Lee Smithy:	Good afternoon, my name is Lee Smithy and I'm a member of the faculty of Peace and Conflicts Studies Program and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and on behalf of the Peace and Conflicts Studies Program and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility and the Provost Office and the Alumni Office, let me welcome you to today's talk by David Kennedy. "What if Criminal Justice Had Hippocratic Oath Toward an Applied Ethics of Crime Control?" 
	First and foremost we have to say that David is an alumni of Swarthmore, Class of 1980, graduating with highest honors in philosophy and history. So we claim him outright. He worked for many years as a case writer, a lecturer and a senior researcher in the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. 
	He's advised a wide variety of government offices and agencies, including the Justice Department, the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the White House. In the 1990s David directed the Boston Gun Project, an initiative aimed at reducing youth violence, and he implemented Operation C-Spire, which resulted in a 60% reduction in homicides among people under age 24 in that city.
	David served as a special advisor on youth violence to President Clinton, Hillary, Clinton, John Kerry and the Department of Justice and in 2005 he became the Director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and that's a position that he continues to hold today.
	He's the recipient of the Ford Foundation Innovations in Government Award; the Herman Goldstein International Award for Problem Oriented Policing; and the Person of the Year Award from Law Enforcement News.
	He's the author of Deterrents in Crime Prevention: Reconsidering the Prospect of Sanction and his other book Don't Shoot One Man: A Street Fellowship and the End of Violence in Inner City America details the replication of programs across a number of cities that were inspired by David's work or in which he was directly involved.
	Here in Philadelphia his work has inspired a new focused deterrents in South Philadelphia where local authorities and community organizations are working together to encourage potential offenders not to commit violent crimes through a combination of highly strategic policing, social services and community support. 
	So why is David here today? I had the pleasure of being invited to a dinner in 2011 for the folks who would be receiving an honorary degree from Swarthmore and I was seated next to this alum who I had never met before, David Kennedy, and we had this wonderful conversation over dinner where I got to hear about all of his work. 
	And it was around that same time that Jim MacMillan, who's here from guncrisis.org was teaching at the college and he had begun thinking about the connections between journalism and gun violence prevention and we'd been having conversations. And I had this general interesting concern that the Peace and Conflicts Studies Program have a course that focused on a local peace building issue. 
	So all these things kind of came together at this one particular moment and so now I'm teaching a course on gun violence prevention, in part, because as Bryan Lentz, who we got to have lunch with today, former Chief of the Philadelphia Regional Gun Violence Task Force who lives here in Swarthmore, pointed out in an article in November in the Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal, quote, "Since the War on Terror in Afghanistan began in 2001, almost double the number of Philadelphians have been killed by gunfire as members of the Armed Forces have been killed in that conflict." That seemed like a local issue that deserved attention by Peace and Conflicts Studies.
	So the fact that we have a gun violence prevention class at Swarthmore is due in part to David's influence, never mind the fact that in both years that I've taught the class, his book is always the students' favorite so it's guaranteed to stay on the list. And the subtitle of the class is Peace Studies in Action. David really embodies the nexus of scholarship and practice that many of us feel is at the core of Peace and Conflict Studies. 
	We are pleased to have him back at Swarthmore, please join me in welcoming David Kennedy. 
David K.:	Afternoon, everybody. The real reason I'm here is because Swarthmore asked me to come back, that's all it takes. One of the very nicest things that has ever happened to me is when the phone rang six months before I met Lee and we had that dinner and it was one of the assistant deans here or vice presidents or somebody saying, "I have a few really good moments in my working life, and one of them is calling people and saying that they're going to get an honorary degree from Swarthmore." That's what happened to me. 
	I could not take this in. I just felt like I was going to show up on David Letterman the next night and this is how stupid people be they actually believe us when we tell them. It was so wonderful and it has been so wonderful since to be connected back to the college and to be able to be here and feel like I've got a real role rather than just walking around being a tourist looking at where I used to live on campus. 
	I went back into Sharples, we had lunch in Sharples today, and I don't think I'd been in Sharples since 1978. It's really nice to be back and, Lee, thanks for getting me here.
	I was actually in this room two years ago? So my last time back on campus was for a day like we had today, with bits of teaching, I went to Chester. Keith Reeve, I just tried to call him Ken, Keith Reeve is a faculty member here and he's doing what's now called an inside out class, so he's bringing Swarthmore students into one of the state prisons in Chester and teaching both students and inmates. The Swarthmore Bulletin did a very nice article on this in the current issue. 
	The questions about my experience with that class and others usually focus on is this going to help the inmates when they come out? And my experience and conviction is that the people who get the most out of that are the students from the outside who go in and have experience with people that they have images about. Those images are wrong. 
