Transcripts For CSPAN2 Thomas Abt Bleeding Out 20240714

We have upcoming discussion wives charles king, how a circle of rein theyd anthropologist reinvested race, sex and gender in the 3,020th center and jeff rowe with if become, white flight, race, fiction and the american imagination myung many others. For details and our full excel all check out online or feel free pick up an event flier this evening. Ims to talk with conclude with time for your questions and a book signing right here at this table. Were pleased to have cspans booktv here attaching todays event. When asking questions in the q a, please know your questions well be recorded and place wait a moment for the microphone to make its way to you before asking you question. We have copies of the book for sale at the registers in the next room which is my cue to say as per use, thank you for buying books from Harvard Book Store. You support the future of an independent book store so thank you. And before we start, quick reminder to please silence your cellphones for the talk. Im very pleased to introduce tonights speaker thomas abt is a Senior Research foal he the Kennedy School of government he served as policymaker and Barack Obamas Justice Department and worked for new York Governor Andrew Cuomo overseeing all criminal justice and Homeland Security agencies in the state. He real joined in conversation this evening by reverend jeffrey l. Brown, nationally recognized leader and expert in youth and urban Violence Reduction and founder of recast, National Initiative to assist cities build better part shoreships in effort to reduce gang violence. Hell be discussing toms book. Steve vein pinker writes violence is not a permanent feature of urban life but a solvable problem if you leave your ideology at the door and look at data on what works. Thomas abt is a World Authority o urban crime and fascinating and important book offers many surprises, much insight and positive recommendations. We are so pleased to host this event here at Harvard Book Store tonight. Plea join in the in welcoming thomas abt and reverend jeffrey brown. [applause] in evening, everyone. Try it again, good evening, everyone. Good evening. It is a pleasure and an honor to be here and to be riff my find, tom abt. And talk can but the release of this extraordinary book called bleeding out, the defendant stating consequences of urban violence and a bold new plan for peace on the streets. Thats really applicable this young man because he has always been someone who was really not afraid to look at the very difficult issues we have in our nation and to scour the data in order to find what really works, and not what is politically correct but what works and will work for the nation. So im glad to be part of this and glad to see you here. Ive known him since my hair was black. Thats no longer so. But i look forward to having a conversation about the book and its interesting because your book is sort of laid out in a way a doctor would look at a patient. You have triage, you have diagnosis, you have the treatment, and then the prognosis, but in the beginning part of the book, you start out with a story and its story of the reverend kim odom, and id like for you to talk but that because i know reverend odom. She and is her husband live in boston, and it was a tragedy that really lent to the focus of her in your book, and id like for you to talk about that and to talk about why you chose her as a place to start in your book. Sure. So well, excuse me. First of all, thank you to the harvard become store for hosting this, and thank you to you, jeff, you have been a colleague and friend for a long time, and you are going all around the country doing this work, and so i really appreciate you taking the time out to do this. So, i met kim in 2011, around the same time that you and i met in connection with the National Forum on Youth Violence prevention, which was something that i was helping to coordinate and run for the white house at the time. And kim came to the forum and she it would a story. She told her own story of grief and loss. Kims son, who steven, who was 13 at the time, was coming home from playing basketball and was mistaken for a rival gang member by one of bostons more notorious gangs and was shot and killed, and kim told this story courageously in front of hundreds of people, and it really moved me it and really sort of reminded me, its one of the most powerful stories along the way when you do this work, since i was a young prosecutor, almost 20 years ago, these people come through your life, these stories come through your life and you want to honor them in some way, and so i think that in many ways thats the those stories were the sort of emotional genesis for the book, and really kim was a great place to start, and as you know, she just an incredibly wonderful person and compassionate person. Go into their story in more detail than many of the others, and the way she processed what happened to her son and her family is extraordinary. So thats really why we started there. I thought it was interesting because this was a typical black working class family in boston, just raising children. They have four children, and father was a letter carrier, and was they were just good people, and this tragedy happened, and it happens a lot. More often than many people realize in our communities. A lot of the violence is random, and it was so unfortunate for that to happen, and you