i'm going to do this poem is called charleen a louse and i think it's self explanatory but thank you to the staff so much for putting this on  say her name charleen allows i hear you thank you lena is what we called her her smile was bright like the sun have remember back in the day our grandmother used to call th struggle to take her last breath fighting not to leave her four children behind and did i mention she was three months pregnant and she was also the number of children that witnessed the police's misconception see she  bullet to her back stomach in chess she was one hundred pounds and yet the police called her a threat and what's going on what's going on we were in church when we received the call she was shot two officers one woman how could this be instantly felt as if i was living in one thousand nine hundred sixty three and let's make america great again by eliminating is indigenous people that are the majority do you really see the minorities money is power people we talk about equality but we aren't treated equal and no my target is white people this is a battle of good versus evil light against darkness love and hate way i think the system hit a home phone batter up they pull the trigger this isn't a game i hope they didn't just see my cousin as just another nigger go figure we can run nor can we heart high desert will come seek us and our bodies will find if you ever feel like you will be able to understand we have to stand up to the system we have to make a plan so i don't watching c n n as black bodies does seem to be the latest trend a trend set many years ago now being publicized private institutions and best and unions committed to oppression let's dissect the root of racism is conception all we are asking for is justice charleen allows a mother gone as we give another tolerate a senseless death and if you want us to breed then do me a favor and stop making us hold up every breast so let's say her name child lena allows thank you never body on katrina johnson and i just want to come to you tonight to offer a perspective from the family not the one that you hear or see on the news or in the our family on june eighteenth two thousand and seventeen our family member was gunned down in her home in front of three of her fo children when she called the police for help to report a burglary and that's all we knew and from that day trying to figure out what's true and what's not has been hard enough but then itself because you have to face the police putting out a narrative that dehumanizes and criminalizes your loved one before any investigation even starts and so it all automatically puts the family on the defense we're out here trying to grieve and we are not able to do that because we have to fight we have to fight to clear her name and we have to fight because she's not that person that is crazy as the media would have you she was a mom who loved her kids and who doesn't have issues i have issues everybody has issues but is sure that you should not be condemned to your death because you have issues there isn't a personality here that doesn't have issues so then you're trying to go up against  system that is designed to keep people oppressed and within that you're trying to seek justice but there is no justice in that system unless the whole system is dismantled and rebuilt us or my family we when i went to the deputy prosecuting attorney's office before the investigation was even complete they told no officer would be charged with my cousins killing i think to myself how can that be you don't even have all the evidence you haven't even gathered everything in it doesn't matter they have already come to a conclusion because they are investigating themselves so why would we get any just is out of a system that is investigating itself and so for us and for me personally i realize the only way that i am going to get justice is to fight and two five four policy changes police story form and so i got behind an initiative i nine forty four police accountability because without accountability you have nothing they will continue to kill our loved ones and blood will continue to be spilled in the streets unless we all get together even though it's not happening in your community right now you were not amused to it coming to your community it's not a white thing it's not a black thing it's it's everybody anybody is subject to be killed by the police whether one in child black or white because they do not have accountability and until we decide that we want to countability for everybody whether you be black or brown or y then there will be accountability for nobody and so my thing is we have to go within our communities and begin to educate people and we have to demand change your law enforcement isn't doing what you need them to do i guess you better vote for a better mayor you have to vote for change you cannot sit there and be upset and be disenfranchised but do nothing about it you have to want change you have to vote you have voice be heard linda your voice to the movement even though it's not your family member because the reality is if nothing changes it could be your family member you next and this is not of  group that you want to be a member of because the cost is too high traumatic or or belittling just disempowering it was definitely is not in the same type of scenario at all as it is to lose a family member  n my experience i think my be useful to this panel in so far as it it points to or it shows the the lengths that departments like the seattle police department but police departments around the country oh all go through to be able to stop dissent and protest and keep things as they are and and how toxic the environment is in those workplaces in police departments on december sixth two thousand and fourteen i attended a rally in march that was organized by women of color for systemic