	Most folks like me, like Swarthmore students, have no or next to no contact with the kind of communities that I work in, that Keith is focused on and with anybody who lives there, and to the extent that some of those people go to prison, they have no contact with them. That kind of facilitated contact is good for everybody, but it's particularly good for those of us on the outside. 
	That day two years ago ended up with a talk here. I began that, as I begin all of my talks, and as I will begin today's, because I'm going to say that things have changed in the last two years and that is good news, very good news. Things have not changed to the extent that they ought to and they have not changed enough so that what I started talking about then does not again deserve to be talked about now. 
	I was recently off a four month book tour for Don't Shoot at that point. I am an academic and a full professor at John Jay. I do the academic thing, I do research, I go to conferences, I publish. Don't Shoot is not an academic book, which is probably why your students like it so much. It is a 230 page rant and basically it says two things. It says that what is going on this nation, which I love, around the issues that I am spending my life on is wrong. They aren't American, they are unconscionable.
	I focus on the worst violence, the worst crime problems in the most dangerous communities in the United States. I am not polite about any of this. A lot of what is true about this issue makes people grossly uncomfortable. People do not like to face this stuff, they do not like to talk about it. And not facing it and not talking about it is meaning that these issues are unresolved and it's getting people killed and we can't afford that anymore.
	So here are some things that are true about these issues: They are concentrated entirely in poor historically damaged minority communities. White people do not live like this. I work in communities where I can walk through the neighborhoods that I work in and there are street shrines to the dead on the corners and in the middle of the block. 
	In Boston during one of the times I was working in Boston, there were so many of these street shrines, which are there for the murder victims, that the city council in Boston considered regulating them and banning them after they had been present on the street for a certain period as an impediment to the public way. This is normally the kind of charge you collect for leaving a dumpster in the middle of the street or something like that so the cars can't get by. 
	There were so many of these informal shrines that they were impeding the traffic and Boston's response to this was to start thinking about getting rid of them. What is going on out there is unspeakable. When one of these shrines appeared in Boston it was the result of a young man being shot in the head in public in Roxbury, Massachusetts. His homicide has never been solved, whoever did that has never been arrested, has never been prosecuted. 
	The community believes it knows who committed that killing. He's dead, he was killed. His homicide has never been cleared, there has been no arrest, there's been no prosecution. On the second anniversary of his killing, his sister went to his shrine, which had been meticulously maintained by the neighborhood, to pay her respects on the day. And while she was kneeling at his street shrine, somebody walked up to her and shot her in the back of the head and killed her. That homicide has never been cleared.
	The numbers cannot capture what is going on, but the numbers matter. The national homicide right now, everybody knows the nation is in a long homicide decline, that is correct. We've been talking about this today, those numbers come from the FBI, the FBI publishes them every fall for about 20 years, more now. Nearly every year the FBI has complimented the country on having less crime than the year before.
	The FBI does not break those statistics out and tell us about what has been going on with the homicide of black men. Those rates are nowhere near 4 per 100,000. I work in neighborhoods where if you are a young black man, and the homicide is unbelievably concentrated among young black men, your homicide rate, just for living in one of these neighborhoods is not 4 per 100,000. In one where my colleague John Koufos in Rochester, New York has done the math, your homicide rate is 520 per 100,000, every single year. 
	Once again, I am not polite about this. I have lots and lots and lots of black friends and colleagues of all walks, they are cops, they are prosecutors, they are judges, they are gang members, they are drug dealers, they are my colleagues, they are my friends, and I have never, ever spoken to one of my black friends and said, "Do you know any dead people? Do you know any homicide victims? In your life, in your family in your social relationships?" And had anyone of them say no.
	I was riding in Kalamazoo, Michigan with three black pastors not that long ago and they were taking me on a tour of these neighborhoods in Kalamazoo. It's not just a big city problem anymore, this is all over the country. That ride was a like a doubledecker red bus, got a guy show you the neighborhood, look at the natives, tour of the deaths of their friends and family. This house, this yard, this corner, this bar, this parking lot. Homicide after homicide after homicide after homicide, people they knew. 
	And finally toward the end of the day, two of them were in the back and the driver and I were in the front. My driver, my friend who was driving, said kind of wistfully, "You know, I've been really lucky. I haven't lost anybody really close to me." And his friend in the back leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder and said, "That's not true, remember Terry?" He said, "Oh, God, yeah, Terry, I forgot about Terry." With so many dead friends that they can't even keep them straight. White people do not live like this. 
