bailey served as king county's prosecuting attorney at the time one of the country's youngest county prosecutors from one thousand nine hundred ninety nine hundred seventy nine and in that time he played a key role in addressing a culture of corruption that had taken hold of seattle's police department today mr bailey is chairman of stewardship partners a washington land conservation and restoration organization and a principal at dillon bay consulting where he advises on environmental and political strategy recent projects there include the sale of fifty thousand acres in the teen away valley for environmental protection but tonight he's here to discuss his new book seattle justice which covers some dark years for law enforcement in this community and offers perhaps a glimpse into the foundation of the department's even more recent struggles which cut to the heart of its very relationship with the people it is charter to serve it's a sincere honor to welcome christopher people ask me why i wrote this book there are many reasons to capture a thread of seattle history to recount exciting days of political reform to remember what we did to create a new model of a prosecutor's office but one day my friend and former us attorney mike mckay made a point that becomes the best reason of all the justice model we created and which has been continued and expanded by nor mailing and dance saturn for over four decades is a precious community asset that must be guarded and preserved all it would take is one election putting in place a person who did not believe in the justice model who thought the prosecutors should be more political or less active in pursuing justice reform throughout the system and this precious asset would be endangered or worse destroyed the reason is even more important now even today after a year of community tragedies starting with ferguson and the news today about  chicago puts us in the spotlight i believe that some of these disasters might have been prevented had the justice systems in those places been more like what we enjoy today in king county in other words there are lessons to be learned from what we did forty five years ago that are applicable all over the country right now let's start with vice vice and seattle is women because the man who logged and fished all week sought relief on weekends the ill he was a great success within a few years it paid the city twelve hundred dollars a year and license fees now this was even though brothels were illegal under state and territorial law in practice though the city enforced these laws only by licensing the illegal activity in the establishments in the middle eight hundred eighty s nearly ninety percent of seattle's general fund revenue came from license fees on brothels gambling liquor and box houses some of you might ask what is a box house it's an early seattle invention it was a theatre where the second level  auditorium and it had many rooms each with a door to the corridor a window onto the stage and a sofa bed women who performed on stage circulated in the corridor serving drinks and servicing customers licensing and regulating price was the first vestige of seattle's tolerance policy and by the turn of the century the issue of vice vers virtue came up at almost every election for mayor seattle's early embrace of vice reached its apogee under our most shameless mayor hiram gill he was elected on a platform of a wide open city strongly supported by colonel blethyn of the seattle times after his election gill and his police chief charles wop and steen established open vice districts around the city he promised that in the campaign but the districts extended into neighborhoods far beyond what he had promised and so an outraged citizenry led by the rever mark matthews of the first presbyterian church launched a recall campaign against mayor gill and he was quickly recall but at the next election he was back he was running as a reformer he said i'm the best man to clean up the city because i know exactly where it is dirty all this began a vice virtue cycle that dominated city politics all the way until world war two and the election of mayor william devon mare devon in his city council codified the modern tolerance policy that means that the city did not prohibit but rather licensed minor forms of gambling like punch boards pinballs and pull tabs all of which were clearly illegal under state law with various twists and turns tolerance remained the city policy for the next thirty years and this wasn't patty any stuff the amounts of money where you were huge profits just  pinball operators in one year in one thousand nine hundred eighty four amounted to twenty five million dollars which is like two hundred thousand today license revenue to the city average five hundred thousand dollars per year during the one nine hundred sixty s the police payoff system grew up inside this environment the s p d vice squad the sergeant in charge came to the city council every month just before the licencee committee meeting to deliver a list the list was of these stablish moments that they recommended be licensed to carry out these activities the city council committee passed the list the licenses were issued establishment that paid off the police department were licensed those that did not were harassed until they paid so fundamentally the tolerance policy was an official endorsement of municipal corruption in pursuit of license revenue the city told the police to arrest only some criminals regardless of state law so in in the later part of this tolerance episode i came back to seattle from law school i'd grown up here and that way for ten years and in the late sixties some friends and i were involved in many sixty six before that initiative passed if you were having dinner at rosalie's for ten at the stroke of midnight on saturday the waiter would come and remove your wine glass and