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 A View From the Street: Police Leaders Share Their Perspectives on Urgent Policy and Research Issues Archival Notice
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June 1, 2010
Your browser does not support the audio element.1 of 4: A View From the Street: Police Leaders Share Their Perspectives on Urgent Policy & Research Issues Facing Law Enforcement in 2010 & Beyond, Charles Wellford, Ph. D., Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland
      Your browser does not support the audio element.2 of 4: A View From the Street: Police Leaders Share Their Perspectives on Urgent Policy & Research Issues Facing Law Enforcement in 2010 & Beyond, Stephanie Stoiloff, Senior Police Bureau Commander, Miami-Dade Police Department, Miami
      Your browser does not support the audio element.3 of 4: A View From the Street: Police Leaders Share Their Perspectives on Urgent Policy & Research Issues Facing Law Enforcement in 2010 & Beyond, J. Michael Ward II, Chief, Alexandria Police Department, Ky.
      Your browser does not support the audio element.4 of 4: A View From the Street: Police Leaders Share Their Perspectives on Urgent Policy & Research Issues Facing Law Enforcement in 2010 & Beyond, Bernard K. Melekian, Director, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services
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Speakers
        Charles Wellford, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland; and Co-Chair, Research Advisory Committee, International Association of Chiefs of Police, Alexandria, Va.;               Stephanie Stoiloff, Bureau Commander, Miami Dade Police Department, Fla.;               J. Michael Ward II, Chief, Alexandria Police Department, Alexandria, Ky.;               Bernard K. Melekian, Director, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.
Sponsored by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and its Research Advisory Committee (RAC), this panel unites law enforcement leaders from across the country to discuss their policy and research concerns. Charles Wellford, IACP RAC co-chair and University of Maryland professor, will facilitate the panel. Presenters will discuss urgent policing issues that merit ongoing research, law enforcement and academic research partnerships, and how research can and does affect agency policy and operations.
  
  
          Transcript
**Charles Wellford:** It's clear that, you know, law enforcement has many, many issues that it needs to address and can be addressing.

So we continue this today with a panel that is addressing this same topic, what does law enforcement want researchers to focus on, what are the key research issues, and we have an excellent group of people here. Stephanie Stoiloff who you've seen in the materials is the commander of the Forensics Division in the Miami Dade department, covers the technology, forensics side. Bernie Melekian is here with a long background, a long history of work in policing in San Diego and now more recently being appointed by President Obama as the director of the Community Oriented Policing office. And Mike Ward, chief of police in Alexandria, to bring the perspective of smaller agencies to this discussion, as you know, 20,000 agencies in the United States, most of them small by any definition of that, and too often our research programs tend to be focused on issues of importance to larger agencies without the consideration of how to translate that into the smaller agency perspective, so we've asked Mike to address that.

**Stephanie Stoiloff:** OK. Well, I have to tell you that I am commander of Forensic Services Bureau for Miami Dade Police Department. I am a member of the IACP Forensic Committee, but when asked to present some of the items in the research topics, you know, it's a little daunting when my world is all about DNA and forensics and crime scene, but there are topics that are relevant to everyone, you know, whether it's in the Forensics Services Bureau or whether it's in a small town police department, whether it's in a large police agency. So I thought, well, what are the issues that really are affecting.

I was trying to think of what would be relevant to you, and I thought, well, one thing I have to do is present something that isn't too technological because I'm going to lose everybody in the first three seconds; your eyes glaze over — it's the scientist in me — or I'll also give you an option of something high tech that we've done that's been very successful.

So what are we all responsible for? How to protect our officers, how to provide the best service and investigation, how to utilize either the latest research or technology to improve the operational efficiency. And we all know that not everything translates down to every agency. So some of these things are a little bit difficult.

So there's two types of solutions. One would be not based on technology but based on something you've seen somewhere else and you want to bring to your agency;, how do you do that. Two, technology based; everybody wants to run out and get the latest technology. Those of you who are computer savvy know you don't run out and get Version 1.0. You wait for like 2.0 to come out, so somebody else can work out the kinks.