	I'll tell one more of these stories. While on book tour in Oakland for Don't Shoot, I sat on a panel with a homicide investigator for the Oakland Police Department. Oakland is one of the most dangerous cities in the country and he told a story about investigating a killing. There had been a car-to-car shooting on one of the Oakland Freeways. Driver of the victim car had been shot and killed, passenger had survived both the shooting and the crash. 
	So the homicide investigator was sitting with the 16 year old kid trying to give up the shooter because the kid knew who did it, wouldn't talk. And after about an hour of trying to get this out of him he gave up and just turned into a human being and said to this young man, "I'm sorry for your loss, this is terrible." And this stony 16 year old, no snitch, gang banger and broke down in tears and said, "My friend, at least he had a full life." His friend was 21 years old and in his circles that was a success making it to 21. 
	This is outrageous. And one of the things it says in Don't Shoot is when I was in this fine institution I was four miles away from Chester, Pennsylvania. Lee and his class have been charting the homicides in Delaware County. The single most flagrant blazing hot spot of homicide victimization is in Chester. It was in Chester then, it is in Chester now, and I was on this campus organizing around anti-apartheid in South Africa and I did not give Chester, Pennsylvania a second thought. And I am ashamed of myself, that is wrong and we can do better.
	Here's the second way in which this is unspeakably awful, which is that 40, 50 years of deliberate criminal justice policy in this country has meant that places like Chester are not only the blazing hot spots of violent victimization, they are the blazing hot spots of prison. I work in places where all the men have gone to prison. This is nearly literally true now. 
	I have a colleague at John Jay, Ernest Drucker, who has just published a very fine book called A Plague of Prisons, and in the first chapter it says that if you are a black man in our nation's capitol, Washington, D.C., your lifetime likelihood that you'll be arrested and at least spend a term in jail, is now approaching 100%. 
	In Baltimore, where I'm working now, the Justice Policy Institute, which is based in D.C., did a study about 10 years ago. You have to do special math to figure this stuff out, the FBI will not tell you this. If you are a black man between 20 and 30 in Baltimore, Maryland, not if you are in one of the hot neighborhoods, if you live in the city, on any given day 50% of you are under criminal justice supervision. You are in prison, in jail, on parole or on probation. 
	Not you have a criminal record. Fifty percent of you are in the criminal justice system. We should have known this all along. One of my black preacher friends said to me once, if you want to destroy a civilization, lock it up. And that is correct. There is no community anywhere that can survive all of its men getting locked up. We now know this to a social science certainty. 
	We know all of the following: Men who have gone to prison will never make as much money as people who don't. Statistically speaking they will never get a good job, they cannot pass a background check, they cannot get bonded. They are less likely to marry, they are less likely to support their existing families and children. They are less likely to go back to school, they are less likely to get training, it will not pay off, there is no reason to do it. 
	Communities where too many people go to prison stop doing the things that healthy communities do to protect themselves against crime. Healthy communities say to each other there are things we do here, there are things that we do not do here, that is not okay, do not do that thing here. And when the law and the police are an oppressive force, people stop doing that, they stop producing what the sociologists call collective ethicacy. They do not work together, they do not join with the criminal justice system, they will not tell who did what, they will not testify, they will not convict. 
	Stop snitching is not witness intimidation. Stop snitching is mostly the growing norm in these neighborhoods if the police are the enemy and good people do not deal with the police. We now know that where the intrusion of criminal justice and jail and prison is too great, people withdraw from political life. They do not vote, they do not organize, they do not become activists, they do not feel that they are part of the same country and civil society that the rest of us are and they opt out. 
	I was born a root causer. Raised a root causer. Something's wrong with the community, fix the education, do something about racism, bring in work, do something about healthcare. That's still all true. There is a new root cause insult to American communities and it is the criminal justice system. We are doing this to these neighborhoods because we have chosen to do so and it is wrong and it has to stop. 
	I was on, again, the book tour and I gave my talk and something happened that happened a lot, which is that everybody asked their questions, we will do that today, and then people leave and people hang around and they talk and they leave. And then a black adult comes forward and says what they have been waiting to say. This black grandmother came forward and said, "I have a story for you. I was talking to my six year old grandson not that long ago and he said to me, 'Grandma, when I grow up and go to prison and I'm going to.'" Because that is what he knew was coming for him. 
	His grandmother taught me a phrase I had never heard. She said, "I thought about slapping the taste right out of his mouth," and she did not do that, but I understood the impulse. We are raising up entire generations of American citizens for whom this is normal and it is wrong and we should stop it. 