change  murderers who killed mike brown and eric garner and across the country people just were outraged and took to the streets since in seattle was no different after the demonstration there were a number of people who still wanted to voice their frustration and still wanted to march and show the city what it felt like to experience this injustice in the see it  and we continued our march through out the city throughout downtown to police kept kept picking us off one by one throughout the hour that we were marching into the early afternoon arresting in six people over the lawyers that the one of the officers who had been describing me talked about how they could put certain types of charges against me to be able to justify taking me down and stopping the demonstration and he it was with the help of patricia soley in the public defenders association over the course of months that the  but he uses it to justify my arrest and to justify the three recommendations of charges which that which states they gave me which was pedestrian interference with reckless endangerment and inciting a riot which the city of seattle realized that was a little too and they dropped pretty quickly but it took a few months for all to finally be put away  afterwards james bible and james bible law group approached me they've been doing fantastic work over the years and they said that this should not just be like oh i was i was ready to just accept it as something that just happens when there's nothing you can do about it something that's just par for the course but folks around me really encourage me to say take this on push back against this put this on the record let it be known and make sure they take notice and i'm grateful that they did because it's been really a really i think really empowering experience to be able to know that that there are people around me who support this kind of work that we do you know that we need to be able to department accountable i think one of the things that's really striking to me that we were talking about before the panel was just how willingly and able e the officers talked on their dash cam both about me but also about  other individuals to about native americans and saying completely disparaging things about them about protesters in general you think about the type of workplace and think about it what your workplace would be like if  occurrence where people just felt like a sudden you can do it's just completely it's completely horrific especially when you think about the fact that these departments and institutions promote themselves as being there to support the population it's completely not the case at all i think that there's a wholesale an accountability and they know it they know that they're not accountable and it just the type of environment that it takes to be able to have just flagrant racism it's supporting the status quo in propping it up and maintaining it they're not there to make things better there you keep things as they are and i think that creates all sorts of really really oppressive ideas that we all have to face because of it i think that there's a long ways to go for demanding real accountability but i'm excited that there are so many people here at this panel tonight because it will take it will take all of us organizing for the long term for the long and fighting together we can win a much better world than we have now but i'm grateful that this panel is here and that d taking place because we can win condolences to the members of the family here i know as the one year anniversary approaches it just gets harder to deal with the trauma and just know that you have a community here that supports the all and will do what we can to lift you up as this gets nearer and i think we just need to say it plainly that we have a system of jim crow or we could call it the new jim crow policing here in seattle and around the country this is a system that's brutalizing black and brown and native people men and women and i think that you can tell that from looking at the statistics when you see four hundred twelve people have been killed already this year by police almost a thousand people killed last year alone in the united states by by police officers and our society has a tendency to individualize problems that are in facts a stomach so whenever i raise these issues someone comes forward and says well not all cops are bad jesse right that's not the point that's not the question that we're we're talking about of course not every police officer has malice in their heart and wants to slaughter black and brown and native people some of them i mean we have people who are realizing the systemic nature of the police and wanting to do something about it but the problem is the system of policing is organized around brutality right it's organized around keeping black and brown and native and poor and working class people in line at all costs and mice my experience with the seattle police department illustrates that we don't have to philosophize about it let's just look step by step but what happened so i'm on the phone on martin luther king day and fifteen standing on the sidewalk at the end of a demonstration for martin luther king day and a police officer assaults me with pepper spray directly in the face and the eyes and the ears as i'm on the phone trying to coordinate with my mom a ride to my two year old son's birthday party ok now that assault was bad enough but if it was just a problem of individual police then we could handle that and deal with that the problem was that the office of professional accountability made the bold recommendation of a one day suspension without pay what would happen if i had assaulted her you wouldn't be seeing me right now i would still be behind bars right but for her accountability in this city means a one day suspension without pay actually