your bottle of wine and you went home that was an amazing coalition of the seventh day adventists who didn't like sunday being celebrated as the sabbath and the restaurant association who would rather continue to pour wine the next year n sixty six we launched something called check choose an effective city council we endorsed phyllis lanphier in tim hill it was a bipartisan effort one democrat one republican and their victory started a five year transformation of the city council the next year sam reed and i started something called action for washington where we brought young people high school and college students into the state wide republican campaigns behind dan evans slade gorton the secretary of state whose name was led kramer and on the amazing new character on the scene named art fletcher art was the first african american to run statewide and he came very close to beating the former u w football coach cowboy johnny sure burge for lieutenant governor the year after that nine hundred sixty nine democrat named wes allman was elected mayor of seattle and after that those of us in these reforms who were republicans thought you know one of us should do something significant and what we thought was significant would be to run against the incumbent king county prosecutor charles o'carroll who was completely entrenched and it never been challenged or anyone come close to him our time he was great the seattle times had launched an investigative series written by two men called the wilson twins or really weren't even related that investigated the tolerance policy and the pay off system that was in sixty seven sixty eight the post intelligencer which used to be a printed paper in the morning there editor luke launched an all out assault on prosecuting attorney charles o'carroll known to everyone as chuck chuck carroll was the closest thing seattle ever had to a political boss before that he was a horowitz washington husky being one of only three football players in history to have their jerseys retired if there'd been a heisman trophy when he was playing in the late one nine hundred twenty s he would have been a serious candidate he rolled the courthouse and the county republican party he also had curious friends one of whom was a man named ben sightsee who owned a master pinball license for king county the seattle p r i learned that the prosecutor met mr  on federal avenue at around the same time every month and one such evening photographer de potts hid in the bushes and caught and caught the prosecuting attorney and the holder of the master pinball in a photograph outside chuck carroll's house and mr sikes he was carrying a black bag which appeared to be full of something nobody knows what governor evans and the state republicans who were in a bitter warfare with the king county republicans led by chuck carroll they band they backed prosecutor mark a prosecutor picked in for the u attorney slot and chuck carroll and his allies backed a man named joel rinder all who had been carol's chief criminal deputy it was a very close decision lobbying went on back and forth focused on a man named john to have done he launched a federal investigation of corruption in king county so a year later nine hundred seventy i was the candidate against chuck carrol and why was i the can they rather than some of my colleagues who were the same age who actually had litigation experience and that's because i had already fled the law firm billable hour wheel to which my friends were still  after slade gorton was elected he appointed me as his deputy in charge of consumer protection which have the added advantage of giving me a platform i had a weekly radio program on campaign which is the focus of the book was the one nine hundred seventy republican primary race for county prosecutor and there were some great stories from that campaign we were all around thirty years old and and you know very idealistic and very committed and very ambitious but we had one really important senior advisor name mort for ayn and mort said one time at a meeting he said you o to chuck and just tell him you're going to run against him as a courtesy so i said fine mark will you come with me so we called on the prosecutor he was in his office at a very long conference table murder cases were not qualified for the support job he told me of the red phone by his bed that summon him to murder sites in the middle of the night i politely told him i thought i could do a better job and we parted politely no more frame is a wonderful man fond memories of him he lost the race for mayor against wellstone and one of the reasons might have been that his campaign advisor were all people of his age they were all in their sixty's they were part of the establishment and they actually approved his campaign button which simply read am f for more cran i'm sure the establishment members of a camp his campaign committee had no idea there was another meaning so we we started our campaign we met with the prosecutor he was i'm sure dismissive of this whippersnapper but we had a problem we launched the campaign he finally filed after dithering until the last moment for reelection but he would not appear with me he departed on his yacht for northern waters this was a perfect strategy for him because he had always run reelection won reelection based on endorsements from lawyers and a couple of ads in the seattle papers so we had to figure out how to smoke him out after he returned from his cruise we appointed my friend keith by start to track him and figure out his daily movements and one evening i was appearing at garfield high school and we had a system for communicating which as you all know in those days you had to do this on pay phones so we had a good hourly check in i check in were easy what's he doing and this is very routine but but as i was a garfield keith our site said chuck carroll is on her way to