	Here's the good news, and this is something I could not have said two years ago. We are doing better all over the country. So I have been part of developing an approach to doing this work that is designed to address these issues, and it rests on what turn out to be some very simple and very fundamental facts about what's going on out there. And normally this would be the rest of my talk, and you're going to get about 90 seconds of it because I want to talk about something else.
	The violence in all of our cities is driven by a very small population of very special people. These are not dangerous neighborhoods. They are neighborhoods of absolutely ordinary people who want the same thing that everybody wants. They want to live well, they want to be successful, they want to be safe, they want their kids to do better than do. This is the way virtually everybody is in every community. 
	In these communities there is a tiny, tiny population of extraordinarily high rate offenders, they operate in gangs and groups and drug crews and that kind of thing. There are not very many of them. We do this work all over the country, if you add up all the groups across the entire city and everybody in them, they are consistently, everybody altogether represents under half a percent of the city's population. And they are connected regularly with 60, 70, 75 percent of all the homicides and shootings in an entire city. 
	Their neighborhoods are not dangerous, their communities are not dangerous, their people are not dangerous they are dangerous. And they are getting killed every year, not at 4 per 100,000 or 520 per 100,000, they're getting killed at 3,000 per 100,000 every year. One in 30 or so.
	My colleague Andrew Papachristos at Yale has done this work, he's done the math, they are safer serving on the ground in Afghanistan than they are doing what they are doing every day in their neighborhoods. Bryan's right, their circles in Philadelphia are more dangerous than being in an active war theater. They are scared, they're getting hurt, they've been hurt. Their friends have all been killed, they're going to prison, they're having a miserable time out there and there are not very many of them. 
	How do you redirect their behavior, save their lives and keep them out of prison? You sit them down, you put them together with a partnership of law enforcement and social service providers and community people. That partnership says to them, "We know who you are, we know what you are doing, we care about you, we respect you. More than anything else we want you alive and out of prison. Your community cares about you, but desperately needs the violence to stop. We may be mad at the police and you may have heard that from us, but if you think that means we approve of the violence, you are wrong. There is no excuse for it, you have to stop it. We will help you.
	"So if you want out of the life, we will do everything we can, emergency assistance, protect you from your enemies, school, work, work placement, everything. We are not asking, this is not a negotiation. We're going to put you on prior notice of the very special legal consequences that we will focus on any group that kills somebody. And the price to the group for the homicide is going to be, for example, that law enforcement focuses on that group, brings in the drug undercover, makes arrests for selling drugs from every single person in that group. And not only will the shooter go to jail for the shooting, but everybody's going to go to jail because shooting is going to bring that kind of law enforcement attention. And we're going to tell you ahead of time because we do not want to do this. We want it to stop. Thank you very much for your time."
	This now has a long record of formal evaluation, a long record of field application. I wrote something for the Huffington Post about six weeks ago, eight weeks ago, that summarized some of the results from last year. Twenty percent homicide reduction across the city of New Orleans; 20% homicide reduction across the city of Baton Rouge; 20% homicide reduction across the city of Chicago. We are working very hard on this in Chicago.
	Chicago right now with this downward decline has continued. Chicago is at mid-1950s levels of violence as we stand here right now. Oakland, California, another perennial hot spot. Twenty-nine percent reduction in homicides across the city. Stockton, California, classic [inaudible 00:29:34] Hispanic prison gang [inaudible 00:29:37], 55% reduction in homicide. 
	And Philadelphia, they're doing this in South Philadelphia. When I was here the last time, one of the questions as it always is, is why aren't they doing this in Philadelphia? They are doing it in Philadelphia, 50% homicide reduction in South Philadelphia. This stuff works, we know how to do it, you do it right. People get it. They stand down and the don't go to prison, the community stops thinking that the cops hate everybody and they start working together. This can be absolutely transformative. 
	It's all written down here, all the how-to materials, all the research results, it's all there. Call me, we will help you do this work, it's what we do out at John Jay. There are people doing this all over the country. 
	We are far enough into this now that we begin to see the shape of the kind of general lesson about how we should think about doing public safety in criminal justice and that is what I want to talk about today. The question I've been asking myself as we begin to get a little bit of a breathing space in the core work. We have been pushing this rock uphill for 20 years now. It is tipping out there, it's changing, people get it. I've always been relentless, I've never been optimistic. And for the first time in my work in this area, I am actually feeling optimistic and so there's been a tiny little breathing space to think about what this means. 
	I want to try out on you the beginning of some of that thinking. The question I've been asking myself, I study medicine, I study engineering. My dad went to Swarthmore, he was an engineering student here. These are all fields that have a very, very deliberate integration of research, applied research and field practice and clinical practice and ways of incorporating students into that very special and honorable world. 