So the first problem — and this is huge in Miami. Mike and I were talking earlier that guns aren't so much of a big deal for a small town, but it's huge for Miami. So we have a problem if there's guns on the street. This is my low- tech solution example.

We do something called “Gun Bounty.” Any of you familiar with that? This is not a gun buyback. OK. So I have bought a few things with me today to show you, but this is what we do. May 24, 2007, the mayor authorized a partnership with the department, our department, and with Crime Stoppers to develop the Gun Bounty Program. They said, well, what, you know, really how successful this is going to be. There was other models, and this is a situation where we based it on something else that had already been done, and we said we think we can make it better. A thousand-dollar reward for turning in someone with an illegal gun, meaning you're going to make the arrest. The goal here is to remove those weapons from the street.

So there's information they give out, the Crime Stopper number. Once the person is given the information that leads to a successful arrest, they're eligible for a thousand-dollar reward. All calls remain confidential, and it's completely anonymous if you wish to remain so.

So let's talk about this. What's the difference between this and a buyback? Well, with a buyback, there's no anonymity. It's certainly not guaranteed. You're trading in a gun for money, and there's no anonymity involved there.

There's no requirement of a reward, but imagine the success as you're going to see that we've had once you ensure complete anonymity and once you offer $1,000.

June 2007 through May 2010, 264 arrests have been made, 432 guns. Now, I don't know how you feel about this, but we have — I get about — in the bureau, we get about 3,300 gun cases per year, 80 high-powered rifles like the AKs we obtained from these. All of these guns then go to the lab and are test-fired for comparison to evidence that's collected on the street. Three hundred and twelve semiautos and revolvers, 40 shotguns, I mean, this is just by offering — we have something, and this is what it looks like. It looks like a little — like a stack. So you have a bill like this. This is how they do their advertisement, $1,000, and they get the arrest.

Crimes solved. I know in the back, you probably can't see this, but it's three homicides; 11 robberies; two home invasions that they foiled; 34 commercial burglaries, one residential; 114 additional arrests for other offenses; 59 stolen firearms recovered in addition to the arrest made for the Gun Bounty; one immigration hold; two dealings selling without a license; 10 arrested for outstanding warrants. That's just the crimes solved.

Then you have property seized. We all know how good that is because the property seized and that money goes back into general fund.

Narcotics valued at over $2.2 million. Currency, well, you can read the rest.

The best part is 10 Gun Bounty cases have been federally prosecuted; seven are closed; all subjects have been sentenced to an average of 14 years in federal prison, all because of a thousand-dollar offer.

So how do you market this? I mean, again, this is as low tech as it gets. Gun Bounty information is distributed in neighborhoods. It's to businesses on a daily basis. They distribute monthly at community events. They distribute within 24 hours in areas where a shooting has occurred, and, well, in Miami, there's a lot of those. The material is dispersed through media, everything you can think of. Every inmate who is released gets one of these, one of these “how to get a stack.”

That's the low tech, but look how far that's gone. Now, other agencies within the United States have actually done the Gun Bounty Program, but nobody has had the success that we've had. We're not really sure why ours has taken off and why ours is so much different, but we've made great, great strides and been recognized for this across the country.

Okay. So now we're going to go to the high-tech solution. What's the other problem? A big problem that you have, whether big or small agency, how do you make a positive ID? Because, well, most people are very fond of giving aka's you have no way to verify. So we need a way to do a positive ID on the street.

Our solution was mobile AFIS. Mobile, what it does is it gives them the ability in the field, on the street to make a positive ID. It provides the user with the ability to quickly establish the individual's identity. Why? You need to know if this guy's got a warrant. You need to know if it's who he says he is.

We had two recent occasions. One was an officer beating. We had an officer — he had pulled and made a traffic stop, pulled over two people. The woman was taken into custody; the male fled. Gave a BOLO, because there was somebody running from the scene that looks a lot like him. Unfortunately, it wasn't him, but they were able to distinguish that by the mobile AFIS. Unfortunately, the subject went into a nearby building — it's very close to on the street where they were — dropped a cinderblock from a second story on top of the officer's head, then jumped down off a second story, beat the living daylights out of him, and then ran him over with his own car. I am happy to say he's okay. I mean, it's a miracle that he's okay, but we were able to stop the direction of there, pursuing a false lead in order to refocus. Of course, I mean, in retrospect, the guy jumping down off the building, there were witnesses to that, that helped make that arrest, but it was a really bad situation. But it did get the other guy, the first guy that they stopped, they were able to do — he was similar to all the information they were giving out on the BOLO, and they were able to let him go.