have communities of color that are plagued with violence, which leads me to the second question that i have, which is you really make a bold statement in your book, i would say its bold, and its provocative because youre saying that in order to help the urban poor, that the top priority must be stopping the violence. And i thought that was interesting because with all of the other structural weaknesses in urban communities, in among the urban poor, you talk about housing and housing policies and education and health care and drugs. Withall of those structural weaknesses you say that, number one priority would be to stop the violence. Can you talk more about that . Sure. So, i just want to sort of give a qualification, then tell you how i dime that personally, then talk about the evidence. So, the first qualification is this is a sort of tough needle to thread. And the argument i am making is that you need to put urban violence first. All of those broader outcomes that we are hoping for, theres educational outcomes, employment outcomes, commercial outcomes, theyll become easier. So, in the book i kind of make this statement carefully which is that, i am not saying that tackling urban violence is the only thing you need to do to address concentrated poverty. I am not even saying it is the most important thing you need to do. About, i am saying it is the first thing you should do as a matter of sequence, because when you look at the research you really see that all of these subjects or all of these issues are interlinked. One of the things that i. Out is that urban violence is not a symptom of all of these root causes and structural factors, its actually playing a key role in perpetuating these. Pat sharkey has done some wonderful research on this and one of the statements talk about a bold statement, one of the bold statements that he makes is that he says that exposure to violence, particularly early exposure to violence is a central mechanism keeping the poor children poured today. And the way it works is that they are exposed to violence, sometimes in the home, often in the community. Even at school. And, this exposure creates trauma and that trauma makes it harder to concentrate, it makes it harder to sleep, it makes it harder to control impulsive behavior, and all of those things which are creating physiological changes in this persons chemistry and bring impact educational performance. And so, when kids dont perform well in school, that affects their fruit future earnings. And so this is a key empirical finding. And so, let me just tell you. I am telling you but you already know this because you have been in the situation hundreds of times. When you go around the country and you have these meetings, these Community Meetings with teachers with policymakers or with Police Officers, there is a very difficult conversation that you are often having witches that someone in the meeting will want to make the meeting about something else. So they will say, we are here to try to save lives and reduce homicides. But, the first thing we have got to do is get rid of all of the guns. Or, the first thing we have to do is get everybody a job or the first thing we have to do is eliminate racism, eliminate poverty, eliminate inequality. And its a very difficult challenge to get people to get people back on board and focused and saying, yes, those things are absolutely critical. They are absolutely essential. No one is should be satisfied with the country that is poor, unequal and unsafe. But, you have to be able to juggle these two things in your mind at the same time because people need relief right now and they deserve safety. And, there are concrete solutions which i lay out in the book that can have an impact right now, while we make those longer generational struggle. Right look at that because we are in all the work i have done across the country, you go into a high school for example with a thousand students and i will ask the question, how many of you have a relative that has been taken to this world through gun violence. When i was going to school you would see maybe three or four hands go up and that was back in the jurassic area but what can i say. Today, you would see three or four hands that do not go up. And, when you talk about the focus of students, that small group of youth who are involved in the violence has a disproportionate effect of all of the students in a school. You ask a student how many teachers do you have on then they may be what would your teacher name last year and they would maybe be able to tell you all of the names, they certainly can tell you how many teachers were in the school. But how many gangs there are in the neighborhood, the leaders, because it is a focal. And, even though we have all of these other factors to deal with within the community for the young people, violence seems to be the top priority. So i fully agree with that. When you move in your book to form a triage to the beginning of the diagnosis you talk about the stickiness of crime which is an interesting word. I would like for you to talk about that and when you talk about that there is an interesting story you outline the 13th street gang versus the killer cartel. And if you can use that to frame your conversation and comments about how we need to focus on these places, people and circumstances. Sure, so, one of the most consistent findings in this is played out city after city, decade after decade in study