	As we all know, medicine does not let anybody practice until they attest to the Hippocratic Oath. And so the question I've been asking myself has been, what if criminal justice had a Hippocratic Oath? Which we don't. Here's the beginning of the theory of that.
	So the most important phrase in the Hippocratic Oath is, "First, do no harm." It's not as it turns out, we all know this. So I went and read a bunch of Hippocratic Oaths, there turn out to be a range of these, there is not just one Hippocratic Oath. None of them actually have that phrase in them. They have things like that. The Hippocratic Oath say things like, thou shall apply no dangerous drug and that sort of thing, but they don't actually say, first, do no harm.
	But I like it and it suits my purpose, and so my first principle is, first, do no harm. What does that mean? Well, it means let's stop trying to protect communities by locking up everybody in them. When I started this work in the mid-1980s, there were about 300,000 people in prison. Anybody know how many there are now? 
Speaker 3:	2 million, 2.2, 2.3, something like that.
David K.:	2.3 million people behind bars in the United States. It's 1 in every 100 adults in the country. It's something like 1 in 18 young black men. If you are a black male born today, you stand a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison during your lifetime. And if you don't graduate high school and you're a young black man, during your lifetime 70% of you will go to prison. 
	We are doing this as a matter of national policy. And as I have said, we know now that this has a dramatic destructive relationships on these communities. We now know that it makes crime worse. When you damage the fabric of those communities in this way, things fall apart and places where things have fallen apart are breeding grounds for crime and violence.
	Todd Clear, who's an old colleague of mine who is now the provost at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has done very fine empirical research and it turns out that if the proportion of adults in correctional facilities goes above about a percent and a half, crime goes up. So the idea that arresting everybody, just jacking up all the penalties, more and more criminal justice, is a rational response to a problem that we are not solving otherwise, it's wrong. We can make things worse. So first, do no harm, let's stop locking everybody up.
	The next thing we should do is stop treating the communities with profound disrespect. As law enforcement figures out other ways of doing this work, they are being more and more honest about what they do do. And guys who have been doing the wrong thing for the right reasons their entire careers are beginning to say in public, "We go into these places, we stop everything that moves, we turn everybody upside down, we shake them. If crack comes out of their pocket, we carry them away, if it doesn't, we put them back on their feet and we send them away."
	These are neighborhoods where the young men can't walk down the street without getting stopped and mothers get pulled over, pastors get pulled over. They are treated with profound disrespect. I said I don't know any black people who don't have dead friends, if I ask them, I don't know any black people who haven't been profiled. They know it, we know it, we may not admit it, we know it's true. And that is concentrated in these awful, they're not awful, forgive me, they are concentrated in these neighborhoods where these awful things are going on and we are systematically alienating the broader public from the outside, from the police, from law enforcement. 
	And now we know that when it's five percent of the young men in these neighborhoods and we are treating everybody like this, nearly everybody we are treating like this ought to be on our side and we are making sure that they are not. So let's stop that. 
	Next thing we should do is stop lying as a matter of policy. And one of the things that criminal justice does the best is lie. Every time we say to somebody standing in front of us in court, "Next time, young man, I'm going to come down on you like a ton of bricks," and it never happens. We are teaching them that we are idiots and nothing we say should be trusted. Most white folks most places in these sort of settings don't have that kind of contact, but we've got our own versions of it. 
	Anybody seen these drunk driver ads that the Department of Transportation is running on TV? They're pictures of guys driving down the road, and the cop pulls them over and opens the door and this ocean of beer pours out onto the street, and they get cuffed and go away, lights and sirens. And the tag line is, "You drink and drive, you'll go to jail." No you won't. Right? There's research on this. It's one arrest in thousands of drunk driving incidents where you'll even get arrested and probably then you won't go to jail. And who knows that better than anybody? Chronic drunk drivers, right? They get away with it every single time statistically. 
	In these neighborhoods with the folks that we are trying to get to respect and listen to us, the criminal justice system says to them over and over and over again, "You do this the next time, you'll go." The federal government puts up billboards saying you get caught with a gun, you'll get five years mandatory in federal prison. And then if you work with the feds, you know that for every single case that they would prosecute federally, that they could prosecute federally, they throw away 99% of them. 
	My friend John Koufos who has been interviewing series final felons in Rochester finds that they say, "We know the billboards, we've read this, we know the feds can do this, we know they've been doing more of them, but we've been stopped, our friends have been stopped. Most of those cases haven't gone federal, they're all going stateside and they're getting slaps on the wrist." Their interpretation of the ones that do go federal, is that is individual personal racial prejudice on the part of the authorities. So the extra authority that we are exercising creates backlash and makes things worse. So let's stop lying to people about what the law says and is.