So mobile AFIS saves time, and this is going to be whether you're in a large agency or small. This just shows — the graph on the left shows you how the population has grown. In 1830, there was a population of 83. 2010, it's about 2.4 million.

So we need to have the search results come back quickly. They need to be accurate, and you have to work with your IT people. So don't try to do this by yourself. You need the buy-in of them. You know, they need to set everything up so it works for you.

The device has to be easy. I have been told by many of the police officers on the road, you know, they glaze over when you talk science or you talk anything technical. So you want to give them something that is easy to do. You push a few buttons, and it works. And when it works, there's a lot of feedback just because of that, and, again, feedback from your people on the street.

So how does it work? The officer stops someone and needs their ID. They log into the device, capturing the two index fingers on the scanner. The mobile device sends those images, and what it does, it will take the one that gets captured, and then it actually enhances that. I mean, on the fly, it will enhance it, and you can pick which one you want to send. Sometimes the one they capture could be better, sometimes the enhanced one is better, but you have the option to send either one in.

Two-finger search is performed against the fingerprint database, and everything is done automatically. And no examiner is looking at these. It's just an automatic search against AFIS.

The nice thing is, is if the search yields a hit, it gives you a response back. It gives you the information with the SIN number. If it doesn't hit, it gives you a message back. So, either way, you're not sitting there waiting, going, “Well, did I get a hit, did I not get a hit, what's the response, is this thing working?” And now the officer knows this person's true identity. So now he can use the SIN number and check and see if there's an open warrant.

As I was telling you, the picture on the left is the example of the two prints that are taken. The one on the left is the capture. The one on the right is actually the enhanced. And from where you're sitting, they don't look any different, I know. And then it will give you the information back. The mobile AFIS comes right back to the inbox on the handheld unit. Unfortunately, I couldn't bring one with me. And it gives you the case details. On the right-hand side, what it does is tells you the score, how it ranked on the hit, the name, date printed, the ID, the sex. It gives you all the information about the offender.

Now, I know this looks funny, but I actually simplified this. I took about half the boxes out. On the left, on the top, it shows what happens with the mobile device. Basically, it's going through an AT&T server, and it goes all the way through firewall after firewall until it comes into our building, and that's our modern MDPD headquarters.

When it crosses into the switch in the AFIS room — we have a room just for the servers — it crosses over into another series of servers that produces the hit information that goes back to the device.

This is just an example. What this is, it's statistics broken down by device name. We have a whole bunch of these in department, and we have them — they are each assigned a different number, so that we can track. And what it shows you, if you can see, just for those of you in the back, device name is the first column, and the second column is entity, which means whether it's warrant, robbery, whoever is using the unit, the hits that they've had for the month, the no hits, the ones they've captured and sent and had no hits, the total they've sent, and the percentage. On the right hand side, number of searches conducted, so you can see these are well-used devices.

Monthly stats per entity, we capture how many transactions, how many hits, et cetera, and this is useful because you can definitely see that the number — you have 133 hits out of 232 transactions;, you're picking up a lot of people.

At the medical examiner's office, they use it to print the victims. They're not always good guys. So it's a way to do the ID, so you can know who's there and who's not, and you capture the same way.

So the successes of this? It saves time, it saves money, keeps the officers off the street. And one thing I should have added, too, is that it protects the officers, too. You're putting them out there on the street, you're keeping them from having to do other things and bring them in for fingerprinting and things, but you're also protecting them.

So these are some of the examples how we've used it. We've used it with ID of unknown patients, the John Does, John and Jane Does that go to the hospital, the deceased at the medical examiner. This is a huge, huge thing that we use in the Super Bowl. We've had the Super Bowl twice in the last three years, and for the command post, it was essential.