after study when you look at urban violence is how intensely concentrated it is. And so urban violence clusters together among surprisingly small groups of People Places and behaviors. And so, what we think of as a problem that is striking out everywhere is actually surprisingly focused. For instance, in new orleans more than 60 of all lethal encounters involve a tiny network that is less than 1 , a fraction of 1 of the entire population. Here in boston, 5 , 5 of those city geography a city block accounts for more than 50 of all of the shooting there a few things that are important about that. Number one, it creates an enormous opportunity for efficiency. You dont have to work with everyone and be everywhere, you only have to work with the people and places that matter most. On the second thing thats really important is, we have been stigmatizing entire groups of people and entire communities with this overbroad label of violence hurried when in fact, even in the most dangerous communities the vast majority of people in the vast majority of blocks are not dangerous. If you lived in one of those communities you know that. You know to go down the street not that street. You know to hang out with this person and not that person. And so, this is something i wanted to get across because i think it is important because not only is there a lot of confusion about urban violence but there is a very deep sense of pessimism which is that unless we solve all of the problems of the world we cannot get to this and that is not what the evidence says. That is so interesting because as i think about the focus piece of bad, it is very true that with a lot of work i did it was with just those groups who are actively involved in the violence. When i was able to build relationships with those youth that i would also have the attention of all the other youth in the neighborhood. They would find out about it. So, all of that is very true. This is not easy. Exactly. But this is achievable. You asked about the metaphor. So, one of the things that i am sitting down with a mayor, police chief, policymaker at the local level, i want to make it very concrete for them about how to tackle this problem. And so, i say we need to understand three things. We need to understand who the people are and it could be as little as 2 300 or 400 people. And we need to understand what the key behaviors are. And then you create policy focused on those people, places, and things. The way this plays out in real life with using this metaphor is, take two games, the killer cartel and the 13th street gaming, these are madeup names by the way in the book i did not want to give any actual names or give any credit in the book but, so you have got these two gangs in these gangs are made up of a bunch of young men who grew up together. And, that gang may be involved in various types of illicit activities and they may be associated with violence, but within that gang are misplayed out again and again and i have spoke with former gang members who confirmed this, for every ten gang members there is typically only one shooter or soldier or hitter, whatever the term may be. And so that is something very important to keep in mind. In this hypothetical that i played out it played out at a nightclub in the nightclub was not in this neighborhood that was nearby in this nightclub there was what we call a hotspot. So, the constant scene of fights, stabbings, shootings. Now you have your hot plates and you have your so both gangs are going to the nightclub, theyre having a good time and then you get into not just your hot place in your hot people, you get into your hot behaviors and what is that . Both gangs managed to sneak a gun into the club. So, now you have illegal gun carrying one of the key behaviors. Another key behavior i think may be surprising to some of you from the literature if not hard drug use, but alcohol use just getting drunk normally and so they are drinking as well. And of course, they are all grading or group affiliated which is the third risky behavior. So, what you have is a people risk, place risk, Behavior Risk and that reaches some kind of an visible tipping. That there is an argument in the club that argument leads to a flight on that leads to the shooting and that leads to killing and then what happened will play out for weeks, months, could be even generations and we are playing catchup. Absolutely. So, let me turn the focus on balance. Because back in the 90s when i was an active part of what was happening in terms of violent type activities i remember the first call and that i did with David Kennedy and i remember being a part of it, i remember all of the folks who had the lawenforcement folks, he had social workers, he had teachers and a mother of a young man who had been killed and he had someone like me there. And in the typical collins you had this violence of Law Enforcement and Community Talking to gang members. Our friend of mine in new york city say, this is interesting, he said well, our violence is going down to bed with a very different scenario. A lot of cops, lots of sweet, lots of occupation by Police Officers. I wanted you to talk a little bit more about balance as you outline it in your book. I really should be asking you the question here about just to back up a little bit, jeff was involved in the boston globe project which turned into focus deterrence, largely credited with reducing youth homicide involved in by 60 the