	All right, doing no harm will not make things better. So what do you do to make things better? First thing you do is support the natural capabilities of communities to control and govern themselves. Safe communities are not safe because there's a cop on every corner and everybody's afraid of the feds. Safe communities are safe because there's a strong civic sense that there are things we do here, things we do not do here and when people cross that line a community takes action and then when they can't make that work, they call the cops, which I'll come to.
	I think I probably did this the last time I was here and I'm going to do it again because it's the best technique I've got on this. Show of hands, who was deathly afraid of the cops when you were growing up? Thank you. Show of hands, who was afraid of your mother when you were growing up? Get the point. We are all more afraid of our mothers than we are the feds. 
	I'm a published deterrence theorist. As a published academically validated deterrence theorist, I will tell you that the rule of deterrence is mom today trumps a 20% chance of the feds in five years. That's how it works, which means even more that we should not silence the mothers and grandmothers and elders and pastors of communities by treating them like felons so they will hate us and not stand with us. But it also turns out that this is something you can make as every bit as practical as running an anger management class or putting together a narcotics raid. 
	So as a practical matter, it turns out that you can do things such as they did in Ohio where when they looked at the Avondale neighborhood, which had been undergoing a homicide spike for about three years. At that point they were losing about a dozen people a year in this very small area. The police identified about two dozen impact players who were driving the violence. They gave that list of names to the community. The community looked at them and figured out how to make contact with about half of them, down to about a dozen. 
	They talked to mothers, they talked to grandmothers, they talked to churches, they put together interventions in which they sat down with these guys and said you have to stop this. The community cannot stop this, the community does not approve of this and by the way we're working with the police. The police gave us your name, they know who you are, they are talking about you and they would like to have a followup visit with you in which they will explain to you what your legal situation is if you don't stop this. 
	This is not a sting, they will not arrest you, we vouch for them, but will you talk to them? In some instances they didn't even make their way to the guys, they couldn't get any further than their families. Worked just as well. In the end, they made six of these contacts and there wasn't a killing in Avondale for 18 months. 
	We are doing this all over the country. We call it custom notifications. The field experience with this is dramatically high. So there are ways in which we can be meticulously nuts and bolts, figure it out every day serious about how the community itself can take over most of which we have assumed had to be done by law enforcement. And every single time that we can do this, we should. It makes the community stronger, the community has more standing with the guys on the street. We do this right, the community is stronger afterward and nobody gets arrested and nobody goes to jail.
	That will not always work. When it does not work, the next thing we should be doing is fixing our crisis of legitimacy. Once again, most people in most places do not do the right thing because they're terrified of going to prison. Most people do the right thing because they know it's the right thing to do. Most bad guys spend most of their time obeying the law. They stop at red lights, they buy most of the stuff they eat, they pay money for the cars they drive and they almost never hurt anybody. 
	So I work in places where the law enforcement bumper sticker is, "Guns Have Become the Preferred Method of Dispute Resolution." No they haven't. If that were true, there would be nobody left standing. These guys figure out ways to deal with their situations nonviolently almost all the time. When they don't, we want the pressures of their community to push them in the right direction. When that doesn't work, we want them to obey the law because they respect the law. They do not right now respect the law. 
	Legitimacy turns out, and there's wonderful and growing research on this. It is not about what happens to you, it's not about whether you get the ticket or get arrested or go to jail. It is about how you are treated during that process. It is what the academic call procedural justice and what matters turns out to be: Have you been treated with respect? Does it seem like what is being done to you is motivated by those people having your best interest in mind? And do you have a chance to speak your piece? 
	Even if you get the ticket, do you get to tell the trooper that you were driving in a real hurry because your mother's in the hospital and you're really scared? And if he listens to you and gives you the ticket, you will feel better about that than if he treats you like an idiot and berates you and sends you on your way without a ticket. It's not about the outcome, it's about the engagement. 
	And I hope I have said enough about the way we are treating these communities at this point to understand how we are systemically undercutting legitimacy. This is the recent story of my adopted hometown New York City. Twenty plus year crime decline, nearly 2500 homicides in 1992, fewer than 350 last year. And we just had a mayoral election that turned on the candidate who won the election running on and winning on rejecting the policing strategy of New York City and bringing in a new Police Commissioner to undo those past practices. 
	What was that about? All over the papers for the last year? It was about the rampant profligate unconstitutional use of stop-and-frisk aimed at exactly the neighborhoods we are talking about. And even if you believe what the city said, which it was effective and it was legal, let's just give them that, they can have it. The community hated it, the city hated it and they threw the bums out. That's legitimacy. And we are now reconstructing policing in New York City to be legitimate. 