the lake city library to talk to the forty sixth district republican club so we raced out there and just as we got there we saw trucks chief changed him and so the prosecutor arrived he went in the friendly chairman of the forty six district republicans called the meeting to order and just as the prosecutor is about to speak my friend i start who is sitting next to be in the back soon up and said mr carroll why won't you appear with your opponent and debate the issues and of course what is chuck carroll to say of course anywhere any time it which point i rushed to the front of the room i photographer caught me with my finger in his face accusing him of something and the cameras were rolling for king t v the next day and it was a total success carroll had to say something so accused me being a tool of the eastern establishment and said that my campaign had been financed by nelson rockefeller if only that were true so it was a you know after that there wasn't much to happen we've gotten our pictures the t v footage was there and we left the meeting continue and we departed but that was a really important thing the lake city ambush as we call it made a real race of it and a month later when the votes were counted on september sixteenth i beat carroll nearly two to one in the republican primaries one hundred twenty thousand to sixty thousand democrats well behind it forty thousand and twenty thousand but to show that my victory was heavily dependent on democrats who hated carol but who under the blanket primary law could vote for me to get rid of  six weeks later in the general election i beat ed he in a recount by fourteen hundred votes out of a three hundred fifty thousand the democrats ran a brilliant ad in the last two weeks called the puppet ad which you can see in the book and i think if the election had been a week later we would have lost so this whole thing is filled with fortuitous things like stamp it can like the grand like the trial of chief assistant chief buzz kirk during the primary and many of the things that are recounted in the book so anyway we won barely after recount and in january nine hundred seventy one i took office chuck carroll had not left us much to work with all the office manuals had been destroyed the big desk i inherited was empty except in the bottom right hand corner or right hand drawer the back of the drawer was was taken out and there were a whole bunch of wires to me this symbolized one of his methods to maintain power like j edgar hoover later he had a file on everyone and maybe a tape so our new team chiefs of three divisions and my chief of staff were all about the same age thirty two we all graduated from college around one thousand nine hundred sixty we were young idealistic and completely inexperienced we had two main challenges first as we had promised in the campaign to call and conduct a grand jury investigation into the police corruption which had now been well documented and exposed by stan pippins investigations and by his perjury trial of the system chief buzz cook the second thing we had to do in and many ways more important was to reorganize and reform the office to eliminate politics and selective prosecution so the first of these the grand jury was convened in may it focused on the police payoff scandal and in july issued a massive indictment charging conspiracy to construct and maintain and it legal system at these talks people ask me why did we bring a case as conspiracy as opposed to individual charges against those either the police officers or others involved in the answer is even though it's a very tough case to prove and we learned that lesson sadly it was it enabled us to tell the whole story before an open court of what the system was who was part of it and and the people who were indicted were all major players in the system one way or the other the people charged in this indictment included charles or carroll himself a former sheriff and many high ranking police officials the case was immediately dismissed by visiting judge from can attest county and  took a six months to get a reinstated by going to the supreme court appeals went on for two years and after the final cases were over we ended up convicting only a few of the alleged but the case drove a stake through the heart of the corrupt system and after years of on again off again payoffs the seattle police department has been free of that type of scandal ever since the second task reforming the office and there are several people here who were involved in that truck carroll's office had been professional and competent so reforming it did not mean firing the staff and starting all over which is exactly what he did in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight when he was report appointed to the office the flaws were that he ran the office as a political and  political part met the deputies were expected to obtain lawyer endorsements on their work time and to work it reelection campaigns by making signs and distributing them it was partisan because new hires were vetted by the king county republican central committee even more important chuck carroll engaged in what i call selective prosecution and my term here means that he ignored the well documented payoff system but he vigorously prosecuted political protestors and flag desecration cases and this was at the time  vietnam war there are a lot of both one example carol charge a group of eighteen year olds who had conducted a sit in at franklin high school with felonies the case came before superior court language when i interviewed later justice souter a year ago for this book before he died he was still upset about this but being a gentleman he declined to reveal the actual curse words that carroll had used there were many other stories of prominent citizens or husky football players receiving favorable treatment and in each case the prosecutor kept a