central part of the boston miracle story. And David Kennedy was the creator of the boston gun project, its a strategy that i talk about in detail in the book. But going back to this principle of balance and just to back out further, there were three key principles that i talk about in the book, focus, balance and fairness which will talk about in a moment. If you look at the evidence and i think if you just think about common sense it is very clear that when you look at the entire spectrum of policy there is some very heavy enforcement strategies that have been demonstrated to reduce violence. There are also some very preventative supportive treatment oriented strategies that have been proven to prevent violence. There is no skewing of the evidence towards enforcement or towards prevention. And then when you back up you look at cities, i know of no American City that sustainably reduce violence either just by trying to wrestle their way out of it or just by trying to help and treat their way out of it and this just reinforces what we know about human nature. We dont raise her children just with positive incentives and just with negative incentives. We are using carrots and sticks to change peoples behavior all of the time. And so, that is a core principle in the book. As you know, this is very challenging practice because people come to this work with very strong prior. So you are in these meetings and you are talking with Law Enforcement community and trying to get them to understand that yes enforcement plays a role but it needs to be very targeted and it is not the solution to every problem. Then you are going to meet with activists and advocates who dont believe in working with Law Enforcement at all. And believe that and are just uncomfortable with any type of enforcement no matter how serious criminal activity. That is really challenging in practice. But that is what has worked in the past and most successful intervention has that theme of balance. So, why backslash happening is cities all across the country happening in boston it had huge margins, tens of thousands of people im talking about police, in terms of the motif of fairness, talk more about why that is an important piece in the diagnosis of all this. Well its a critical piece. For me, i left the Governors Office just after the unrest in ferguson began. So, i had spent a long time and government know when youre working in government youre really not free to just publicly opine on this. You have a Communication Team and everything is scrutinize. But for the first time in a long time i could speak freely. So, the first oped i wrote was basically pushing back on a rather provocative conservative talking. That ferguson had basically been responsible for a massive uptick in crimes because people were criticizing the police and then the police were simply stepping back. I did not believe that to be the case and as i dug into the research i really found a different phenomenon going on. As the phenomenon called legal cynicism. Basically, what legal cynicism explored and now has been verified through a number of studies is this concept that if people dont believe in the criminal Justice System they wont use it and that means they will not provide information to police investigators, they wont serve as jurors, they wont show up as witnesses. Perhaps more importantly, it means they wont turn to the criminal Justice System to resolve potentially violent disputes. If your cousin gets beat up, you dont call 911, you call your other cousin and you go handle your business. And, that creates this cycle of violent retribution. One of the things that i think we need to understand is that these toxic instances of Police Corruption and brutality send a very dark message to people who are already struggling and without hope and if they were not in a dark place before now they are in a further dark place. And you have to remember this activates all of their very real prior about a whole history, nations history of segregation, discrimination, persecution, and slavery. And so, this is all of the piece. I remember in a conference right after ferguson and john j, a lot of Police Leaders they are talking about this and saying, if you are a white man in this area and you are working in Law Enforcement, i was the former head of Public Safety for new york state. If someone calls you racist, you cant just walk away from the table. You have to stay involved in that conversation. While you may know in your heart that you are not racist, that perception is not crazy for bed. It had you have to work through that. And so has a critical component. So basically, if you want to reduce crime sustainably you have to do it in a way that is perceived legitimate by the impacted community. Any police chief will tell you, you can just flood a with officers, stop everybodys search make a lot a lowlevel technical address and you will drive crime down. The cost will be enormous, moral, economic, social, its unsustainable. Six months later youll deal with the same crime problem with less resources. And so, that serves my better. , if you are going to do this over the long run it has to be perceived as legitimate. The plan is that if we follow through with your plan, nationally we will see a reduction of Violent Crime by 50 in eight years. Now, i would say hallelujah to that. It. Absolutely so, after the amen, tell me the plan. How would this work. Essentially what i am proposing