Stings, prostitution and robbery stings. Now, this is what I think is hilarious. My robbery guys nicknamed the device “Pinocchio” because they said subjects have become more inclined during a stop to provide their real name due to the mobile fingerprint device.

[Laughter.]

Stoiloff: So these are just — there's many, many, many types of handheld devices. You're not tied to one. If you research it, there's all different kinds, and they're coming out with bigger — I mean actually smaller, faster, better ones every year.

So questions, there is mobile — this is the contact for the mobile AFIS information and for the Gun Bounty.

**J. Michael Ward II:** Stephanie and I had a great conversation before we came in here today, and the Gun Bounty Program, I thought was absolutely tremendous. And I thought, well, you know, if we tried to do that in my area, it would be ye that has the mostest wins. So, you know, it would be the exact opposite. We'd have people showing up wanting to buy the guns, not give them up.

[Laughter.]

**Ward:** And, in fact, in a most recent domestic, we took over 50 or 60 firearms out of a house on a domestic, but that's typical of the state of Kentucky. We cherish our firearms. It's a right in our state, and it's something that we feel very dear about.

Obviously, in metropolitan areas, that is different. Including Louisville and in some areas of Lexington, they have issues that I'm sure they'd like to get rid of them, too.

There's a couple of things that I noticed this week, and I've spent my time going to a lot of the sessions, as many as I can get to and pop in and out.

From a small agency perspective, Stephanie commands about a hundred and — what did you say, 150?

**Stoiloff:** Ninety.

**Ward:** Ninety? Ninety people in her forensic group, and that's the sworn officers and the technicians that go out to crime scenes.

My area, I live in northern Kentucky. Alexandria is just south, about 14 miles south of Cincinnati. So our area is very suburban and rural. Most of the people that live in our area, they either work across the river in Ohio or in some of the industrial areas in Northern Kentucky.

But, in our county, we've got 10 agencies, 10 law enforcement agencies in my county. The largest is 35 officers. The smallest is one. So, in the three northern counties of Boone, Kenton and Campbell in northern Kentucky, we've got just roughly over 300 total officers. So, for a small agency, we have to become the jack of all trades, and that's very difficult for us.

As a matter of fact, next month I'm sending my — I've got 15 in my agency. I'm sending my third officer to get certified as a criminologist at the Criminalistics Academy down at the Department of Criminal Justice Training. That certifies him to do the evidence collection that we need because we don't have the resources regionally, even, to pull from. So we have to work together. Small agencies, if we have a large crime scene, we have to pull from each other, and that's where in the research and what I've seen and heard about forensics and the investigations this week, I would love to see small agencies get more involved in that aspect because there's so much that we have to do.

If you compare a patrol officer in a small agency and a patrol officer in a large one, the real difference is the large one answers a call, picks up the phone, and calls the technicians to come in and do the work. The small agency picks up the phone and calls a dispatcher and says, “I'm going to be here for a while,” because he or she has to do all that work.

So we are held to the same standard in court, regardless of the size of the law enforcement agency. The officer has to be able to do all that stuff. So it really creates a huge challenge for us in funding and resources. The biggest thing is in funding for training. We've got the officers that have the ability and the willingness to go learn. We don't necessarily have the funding to pay for the training. So there's one issue that I found this week.

Another one is in our labs. In Kentucky, we have one lab system. It is the state's, and they do a tremendous job, but in this economy and as in years past, even when the economy was good, when things needed to be cut, it seemed like the labs were cut. The funding for the labs has been a huge challenge for us. We don't submit forensic work to our labs for property crimes. We just don't do it because it takes too long for them to crank it out. It's an overload.

Now, that has its good and its bad points. If we don't submit the work, they can't request more personnel, and they can't say, “Hey, we've got all this backlog we need to clear.” But, when we go to court, we just have to hope and pray that the officers are able to articulate properly in court and get a conviction without having that forensic evidence. As an example, tool marks on a burglary could take anywhere from 18 months to two years to get back from the lab. You can't have a case sitting around that long. So that's some of the issues that we face in the rural area.