it doesn't because the chief of police kathleen o'toole intervened in my case to make sure that that harsh penalty wasn't carried through she said that is far too much discipline in a race that from happening now if i hadn't had the incident captured on film there or there would have been no outcome for me at all but thankfully somebody caught it on video and because of that we were able to reach a settlement but let me tell you this a settlement is not just a settlement is not accountability i'm proud to say that i was able to use that settlement though to start the black education matters student activist award and now every year i give away a thousand dollars to deserving youth who are fighting against the school to prison pipeline against police brutality and for racial justice in this city me just say well my case receives some attention in this city and around the country too often there's so many cases that don't receive any attention and especially happens when we're talking about women who are the victims of police brutality right and we need to understand that and that's why i jumped into organizing and supporting the case of charlie in the law and fighting for justice and that's why the night she was killed i went and reached out to the family to meet you all to see what we could do to help and the first thing i thought we could do was this earlier that year we'd have in the schools called black lives matter a school and we had gotten three thousand shirts that said black lives matter how her name to the teachers of the seattle public schools and what we did is in two days of charley and murder by the police we were able to get hundreds of teachers to come back to school wearing those shirts in solidarity lot which is one of the things i'm most proud of ever having been a part of because when you read those despicable disparaging remarks about her in the newspaper trying to dehumanizer trying to say she is outside of our community that she's not worthy of our love and our respect this change the narrative now they had to talk about her as a mother of kids in the seattle public schools and the teachers in seattle reaching out and embracing her as part of the community but too many women don't care for a while for the brutality they experience and we should remember the names of jacqueline slayer's a pregnant mother who was shot to death by tacoma police officers on january twenty eighth two thousand and sixteen we should remember before her the name of renee davis a twenty three year old pregnant mother who was a native american woman who was five months pregnant and killed by two king county sheriff's office on officers and indian reservation we should remember the name of brooks i just learned about her couple weeks she's a thirty three year old pregnant woman and she was driving her eleven year old kid to school in seattle in a november morning when a police officer stopped her gave her a ticket and told her to sign the ticket well she didn't want to sign the ticket because she thought that would be an admission of guilt so the officer deemed her combative like they did to sandra bland and this officer tase church several times her pregnant body of lurching so hard she fell out of the car  and i just want to recommend to everybody that you read this book invisible no more it's called police violence against black women and women of color that traces the history of this police violence from from slavery through jim crow till today against black and brown bodies the two often go unnoticed and i just want to end by saying that these experiences show that i wasn't just assaulted by a specific officer and these women were assaulted by a specific officer they were assaulted by a system of policing that is completely out of control and we need to i think christine as katrina we need a complete dismantling of this system and i think in a media fight that we need to look at is a total disarming of the police department to stop this this what's really mass murder of communities of color in this country thank you police violence particularly why white police officers all too often shoot and kill on armed people of color young people poor people people of color and a little bit later we're going to shift gears i'm sure and start talking about what we can do about these things we must have that conversation but i couldn't agree more that what we're looking at is a profound systemic challenge in reforming police or abolishing police issues that deserve consideration conversation but i think there  are a small number of reasons that most of us can agree help to explain why we see so much of this at the top of my list is that there are too many police officers of all colors but principally white who do not play sufficient value on the sanctity of human life they simply do not and that they have been taught and told this is the way to be you see somebody with a knife you see somebody who may have a gun you see somebody who you think is a threat to you that will keep you from going home at the end of your shift to your family and your loved ones then you better take action or you won't be here for that to happen so we wind up i think with a situation in which number one too many officers do not place the protection m preservation of human life as their number one priority talk to a couple a couple of months ago and he said chief i have a montra every time i hit the streets i tell myself nobody dies tonight nobody dies tonight i don't i'm going to make it home to my family but every single person i encounter is going to survive that encounter it's a mentality it's an attitude it doesn't suggest a weakness on the contrary it suggests a real strength of certainly of character and i did say and want to repeat that police officers are doing what they've been taught to do here is one problem we think of teaching or