record and reminded those favored later when they were asked for political contributions i looked for examples in the first year that would show how different things would be that would really be a stark contrast to this and one came involving a brand new deputy named bill for legal tao and the new deputies in the office were assigned to what we call the district courts the misdemeanor court scattered around the county either in small towns or as part of the county justice system and these new deputies told the police in their jurisdictions you know if you have any questions call me any time of the night or day i'm available as your resource so one night at two in the morning a police officer from a suburban district called bill for legal time at two o'clock in the morning he said i've got the mayor of clay elam here locked up for drunk driving what should i do bill said treat the mayor like anyone else and he went back to sleep the next week there was every week we had a training session for the new deputies with a wonderful man named fred yates who was one of our senior deputies who conducted the training and answered questions and help them learn how to do their jobs i never went to these meetings they were at seven thirty on wednesday morning but the next wednesday i went to the meeting to commend the surprised bill for legal to how the word of this and other examples got out and th began our just as model of how a prosecutor's office should behave over time this application of our unique power to prosecute or not and for what have a has had a positive influence not only on the police but on judges above and on the community at large the next thing we had to do is show that the office would be nonpolitical and i was really lucky because an obvious candidate for chief criminal deputy was david byrne he had worked for the previous attorney general a democrat named john o'connell he was a well known democrat i pointed him chief criminal deputy and sent him out to talk with all the deputies first of all they were nervous so i wanted him to tell them they would not be fired they would be retained and actually the only new people in the office in one nine hundred seventy one where the boss him self the chief of staff and the three division chiefs so the story of how we professionalized the office is best known by those who actually experienced it and that includes the carry over deputies new hires over the next few years but they were there were obvious things we did we looked for and promoted talent from within we interviewed at law schools where a recruiting prosecutor had never darken the placement office door we hired and promoted women who were now beginning to study law in increasing numbers in crowd in contrast to my law school class a few years earlier which had twelve women and five hundred forty men i now want to emphasize that our justice model means not only treating everyone equally and prosecuting all good cases regarding the regardless of politics it means the prosecutor is a key player in the justice reform efforts and should be active in that pursuit it's not enough for the prosecutor to sit and wait for the police to bring a case and decide yes or no on the prosecution and go on to the next case the prosecutor should engage in public debate we were active in the limpia on legislative battles and valving juvenile justice and sentencing reform but after i left after two terms what i had done pales by comparison to what normal and did and what dan sadder still does maling was in a limpia during every session leading the fight for justice reform he played special attention to the victims of crime and in murder cases actually got to know the families personally each time a new african american minister moved to seattle norm called him to welcome him to town and they were all hymns in those days more recently dan said a bird has been a national reform leader working out things that would never imagine was would be of concern to the prosecuting attorney school discipline policies were easy expulsion can propel a kid down the wrong path law enforcement assisted diversion which the national effort called lead works working with the police t defense attorneys and others to find alternatives to incarceration for early offenders and finally taking another look at those who are serving life sentences in walla walla under the three strikes law that was  inactive back in the tough on crime one nine hundred eighty s now dan is joining clemency petitions for worthy cases urging the governor to do that recently saddlebred was invited to a dinner in new york hosted by entertainer john legend who founded something called free america a nonprofit aimed at finding ways to move our country out of what has been called the era of mass incarceration so these king county initiatives have had a big impact twenty years ago we contributed about one third of the state inmates for drug crimes today it's about seven percent because of this the percentage of inmates serving sentences for drug crimes in washington is correction institutions has fallen from nearly twenty five percent to ten percent over these years my final point is to really emphasize that the public prosecutor is the natural leader in criminal justice reform john legend understood this when he convened his new york dinner public anguish over ferguson baltimore staten island and now chicago and those all the other tragedies in between can't be a racist but convincing prosecutors all over the country to become active reformers like dan snyder berg is the best way forward it's step by step it will take years but it provides hope and a way to move the reform discussion onto a positive path thank you very much you i hope you approve of your picture yes thank you very much it's page one twenty four i read your book all right and it's very interesting and i would everyone to get a copy of but