for me. Amla oil, you guys. Amla oil. And, you know, Amla oil has a fragrance to it and it has a slight, like olive color. That's what's giving it this olive color. And also in here I have sweet almond oil, jojoba oil and olive oil. I really am not using coconut oil that much. I honestly, I haven't used coconut oil on my hair in like two years or so. I just have no, yeah, really no real desire to do it. So very, very simple.  Let's do things in order y'all. Let me go ahead and section off my hair. I'm going to lightly miss my hair. Okay, I'm going to add the hair oil right here. All right, out of the towel. All right, you guys. So once I'm done applying the oil mixture, I just go ahead and two strand twist my hair just to keep it in place. I'm, excuse me, I'm here yapping away. So I decided to do some of the oil on my hair too because let me just be real, this is a lot of hair. So just doing it on the scalp, I wasn't confident that it would get all the way down my hair strands. But I am definitely liking this hair oil mixture. This is the first time I use this particular mixture. Make sure you look down in the description box. I will have everything down there below. So just continuing to apply my hair. Again, I am moisting my hair, applying some water and then applying the oil. I'm not applying a lot of oil. And I think I'm going to go ahead and leave this on overnight. Traditionally, I wouldn't do this, but I feel like my hair definitely needs it. All right, you guys, that is it. This went by fairly fast for me. It took me about 30 minutes to do this, which is not bad at all. I'm going to leave this in overnight and then I'm going to come back on cam and show you guys. Okay, here I am the very next day taking down these juicy twists. Look how shiny and just overall how healthy my hair looks. Yes, I get those spider tangles in my hair, but overall it feels really, really good. This is it up close. And yeah, absolutely love the hair oil mixture. That is it, you guys.  I'm going to go ahead and clean my hair, wash my hair, condition my hair and then come out and put my hair back in these clips and let it air dry. So I love free pulling with oil. And this is the first time I use this particular oil mixture. So that is it everyone. Thank you so much for watching. Take care. Bye.