instruction or training as taking place in the academy and certainly it does a much improvement is needed there generally across the board throughout the country but the most powerful training does not take place in a classroom it takes place in the front seat of a police car or in the locker room where a senior cop tells a junior cop this is how we do it in this city and that gets to the culture which is a function of the system of function of a paramilitary barrack radek structure of american law enforcement which we have to acknowledge comes from a very tainted history from the very beginning police in our society have been aligned with tainted ideologies have been aligned with a belief that there are inferior people that there are criminals that there are mentally ill people that there are people who don't look like me or perhaps talk like me or dress like me and so we wind up with this this situation in which police officers are viewing the community as the enemy it don't fight a war without an enemy you don't fight a war without propaganda and as we know all too painfully you don't fight a war without weapons weapons of destruction weapons that take lives there's another issue that must be addressed and it must be addressed with all the courage and the political will that we muster and that is we cannot afford scared cops frighten cops are impulsive cops they literally don't see straight fear does that to us it affects our perception and then it affects our judgment and so we get an awful lot of horrific situations that are the direct result of unmanaged fear on the part of police officers combine that with these other factors and you've got a real problem a police officer who believes that anybody who happens to be holding a knife is a lethal threat to his or her personal safety so i think it's vital that we understand that scared cops are dangerous cops fear is not a socially acceptable emotion in the cop culture so there's a lot of compensating going on there are a lot of police officers talking tougher than they genuinely feel a lot of police officers using horrific language to talk to their fellow citizens because they're really afraid of their fellow citizens and they think that by screaming at them yelling at them for lando cast steel in minnesota or like one mcdonald in chicago or walter scott and north charleston south south carolina just screaming at people and eventually using lethal force where no force whatsoever is justified to those that i mentioned in my estimation my frame of reference were cold blooded murders on the part of people who were the uniform that i used to wear it's important i think that we all understand one fundamental tenet of policing as it should be before we get into our our prescriptions and that is that the police and america belong to the people not the other way around and too many officers convey this attitude in many of their contacts were the cops and you're not and that attitude that mentality is destructive to everyone including those people who wear those uniforms thank you very much no one i know will hear from alex but these close thank you and i want to say that i'm just thrilled to be here in seattle and have some some friends in the audience as my first time out here and  super appreciation to the red may folks who facilitated my being here so it's very inspiring to hear the fight back but it's also you know very moving the reason that we have to be here and we should always keep that balance in mind and when i think about the fight back and i see the fight back here happening here and all across the country i'm traveling all across the country and i've been doing this work for almost thirty years and i've seen a lot of cycles of agree just police abuse community mobilization some reforms demobil and then more police abuse and the cycle continues and we don't always do a very good job of breaking out of it so we've got to ask some tough questions about what do we mean by police reform yeah we want to see police officers held accountable but what does that mean what would that really look like everyone was so excited when the d a in baltimore indicted those officers were going to get some justice did we get any justice did any police officers go to jail to policing in baltimore change in any meaningful way no it did not know it did not in new york when amadu deol was killed in the vestibule of his building for pulling out his wallet when the cops ran up to him in the middle of the nih massive mobilization huge direct action campaign chut down police headquarters for weeks what was the demand indict the officers they were indicted found not guilty nothing changed the movement was demobilized these weren't real reforms and they're not going to be possible because they misunderstand the nature of policing policing is not the kind of institution that can be fixed by putting a few police officers on trial first of all the system is designed not to hold them accountable the legal systems are created to allow exactly these behaviors and in the very rare cajun when an officer is caught acting in such an egregious fashion that they are the exception they become the exception that proves the rule in the sense that the whole institution jettisons them and says well that has nothing to do with what we do and therefore it's no real reflection on us and therefore there's nothing really that we have to change except to get rid of that one officer what about the nature of policing itself don't can we just fix policing with some community policing some deescalation training put some body cameras on have some implicit bias training that's my favorite implicit bias training this is the idea that people have these unconscious biases that we can measure through so through laboratory psychological testing and we put people in front of monitors with little buttons and we