let me ask you with the gift of hindsight do you now agree with the a c l u that the prosecute there has a conflict of interest in dealing with potential police criminal conduct because the two work so closely together that's a very good question lam you're very well qualified person to ask that question the problem is that the prosecutor has the primary responsibility to decide on charging of any person or that's a police officer or somebody else in the in the modern era as the book points out it's much more difficult to respond to responsibly charge a police officer because of the new ingredient in convicting a police officer the malice ingredient so  don't think it's a conflict of interest but i think it creates a huge problem to explain your decision whatever it whichever it is it is you know we went both ways on that we were praised by the a c l u and you and others for for certain cases we were denounced for others so it depends on how you define conflict of interest the problem is that nobody else can do this the prosecutor is the only one oh i i agree with that i was primarily talking about the  the police investigate the shooting and then the prosecutor decides whether to prosecute and carol used to use it as a white watch and in fact my agenda was different from yours that's why i did that race because i knew you and he would not punch i'm ok but i'm such a gentleman actually lem lamb you served a huge purpose in that election by tearing him apart ok but chris what i'm really concerned with for example you said in your book that the fact that you may not prevail in a prosecution would not  deter you from bringing charges and that was admirable and then you now before this great audience and i like to see the great hear you praise stand sad over and we had that clear case of john chris yeah i heard howard i have a historical question glad to hear that not too historical but it's not current in one thousand nine hundred eight the why me massacre right and occurred in the i believe in the fall and we my family and i were just leaving town so we weren't able to stay around for that for how it evolved but there was great shock that there were gambling clubs down in the id and was that a shock was that part of police corruption were there payoffs to turn a blind eye toward that type of activity i don't think so i'm not an expert on that was after my time i think that was a completely illegal and none activity within that community and it was like gangs it was it was not something that was subject to legal control but i don't know i don't think though that the example would have been before the payoff system ended that would have been a license activity by the city and the police would have tolerated i don't think that was the case you very much you're welcome anybody else come up to the front because i can't see anybody wh a i'm on the side i'm sorry i got to go both ways or why is it they hardly ever prosecute perjury for police officers like when they're even when they find out they're covering it up for other officers was that they later prosecuted for perjury i don't know the answer to that perjury means lying in an official place like you've taken an oath and you're in a court or something i don't know if that applies to a or something else and you must have a specific case in mind i don't know about those i gree that a law a public official whether it's a police officer or somebody else who does something morally wrong like that is should be dealt with in some way whether it's being prosecutor dismissed or been disciplined or whatever like that like whenever the police officers are whistleblowers against other police officers the always usually punished for it that should not be that in fact the whole our whole police department which i'm not really an expert on at all anymore is as you know been under review and under a federal  mandate with someone named to really watch the reforms in approve of them and so on that's all going on in their arguments about the speed of it and other  things but the whole idea is that a public agency like a police department even though it's quezon military like police departments are should be open and subject to review beginning of the end of it i'm working now and going here in the front working on an op ed which you're going to try to get published in the new york times because we're really trying to make this book get become part of the national debate because the issues are happening over and over again and the point of the op ed will be that who what was the prosecuting attorney doing knowing that there was a tape of this episode knowing that there was another tape from a burger  king and doing nothing the prosecutor is the one person who can charge someone with a crime and this is not the police chief it's not the mayor all of the efforts are now focusing on the mayor and the police chief but i'm waiting for someone to say to people thought it was too easy to convict a police officer and this will go back and forth i happen to think the current statue which is the most limited in the country is too limited and it should be the new head of the police academy says that we should be guardians not warriors and to me that's a really important thing in the culture of a police department so when someone behaves like officer burke did  that's pretty close to criminal conduct without this malice ingredient so i think lamb is right that statute is now too limited steve chris as someone you hired out of law school  and having participated in the prosecutor's office in the late seventy's i wonder to what extent when did we miss it the sort of war on crime and the war on drugs really was having such a disparate impact in terms of racial justice and to the extent to which the crack cocaine became such a huge scourge well coke you know regular powdered cocaine you know was not prosecuted because