Kentucky is like in other states, and we're not unique in this perspective. The largest agency in the state is Louisville Metro. We've got 1,400. The next would be the state police with just a little over 800, and then I believe Lexington is right around 500. We have 460 law enforcement agencies, of which 380 are 10 men or less. So, in our state particularly, when we talk about research and whatnot, it's great that Louisville, Lexington and the state police get that look because they certainly have issues, but the majority of the state is small and rural, and we kind of feel at times that we just are an afterthought. And we've got the staffing. It's amazing the people that we're hiring today. We're very proud of the officers that we're putting on the street.

So I listened to a presentation on predictive policing, listened to the DDACTS, the Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety, which is huge for us. We don't have analysts. That's my biggest problem. I don't have the people. I would almost have to hire a civilian to come in and to do that work for us. We have one criminal analyst assigned to the state police post in our area, but that person is responsible for 10 counties. So having one analyst try to do all those agencies and 10 counties is daunting. So we really need that support in that area because within five minutes — well, actually, from my office in 15 minutes, I can be in downtown Cincinnati. And our big issue in our area is heroin because we can go across the river into Cincinnati and buy heroin and be back across the river in literally 20 minutes, and we've had overdoses and whatnot. So that permeates the northern Kentucky area, and all those agencies, those jurisdictions that are crossed, if we had the analysts to work with us in that regards, that would be fantastic because those are hot spots and areas that we could target.

One of the things that we are very proud of as small agencies is our ability with computers. We've been looking at the mobile AFIS. Our problem with that is our pipe down state to the AFIS database is too small, and we can't do it.

But I was fortunate enough last year to be a part of the technology work group that IACP held in Indianapolis, and I sat on the mobile computing side. And right next to me was a commander of that unit for the L.A. County Sheriff's Office, a great guy. I was really ecstatic, I could sit and talk to somebody about what large agencies are doing, some of the technology that's out there, and it was reversed. We were doing more with our computers than what they were doing in L.A., and I was shocked. We are accessing databases on the Internet and doing so much more. I've got officers and it makes me laugh to think of the things that I did on third shift when I was bored, and we won't talk about that because maybe some of the statute of limitations aren't up.

[Laughter.]

**Ward:** But we've got guys that are data mining. They're going out and they're hitting these databases, and they're pulling down names and they're pulling down addresses and they're cross-referencing them. And instead of drinking coffee and putting on the golf course in the middle of the night, as some of us used to do, they're actually working on a computer and going and waking people up at three and four o'clock in the morning and putting them in jail because that is the level of staffing that we're hiring now. These — and I say “kids” — that we're hiring are fantastic. They're much better cops than I was at that age because of their ability to utilize and to implement technology. It is amazing what they can do, and I think we need to harness that and get some of those people more involved because the ideas that we have implemented have come literally from the patrol staff.

We have built interoperable data systems on the Web that agencies dump all their reports and whatnot in, so that we can share that locally. That was done from the car up. It was literally — we took a group of patrolmen, we sat them in a room, and we said, “What would you like to see? If all this information was available to you, how would you want to see it? How would it work?” And we built it from there, and we did it with just a little under $30,000 in grant money.

And so what can be done inexpensively is amazing when you put a bunch of heads together, and when you don't have the resources to draw on, you figure out ways to do it a little bit better. That's where small policing is. I'm kind of at awe with the research that I've seen this week, and the knowledge that's here in this building has just been tremendous for me, and I appreciate that. I just wish there was more representation from the practitioners, from the people that are using, and it's amazing to me that — you know, I've been in law enforcement in Kentucky for about 28 years, and this is really the first time I've had an opportunity to see what NIJ truly does, other than getting publications, e mails and occasionally perusing the website. So it's tremendous, and I wish we'd had an opportunity to get more involved with this earlier.

**Bernard K. Melekian:** Well, thank you, Chief, and thank you, Commander, and I will write today down in my diary. I don't know that I have ever before been introduced as the “grand old man.”

[Laughter.]