get these little micro differences and that if we could just train officers to be aware of their unconscious unintentional bias that this would help in the killing of unarmed black people but of course as jorge pointed out we don't have a problem of implicit bias we have a problem of  this is not true so that when we look for racism in american policing we sure find it when we see the e mails when we get access to the chat rooms where i when we find the white supremacist tattoos underneath the uniforms that stuff is all out there and there's nothing implicit about it but this does not mean that all police officers have to be thought of as racist individuals because that's just clearly not true i've spent a career working with police officers and it's just not true and and in a place like new york a majority of police officers are nonwhite in washington d c in baltimore and detroit and philadelphia but no one is holding up those police departments as models of perfect policing with no problems of racialized policing because it's not about just the bias of an individual police officer it's about the fundamental mission that we've given the police implicit bias is the perfect liberal solution to the problems of policing because it allows politicians to say they're doing something about the race problem in a way that no one is responsible for it was all a big misunderstanding i know you didn't mean it it was an accident and we're just could you please not kill any more black people and we'll all be much happier thank you very much no the problems of racism are about the mission we've given police a totally professional unbiased community driven low level drug arrest is still going to ruin someone's life for no damn good reason we've had a war on drugs for forty years drugs are cheaper easier to get and of more greater potency than they've ever been the war on drugs has never had anything to do with public health or public safety it's about a cynical toxic politics of race the mobilization of white fear and resentment through the lens of a moralistic crusade around drugs that just drives overdoses death mass criminalization so if we want to do something about the problems of policing we need to quit tinkering with technocratic fixes body cameras and we need to ask why we've turned every problem in our communities over to the police to solve or perhaps more importantly why we've allowed our elected officials to frame every problem in our communities as a problem that can only be solved by policing that's the real issue for bringing us together with this panel and i want to offer my condolences to the family of charlene a lot i got involved directly not just as a professor or writer about this but as an activist in albuquerque in two thousand four when just months before ferguson police killed james killed mike brown albuquerque police killed james boyd and the book that i just recently co wrote with tyler well placed a field guide you know i made made certain that we released it on the fourth anniversary of james boyd's murder and then i was involved as an activist but i was also trying to focus specifically on the fear i had in the wake of the murder of james boyd by albuquerque police that the forces of police reform hundred seventy albuquerque police killed more people per capita than any department in the united states and then the outrage produced all these reform measures like an absolutely brand new police oversight commission that was unlike any other in united states where they raise training and hiring standards and then the police promptly killed twenty three people in the next three years so increased the amount of people that they were killing and you know and so i was writing and i was talking facts i was saying you know look in in two thousand and fourteen the albuquerque police department committed twenty one percent of all homicides in the city of albuquerque and i and i pointed out that you know it doesn't matter all these reform measures that we were in acting didn't make a difference was saying we've had generations of efforts to reform police and it's and then i started to think what is it exactly that makes police reform so compelling as an option when all empirical evidence demonstrates that it doesn't actually transform police and so we started to pay attention to the rhetoric the way that police talk and the way that we and including activists professors talk about police and i realized a couple things and i think these are important it's what my book police feel god tries to get at and there's three things that i want to mention the time i have one is that we are offered no alternative to police every single person in this room it's probably been a point in your life when you've been in trouble when you feared for your life or your safety or your loved ones safety and who do you have to turn for help what institution institutions do we have in our communities that are alternatives to police we don't have most of the time we don't have those institutions secondly we're raised i mean listen officer friendly is not just a joke right that's an actual program the chicago police department created to put i mean probably half the people in this room are read to in school by cops right or are you into coffee with a cop or are you at the state fair and a cop gave your kid stickers right we dare as another example the police are are are we're told as a very young age that police are the thin blue line and this is a real this is a metaphor that police themselves really hold dear to right and it's important one what is the thin blue line right it is police and it is a line between civilization and savagery and it is police that literally is this line it is a metaphor but for police it's not a metaphor and it's thin it is a thin line and police are always under attack they're always confronting