	That's not always going to work. So when it doesn't work, what do we want to do? We want to get deterrence right. Deterrence is getting people to change their behavior because they know that if they touch the hot stove they will be burnt and therefore they don't do it. 
	Is Taylor Clark in the room? Taylor, hi.
Taylor Clark:	Hi, how are you?
David K.:	Taylor's dad Ralph runs a company in California called ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter uses acoustic sensors to identify gun shots in high activity, mostly urban areas. They have been finding some amazing things. They have been finding, for example, that in city after city, 80 to 90 percent of validated gunshots are never reported to the police. In the neighborhoods we are talking about, they are living with unbelievable levels of gun fire and no longer, if they ever did, expect any help from the outside world including law enforcement and don't even bother to pick up the phone now. 
	In one of ShotSpotter's cities in Florida, the city did an analysis of New Year's Eve gunshots. So this is a problem all over the country and in Detroit, where I'm from, Detroit Police Department has its patrol units park under bridge overpasses, either side of midnight on New Year's because there is so much celebratory gunfire that they got tired of the falling bullets damaging their equipment. So now they just go undercover for a while. 
	In this city they did a run that showed the ShotSpotter identification of homes outside which there had been gunfire the previous New Year's. And you get, as with all this stuff, a very high concentration of particular places. This past year they went and knocked on the door of this house. They said, "There were guns fired here last year, don't do it again this year we're going to be watching. Thank you for your time." Seventy percent reduction in city-wide gunfire on New Year's Eve.
	We are doing this in all kinds of ways. We're sitting down guys with gun records and saying, "You need to understand that if you get caught again they're talking about you with the U.S. Attorney's office and you face at least a five year federal mandatory minimum. Repeat after me. Thank you for your time." We have meticulous evaluations on this. The future offending for the guys who have just that intervention goes down dramatically. 
	This is the old idea in cease fire where you're sitting down all the gangs in a city and saying, "The next one of you that puts a body on the ground, that's where we're going. Don't make us do it." And they get that, they calm way down. One of the reasons violence in Chicago is now down to mid-1950s level, is because Chicago is using these techniques, what we call custom notification. 
	There's a shooting, they use it to head off retaliation. There's one of the standing vendettas, they go talk to guys on both sides, they calm it down. There's a geographic spike, you find the impact players, you go talk to them and their grandmothers. One of these we did recently, the guy we were talking to, we spelled his record out for him. He said, "No, no. No, that's not right, I don't have that many cases," and we showed him his record and his response was, "Gambling counts?" Yes, gambling counts. You caught the conviction, it means you're exposed to all these sentencing enhancements. You need to know this. He knew about all his felonies, he didn't know he had all these misdemeanors, he didn't know the law.
	So all kinds of ways we can use this direct outreach and notification. Remember where we started on this. At least if we're talking about the most serious violence and the cost serious crime, very small numbers of very special people. And that means we can focus on them, we can put them on notice. In Chicago, we're saying, "Look, we're giving you $2500 of free legal advice. Listen!" And they do it turns out. 
	All right. That is not always going to work. When it doesn't work, the next step should be that we apply the least possible effective use of the criminal sanction. We should treat arrest and prosecution the way we treat our own money. We should economize with it as much as we possibly can. And the idea, which is still embedded, especially in police culture and prosecutorial culture, that an arrest is a good thing. Doesn't matter whether it solves the problem, doesn't matter whether it has an impact. It's an outcome measure. We want that as high as we possibly can. 
	This is what happened with stop-and-frisk in New York. Most of the crime decline in New York came before stop-and-frisk ramped up. When it began its uptick, it was, I think, at under 200,000 stops a year in a city of eight and half million. By the time they started to bring it down again, it was up closer to 800 or 900,000 and the degree of crime reduction that had occurred during that about eight year span was minimal. But it had gotten into the culture of the NYPD that a stop is a good thing. 
	We should presume that every application of state power is a mistake until we can prove otherwise. It is the nature of democracy that we intrude into the private life both of citizens and communities as little as we can commensurate with the protection of their freedoms. And in these neighborhoods we have turned that on its head. 
	In very practical terms you can again make this into an engineering principle. So in Chicago, for example, and this is happening all over the country, none of this stuff works, the community pressure doesn't work, legitimacy doesn't work, putting people on notice doesn't work and it will never always work. And you've got one of these groups and they're shooting and they're out of control the normal move is to go in and you put hands on as many of them as you possibly can and you put them away for as long as you possibly can. 