generally it happened in people's homes as opposed to out on the streets how did we miss it terms of the levels of incarceration and the impact it's had on racial justice in this country i don't know about that particular question i think the eighty's was a time of tough on crime three strikes and all that much too far because the some of the people in walla walla for life their third felony might have been a third degree assault so that's why i think it's good for saturday to be reviewing those things and seeing as part of his duty this whole mass incarceration thing has many elements drug crimes as one that's another one  urge there's a wonderful article in the current new york review of books that sent the subscribes to and by the president of harvard drew gilpin faust all about the whole race issue and it's not just about criminal things it's very deep an interesting and it's just it's a refreshing way of looking at this so that we don't think we've solved something and where it's over with this is very incoherent into the fabric of this country it's there and this particular thing you're talking about the different kinds of cocaine is i guess an illustration of that thanks yes i wanted to ask you a series of questions and i wanted to touch on the racial lisa could you talk about how to fix that but where do we where do we go because it seems like our police officers are mostly white the criminals are mostly black it's generally not because there were people than anyone else how do you go about fixing that problem especially in seattle where well seattle's every city in every jurisdiction is different you're reading about the baltimore case right now were a majority of the population is black and the jury now in this case involving the first of the police officers to be charged is i think eight blacks and four whites and a majority of women i don't know where the mixture goes there nine blacks eight women so that's a wholly different community are you want the police department and just like you want the government to reflect the population and i'm not sure the ratio is in seattle police department i think are african american percentage in the cities like eight or nine percent so it's completely different for baltimore the real problem is the culture of a police department who wants to be a police officer who's now the chairman of the city council i was a police officer would be interesting to hear what he would have to say about why he became a police officer i think we want people to become police officers because they want to serve the community by guarding the community against violence and that's why i like to rars dichotomy of guardian versus warrior and when you see some of these tapes a police officer shooting young black man who are running away it's the police officer comes out of the car and freezes into a like a vietnam era warrior mode and that's i think that's a cultural and a training problem it'll take a long time to deal with that but i think i mean i'm not an expert on police reform but that's what i think do you think that over military station of the mill the police force has led to that problem you mean the all the surplus military equipment in the great armored vehicles i don't know about that like to play video games tend to be warrior types and less guardian types i don't know i have a grandson there himself but his are mostly about world war two japanese airplanes so it's a different thing but i think the i don't know about the equipment thing i mean that's a whole different issue i think it's much more about the people who are in the force and the people who are coming into the force and the people who are leading them and what models are they provide it's frank never shows up i'm very proud he was a hero of the garfield track team in my age and i was curious i think college churchill was pretty active in your day did you have run ins with him well there are two of them you know  yes but not fortunately i didn't directly he was indicted by stan picken for some things and from that grand jury but the trial was in spokane the only way he kind of got close to what we were doing is because the pinball operation was so lucrative to the people who had the master license he was contesting the license to the far west novelties which was been psyche's organization and there was a small war about that there were some car bombings and some other things that never really led to much but it kind of made the point to me that you know what we say the tolerance policy keeps out the mafia a lot about this local warfare that's going on with car bombings so i really don't know much about the colic or chairs they seemed once they didn't get into that business he turned to strip clubs and as you know that became another city council scandal but i'm not an expert on like or geos or more city or head and  county thing well it was just they i think they are they were professional criminals and racketeers who wanted to find illegal business is that could make them a lot of money and figure out how to protect them chris yes  thankfully no no i don't i you know i i really did things like writing letters so there's a lot of that sort of thing but i never kept a personal diary i had like i had a calendar book but not a not where i'd sit down at the end of every day and write down what i thought the other question was given the special stuff of the pinball king that have you worried about your own personal safety and that of your family and if so did you take any steps to protect them that's  that question comes up every time in these audiences and no we never had a threat the closest thing we had was someone set fire to the house i was living in before cindy i remarried with some other bachelors in magnolia and it was great fun for me because one of the things i inherited from chuck carroll was a a county car a nine hundred sixty seven