threats and everything is an emergency this is how police tell their story to your children but you know what the most important thing in this is the third one i talk about is that we have no  language to talk about police that isn't given to us by police the police don't just patrol our streets they portrayed the language we have to talk about cops every single one of us in here has a cop in our head right that that we have to fight against that wants to see every person as a possible threat that wants to conceive of every possible circumstance as a as an emergency and it's so it's a which that that law endorses and that explains situations that we've talked about in this panel what why don't that cop by does not come get arrested why don't they get fired from the force because that cop is the only cop capable of identifying who's a threat what's a threat what is an emergency they have the discretion to make all of those decisions it doesn't matter if you have a weapon if the cop thinks you have a weapon that's the lawful decision by the cop so what do we do then because if we if we are using the language that cops give us to talk about alternatives to cops on the road leads us to more cops it's not an accident that every police reform process in every city i've ever looked at results in more cops more cops more weapons more equipment more cops why is that because we don't have that language and so we need to start our own language and so the book attempts to pull back the curtain and explain what is discretion really mean what is what is we actually redefine these these words and these concepts in a way that gives us collectively a language to talk about real alternatives to policing that have nothing to do about police reform because police reform is not about cops police reform is about you right police reform is an effort to restore legitimacy in police in times of crisis and you are the problem because you don't trust the cops it's your lack of free from police that constitutes the crisis for police and police reform is  solution to your lack of faith from police so when we talk about police reform we're talking in the language that serves the interest of the institution that guarantees the inequality and racism we've been family and actually all those who have been impacted by police violence what i thought i would do with my time is talk a little bit about some of the things that we keep seeing as the problems that arise behind the police violence that takes place  touch on a few of the statistics in washington state and what some of the efforts have been to make change around how policing is happening here and then mention a little bit about oversight if i don't run a i don't get like that thirty second  by the time i get there so there are three big things that just keep showing up every time we look at these incidences where there's been excessive use of force and lethal force so it's racially biased policing right it is often a crisis intervention failure either because there was a lack of sufficient training or the training didn't do the job right particularly where there are issues of mental health and disability with the person who was who was killed and then of course just excessive use of force so these things keep showing up together in combination where we are we see lethality at the him police so in seattle as many of you probably know there was back in i guess about twenty eleven so many incidences one after another really kind of culminated with the police shooting of john t williams the native carver hard of hearing it was asked to put down is carving knife he didn't do it he was shot and killed and so many of these things happened in rapid succession that several civil rights organizations and community organizations along with the a c l u put together a letter to the department of justice to have them come out and investigate the seattle police department and that was at a time when the department of justice was kind of a resource for that right because that's not the case now right they're very clear right now that they are not about intervening in police's lawful right to do what they do so they came in the seattle police were under a monitor and a court process for several years which actually just in i guess about october of twenty seventeen was reduced to compliance monitoring so less attention to what they're doing but in sort of a maintenance phase like so basically the decision the finding was they have their substantially in compliance with all the things we want them to do and in fact there were changes that had happened with seattle police there was a finding by the monitor that there's a reduction in use of force because the department of justice was clear there is excessive use of force with seattle police but they found a reduction they put a lot of things in place and so i guess about april of twenty seventeen the monitor said we're making a lot of progress and at no expense to police there's no harm that's happening in the community but then as you all know in june of twenty seventeen is when the police shot and killed charlie charlie in a liles and it was such a  l moment right because we see that notwithstanding all the things that have happened this could still happen a woman could call the police for help in the presence of her children be shot and killed and so this is where we know that you know as they have talked about police reform isn't so simple as changing a few rules right so clearly there is a need for massive culture change in policing and it's been spoken to a little bit here so far because police like all of us are subject to structure structural racism right that is absolutely present and it's not something that changes overnight when we look at steele which has who was also mentioned earlier today you know he'd been pulled over thirty one times