**Melekian:** And so here I stand. Thank you very much. It is a privilege to be here. My name is Bernie Melekian.

Until seven months ago, I was the police chief in Pasadena, California. I have 37 years in local law enforcement and 13 years as a police chief. And, actually, it's very appropriate if we're talking about stages of research. By size of department, Pasadena would fall right between these two agencies. We had 260 sworn officers. We had another 140 civilians. We were one of 45 police departments in Los Angeles County. There is a range just within Los Angeles County; Pasadena was the fourth largest department, if you count the sheriff's department, the largest being LAPD at about 10,000 and the smallest being a small town of Sierra Madre of 13 sworn officers. So there's a wide swing, and Pasadena was an interesting city.

We have — I think the image of the city nationally is based on the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl game. I think there's this image that Pasadena is two square miles of mansions and once a year we have a parade.

[Laughter.]

**Melekian:** The reality is that it is the fourth biggest city in the county. It is ethnically and economically diverse. If you drive south from the police station for a mile, you're in an area where some of the wealthiest, most powerful people in Los Angeles live, and if you drive north for half a mile, you're in an area where 40 percent of the people live at or below the poverty line. It average — a city of 140,000 people, average 25 murders a year; when I arrived there, most of them gang related. So the issues of crime and research and how to marry those two and how to do policing in that complex environment without the massive resources of, say, a Los Angeles or a Los Angeles Sheriff's Department is significant.

In looking at — you know, I didn't know until 45 minutes ago I was even going to be standing up in front of you. So here's my presentation for the group, but I thought I would touch on three areas that I think are significant. I notice that Charles, I think rightly, commented that when we talk about research in the field, we tend to talk about technology and about computers and about those sort of kind of things, and we talk less about the human side of our business. We talk less about the importance of leadership and the importance of sort of how to connect with people.

I thought I would take advantage of maybe my tenure in this business to talk about three areas that I think warrant research, some of which is being done, and then talk very briefly about some things that the COPS office is looking at.

In no particular order, I think, the first I would list is the issue of credibility and public trust and connection, connection with our various communities. When we talk about community policing and we talk about that sort of connection piece, I would argue that it's very likely that the small departments and the rural departments of this country are doing community policing almost by default. They do it and they did it long before it had a name. It is in Los Angeles and Miami and Chicago and the other sort of large urban cores that you have to address this issue.

And, in a minute, I'm going to talk a little bit more about the concept of police legitimacy and sort of balancing the two, but there's some fascinating work being done by Professor Tom Tyler at New York University in the area called “procedural justice,” and he's written a book. He wrote it actually back in the early '90s, and it was reprinted a couple years ago, called *Why People Obey the Law.* And the notion was that most of us in this business and most of, I think, people perhaps in general believe that people obey the law because they worry about the consequences. They do kind of this cost- benefit analysis. He suggests that that's not the case, that his research and other research indicates that people obey the law because they ascribe legitimacy either to the law or to the lawmakers, and that it is in dealing with the police, that it is in the process of the interaction between the officer and the citizen, that it is the way that people are treated during that process that it may be more important than the outcome.

“Selling a ticket” was what we used to call it or “selling an arrest” in some ways is really nothing more than communicating this idea that, yes, I may be taking you to jail or, yes, I may be writing you a ticket or, yes, I may be responding to a problem that I can't fully solve, but if the person feels listened to, they may walk away from that with a greater sense of appreciation for what law enforcement does. And I think research in that area needs to continue and be focused.

Second is the issue of budget impacts, and we've all talked about in every conference that I've gone to, when I was still with Pasadena and since I've come to the COPS office, talks about budget, budget, budget and the decline of funding.

I believe — and this is not the Department of Justice talking. This is Bernie Melekian talking, and so you can put an asterisk by it or ignore it or whatever you want to do, but I firmly believe that most of us are convinced that recovery means that sometime in the short term that the economic condition of our various departments is going to return to where it was a couple of years ago, and I don't believe that that's the case. I really believe that going forward, the nature of this economy is going to fundamentally change the delivery of police services in a way that I don't even pretend to know what it is yet. But those of you that are out here studying this business, the way that we deliver our services is, in many ways, inefficient.

I've been in this business long enough to remember going on patrol without a walkie-talkie. I can still remember call boxes. They were on their way out when I got here, but they were there. They were still there. You still used them. You didn't get overtime. I know that's a shock. A lot of things have changed for the better, but one of the consequences of that change is that we have become, we the police profession, both sworn and civilian professional staff, have become very expensive. We eat up huge percentages of local budgets, and the reality is that the delivery of our services is going to have to be done differently than what it is.