pontiac bonneville called the brown bomber and it had a recessed lights in the grille red flashing lights and it had a siren and so when we got the word that the house was on fire i jumped in the car with richard allison my chief of staff we raced to seattle sounding the siren look see this brown car with no lights flashing cept in the grill and it was great fun going out there turned out to be the seattle times carrier it was a pyromaniac so it was not it was not what you might think but it i excited to hear about your work with stewardship partnership what has my due to that direction and what do you see happening in seattle and where your heart is thank you well that's where your heart is now is a very good way to put it i i had another poll of experience little experience was i don't dwell upon which is losing the primary for the u s senate nine hundred ninety eight and my family was fully supportive when around the stated in our old convertible waving in things but we were beaten two to one by linda smith in the republican primary which prove that voting is emotional not rational my argument was that we would nominate ellen creswell who'd been destroyed by gary locke so two years later we nominate someone from the far right against this new brand new senator patty murray what i call the ineffective  incumbent that couldn't happen again but it happened anyway after that was over in the primary my family advised me to do something else that was equally in gauging that i really cared about and so agriculture who hated the government but they were natural conservationists they took care of their land for obvious reasons and so i thought there needed to be an organization that took advantage of the fact that these conservative landowners were innately conservationists but they hated to be told what to do they hated the government they didn't want handouts to build a bridge between them so the resources that were available at various levels of government and private foundations could be applied to helping them do what they really wanted to do so that's why we created stewardship partners and fifteen years later it's been a great success thanks for the question ok thank you everybody how you thought about it as it was happening what the next step if you think there should be marijuana is something i have sort of had different positions on when i was a public official i was against  against any decriminalization on the simple argument that anything encourage further use by young people was a mistake on the other hand when we voted i voted for that and one of my friends in other u s attorney john mckay was very influential in  that i'm not saying we should go back but i'm saying there are some secondary issues that are really important that you know i'm not i'm sure i'm not sure it's good to be the first one that tries this like we in colorado are because i think there are some further issues of medical versus recreational and growing it and not growing it and how much you can possess but i don't know much about it and i've never tried it thank you audio underground railroad flow with the river gods gone troubled the spirit dancin among all free we still can't breed everything we know appall we've been forced to leave travel light ready to go instinctively we're all still runnin like these in the night following the north star we got away without lies for every time we were told you would not survive and then rose from the ashes to see new heights here we determined phoenix reborn with a mike and confined by time shot gun at the side we will rewrite tomorrow to defend black life the justify how they did humanize and torture are folks behind enemy lines media fills them with fear so they believe these lies like it's we had dilatation and not a plantation take one trip north and no let's have a look at angola it is pretty civil war self happening right now to make you want to burn every prison to the ground all with to my elders for the life our family hidden in pages that they wrote on in cages in coded language the racist underground railroad the starlight is to break the was it all starts inside and break the walls to all of the was in total gracious god i had the odds stacked against me i tried to pray the felt the urge to let it out with the pen be meditating these moments with devils who dance around me i'm sorry if i drift away but i'm just trying to survive in  product of my community practice all this patriarchy preaching all this unity to feel conflicted what it means to be free chasing after money what's the immigrant dream because lately america don't value what the immigrant brings they make you sing songs of pain and pray to the hymns of a blue eyed white skin but jesus was middle eastern said you dropping bombs on his brothers when they were sleeping past them i can breathe a life back to my soul i rather die than that you think i never write what i hold all these grievances and demons keep keep me from sleeping in the night i seek the light but the wiccan this was a product of my youth i'm selling product out the both of us pure then it's the truth never taught in front of me others i create from the light that reflects off of my retina projected to the speakers audio cinema media feeds your fears and get drunk on your tears breaking news breaking views thinking you don't need the truth just out here trying to find some peace of mind set out to people working harder than a nine to five college kids shackled to this debt like where we sold a lot violent sex sells money hungry politicians even if you climb the ladder mentally you stuck in prison justice for the people black lives matter oppressi builds anger watched the whole world shatter listen we came for peace but what was this you was one would feel empowered if you're holding a gun ferguson to palestine syria pakistan the movement is more than music even when we've gone