and hit with sixty three traffic charges before that fatal encounter and he actually had zero other criminal record apart from the traffic charges that happened because he was pulled over all all the time right so it's a classic case of driving while black it was nothing but that right and that ended up in the end of his life and those police officers were not held accountable and that's not unusual because the statistics and the record are pretty clear that black and brown black and brown people are disproportionately pulled over and some of that is implicit bias and a lot of that is explicit bias right so here in washington state i just want to show tell you a little bit about where we have gone with the numbers right so in twenty fifteen there were sixteen fatal police shooting in twenty sixteen so those twenty fifteen in twenty sixteen there were twenty six in washington state in twenty seven hundred thirty eight so that is a highly problematic rise and so we're looking at this culture where there's racially biased policing looking at a culture of violence the militarization of policing these things are on the rise these fatalities represent the lives of someone people who are loved right they were loved by their families they loved other people it is just an absolute loss of humanity that's deeply painful so one of the things that happened with regard to this move toward accountability and training isn't katrina already referenced this right so many family members who have been impacted by police violence and community members came together and wrote initiative nine forty and that was a community led effort to try to put some changes in place in washington state and the a c l u is proud to support and join that and the legislature has passed it but it's really only kind of a beginning step but what i want to tell you is the thing about washington state was in our law a police officer couldn't be held accountable unless there was a finding of malice and that's really hard to do because it basically got to have somebody say i'm going to kill somebody right now and then do it right because apart from that you're really not going to show that and so one of the key things that nine forty did was take that language out of our law and change the standard so it's in a check to good faith standard that a reasonable officer in that situation would feel that there was a need for that level of force it also put in place independent investigation which is extremely critical and increase the training but that is as i'm sure you've gathered from hearing all from all these folks are really beginning place but it's an important place and that was the community that made that happen so we'll say that the legislature passed it there is some litigation going on right now related to whether it's going to stand you'll have to stay tuned for that i'm not going to go into all the legalities of it but we hope that it will be upheld if not it'll be on the ballot and you'll hear about that because we're going to need you to vote to lift that up i think the last thing i want to save just very quickly is that another thing that has happened in certainly were that we have here in seattle and king county is community oversight bodies and so that's also a good start it's not all of what we need it to be just yet probably in terms of how much power those bodies have but in seattle basically out of d o j process we've got this c l community police commission and in king county there's the office of law enforcement oversight and those are professionally staffed into teas that have community members who come general so there's a lot of those bodies in place to help with accountability and we'll talk more about that because i'm sure there's plenty to question about how to make that really actually show up in an effective way for  people i was going to actually comment because i had heard about the officer who's who says no one dies today and i think that issue of sanctity of life which arose out of president obama's commission is really a big piece of the key right now we don't have that right we don't have that idea from all police officers that no one should die today and that life is sacred and needs to be upheld and that's the place that we have to get to so i'll stop there  the term murder applies it's certainly happened to him anyone who sees that videotape of him walking with his carving knife crossing the street the officer gets out of his car ask him drop the knife and cynical about it and rightfully so they've been studying it as well so hopefully we can have some discussions about that just how do we whole police officers accountable another question is why is it that the truth doesn't come out until  state that the police had and that's the only reason that came out the guy shot sixteen times been raised here as well why is it that mental illness is such a factor in police how could that be dealt with better and of course it doesn't take a genius to realize that why do you send somebody out with a gun to deal with someone who has a mental illness the cops don't know how to deal with mental illness ok but they've got guns so mentioned here as well so this whole business of the war on drugs and that is why we're killing people and the militarization of the police as i'm sure all of our panelists know about and we see because we've got campus cops were walking around with guns you need guns on a college campus i don't know except to harass black males because on every college campus where we've had guns black males are usually been the ones who get accost it by the cops and here's one that i know just is going to deal with so what about the school to prison pipeline and you know as i said we all know about the number of kids who get expelled for whatever reason when black kids are acting out the way white kids we can talk about