I thought a long time ago when I discovered the concept of fiber-optic cable and thought I had had some kind of a technological epiphany that sooner or later, if you think about the reality of a citizen calling to report a crime, particularly a misdemeanor crime that is not life threatening, the idea of sending out one or two officers in a radio car at whatever the total cost of that is, is extraordinarily inefficient when in many cases, what people want to do, if you take Tyler's legitimacy piece, is they want to be able to talk to a police officer. Why not have a videoconferencing capability as more and more people get computers in their home and can Skype and do things? It may well be that one officer sitting in a police station will be able to link via videoconference and take reports. Now, that's probably archaic thinking by now. I mean, I'm sure that there are other and better ways that most of you know what to do, but you get the point of what I'm trying to make. We are going to need to deliver our services in some different way.

And the last point and perhaps because Pasadena was ethnically and economically diverse, a city of 130,000, 140,000 now, at school there are 23 languages spoken in that school district, the issues of race and diversity have become no less intense, but they have become far more complex than what they once were.

When I came in this business, talking about diversity, talking about community relations, talking about community outreach, I meant essentially relationships between the African American community and the white community, and today it is about differences in language, it is about differences in religion, it is about difference in culture, and the use of technology and the need to do language research and to do cultural training and language training to reach quickly across these barriers that change faster than we can anticipate, I think is something that we really need to look about.

I particularly like the emphasis that I've heard here in the brief time I was here about the need to link academics and to link research and to link practitioners in the field. All of us have watched programs or read about programs, you know, that are great, that are great at problem solving. Look, we've eliminated crime, we eliminated homicide, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It gets a nice press conference. It gets a nice ribbon cutting. It gets whatever it gets. And if you go back a year or two later to try to find out how the program is doing, it's gone. You know, either the chief left or the mayor left or the professor left or whoever it was that was doing it left, and so did the program.

I believe and one of the focuses that I've tried to bring to the COPS office since I got here is we need to fully partner, law enforcement and the academic community, in a way that does research to focus on how — what it is about successful programs that might make them sustainable, that might make them last beyond a change in leadership, and what would make them portable.

If it works in Boston — for example, I talked about we had 25 homicides a year. We looked at what Boston was doing. I went personally one year and visited with the Boston Police Department. The next three years, I sent my gang unit to Boston for two weeks at a time. We mirrored the Boston project, and we, too — Pasadena had 30 months of zero homicides, down from 25 a year. I mean, we looked at what Boston was doing, and we figured out how to replicate pieces of it in Pasadena. We have to do more of that, because, in every one of these successful programs, there are aspects of it that are unique to that location, that are unique maybe to the personalities involved, but there are also bigger chunks of that, that are easily replicable and easily could move from one jurisdiction to the next. And the National Network of Safe Communities through John Jay College and others are really trying to do that.

So I'll close with this idea that there needs to be more research in how we deliver our services and a focus on leadership and training and particularly at the supervisory level, and as we talk about predictive policing and predictive analytics and the use of data mining and the use of technology, I would suggest that if we're not careful, we will fall into this sort of binary trap that here, on one hand, is the use of technology, and here, on the other hand, is this human connection of community policing or values- based policing or whatever term you want to make that talks about the connection of one person to the next and asks us to make a choice, and I would suggest to you as law enforcement professionals, that's actually a false choice.

The choice, the goal is to follow both of those tracks to Tyler's notion of legitimacy, to Tyler's notion of how are we effective as a profession, and I would hope that going forward — and I know NIJ and the COPS office are working together in August to have a large national working conference on this issue of procedural justice, but I am particularly hopeful that we do continue to do research in those areas as well as the issue of technology.

So, with that, I don't know if there's any questions, but I certainly thank everyone for listening to me.

[Applause.]
    
  
Disclaimer:
              Opinions or points of view expressed in these recordings represent those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Any commercial products and manufacturers discussed in these recordings are presented for informational purposes only and do not constitute product approval or endorsement by the U.S. Department of Justice.
  
Date Published: June 1, 2010
    
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