	In Chicago, they are doing formal social network analysis of the guys in these groups. They are figuring out most of these groups don't have really hierarchy, they don't have leadership, they are constellations of operational connections between people. You can do the link analysis, you can do the mathematical analysis on that network and you can figure out the minimal number of those connectors that need to be taken out at which point the entire network is not longer a network, it is not an entity any longer and it cannot function. And what would have been the arrest of 50 people can come down to an arrest of five people or seven people or 12 people and you still get the outcomes you want on the ground.
	I talked about the wonderful work that they are doing in South Philadelphia. These folks, and there are only about a dozen of them, doing the day-to-day operational work. Just to say it again, they have basically shut South Philadelphia Down. They are not doing it by sending people to federal prison. I think there has been one federal case, the last time I checked, in the entire year that this has been going on. 
	Here's what they are doing. They have discovered that if they have to get to the point where they have to crack down on one of these South Philadelphia gangs, and they use that word gang, and they look in detail at the guys, Bryan Lentz who was just with us told us this story, actual case study.
	There were about 20 guys in this gang, they needed attention. They looked at them carefully and they discovered that fully half of them were pirating their electric power. They were stealing electricity from Con Ed, PECO, whatever it is. So they brought out the utilities, they cut those guys off and the word on the street in South Philadelphia ... Turns out the same thing is true for cable TV, there's this huge, huge problem or opportunity depending on how you look at it, with people stealing their cable. 
	Word on the street in South Philadelphia, because it has been meticulously marketed by this crew to the street gangs is, "Your gang shoots, tomorrow you're sitting in the dark reading comic books by candlelight and you can explain that to your mother and your little brothers and sisters why it is that we came in and cut the power. We told you, we told you again, we're telling you now, if this happens it is your fault. You are in charge of what is going on."
	We've ridden with them in South Philadelphia, the gang guys are coming, they know [inaudible 00:57:46] they know who everybody else is. They're coming up to them and saying, "Get me off this list! What do I have to do to get off this list!" And it is not RICO, it is not the federal government, it is not the death penalty, it is small stuff with certainty, with prior announcement, with transparency today.
	There's one I've been wanting people to try and every time I talk about it to my professional colleagues everybody laughs and says that's a great idea and nobody has done it yet. Someday somebody will do it. If you look at one of these groups, there's going to be at least a chunk of people on probation and parole, and I want the word in one of these cities to be, "Anybody in your group shoots, you are going to be brought into the probation and parole office, we are going to fit you with one of these now off-the-shelf ankle bracelets that can monitor you for alcohol use. And the price of somebody in your group shooting is that all of you have to be sober for the next 90 days." And I promise you we will shut the entire city down. My bumper sticker on this is, "If it's good enough for Lindsay Lohan, it's good enough for you." 
	So here endeth the lesson. Let's go back to where we started on this. This stuff works. There is now a stack of evaluations this high, there are the international net analyses, there are applications in probation, there are applications in drunk driving, we've got applications for robbery. We are two years into one of my personal obsessions, which is we've got a pilot in North Carolina that applies the same stuff to domestic violence and it is working. The approach works. 
	The approach began as an intervention against gang violence, an intervention against drug markets, an intervention against this and that. We're beginning to get to the point where we are beyond that and that those of you who do this kind of work, if you go to a cop and say, "What do you do?" They will tell you about how they spend their day. Then you say, "Well, wait a minute, you could have arrested that guy, you didn't. I really don't like the decision you made there," and nine times out of 10 that police officer will look at you and say, "We just enforce the law." 
	Prosecutors, any prosecutors in the room? I manage to insult everybody by the time I'm done. Prosecutors handle what's in their in-basket. The investigators, the arresting officers, they drop a case on their desk, they handle it. That's pretty much it, that's what prosecutors do. Judges apply the law, juries convict or don't, people go to prison. Prison administrators administrate the prison, maybe end up on probation or parole, they supervise your case load. We have no philosophy of doing this work, we never have had. 
	If there's been a philosophy in the last 40 years or so, it has been up the ante. More police, more prisons, harsher sentences, mandatory minimums, all that kind of stuff. In the communities that I care about, in Chester, Pennsylvania it has not worked and it has allowed the killing to persist. And we now know beyond any shadow of a doubt, that we have done additional discretionary damage to those neighborhoods. So just applying the law and just upping the ante is not okay. And we begin, as I say, to have a notion of in a structured principle way, how we can do this different. 
	When I was here before and I was not as optimistic as I was now and we did not have a 55% homicide reduction in Oakland last year, I still ended by saying we know this is the right direction in which to go, and if this stuff works and we know the cost of doing it the other way, then we have a moral obligation to change what we are doing. And I will end on exactly that same note today. Thank you.