is, i am not in the book i dont mandate one strategy. I dont say you have to use this particular strategy or that particular strategy. I identified ten or 11 strategies that have been proven by multiple experimental studies to again and again provide concrete anticrime and anti violent benefits. So these are very well supported tragedy. What i argue is, you need to pair two, three, or for these strategies and focus on the people, places and things. And basically, i am making a very conservative estimate which is that most of the strategies in the book are capable of providing a 10 reduction in homicide by themselves. I am assuming that three or four together can produce that same 10 annual reduction you multiply that reduction over eight years you get a 50 reduction. And thats how it can happen. It sounds 50 sounds, how can we do it, sounds impossible but reducing Violent Crime by 10 and murder by 10 , thats achievable. And i think thats important. This any complicated problem was the first thing you do . You break it down . And then it gets easier and easier. Urban violence is no different. So, thats the way you do it. And i think the other important thing is i also talked about your involvement adopting the strategies would require a few Million Dollars per year and a larger city and more violent city like chicago it might cost as much as 20 million. And in the first year at the federal effort tackling the 40 most violent cities it would cost about 180 million in the first year. Some of you may know that famous washington, d. C. Term, a billion here and there and pretty soon youre talking about real money. I have to tell you, after two decades in government, federal, state, and local, this is not a lot of money. This is easily, you can find these levels of and so, these things are achievable. You might ask, how can this be so affordable again, its because the problem is so concentrated. You only have to work with those few hundred people in those few dozen places. So, that is how i get to that number. And it sounds fantastic and it sounds so simple that all of the cities around the country should be adopting that and embracing that. They should be but lets talk about political realities around that. And you talk about that in your book, you talk about progressive elements and conservative elements and how they characterize this issue and you talk about the difficulties around it. Can you just speak about not only those things that may be a way in which we can wind through that . Sure. One of the chapters in the book basically says, i have laid out all of these strategies, they all seem to make sense and seem achievable and feasible. Why isnt every seas city doing this and so then i go into what i see is this to central issues. The first issue is how you talk about a problem impacts how we think we can solve it and that i think that how we are talking about this politically creates challenges to the types of solutions that are laid out in the book. And then also the extraordinary challenge of explaining what financing evidence means in these complicated and making the solutes simple and making it explainable and then translating it into practice. In terms of politics one of the reasons that the boston gun project, now called a focused deterrence or operation ceasefire has been implemented in maybe two dozen cities and not 200 cities is because it doesnt reinforce the priors of any political base. It is not entirely prevention order in today a lot of prevention is goes its a little bit of a tough on crime message here and a lot of conservatives go wait a second, youre going to give handouts to people who shot people before, im not im not comfortable with that. And that is true of a lot of the strategies, particularly when you group these strategies. So, in my experience really the reason i wrote this book is is the vehicle to save lives and solve a very important problem. Part of the reason i wrote it and i wrote it for an audience like this is because i had some success in my own career before this but it was limited. I had all the access you would want. I have been to the white house, i have been to the statehouse. I had briefed many mayors on this issue and often the response would not be i dont trust your evidence or we dont have the money, it would just be i dont know if i can sell this or this doesnt go down easy, i dont know who is going to get excited about this and so, the reason i wrote the book for a broader audience is because if a broader audience believed in these strategies they will demand it. And then you will make that advocacy easier. Im looking at the time and i want to make sure that we have enough time for folks to ask questions i had a question around the issue of race and how it permeates i need to Say Something really quick about that. But i do want to note is that he makes a very strong argument about we address head on the issues of race. So, and actually i would love for you to follow up you have dealt with this exact same problem races everywhere in this work. It is why we got here. It is why we havent made more progress. And yet, raise can be a huge you have to account for it and acknowledge it. Its often hard to move forward. What i see is the key thing that has to happen in order for this work to move forward is that there has to be some kind of reconciliation between impacted communities in the state, the government, Law Enforcement but not just Law Enforcement and, the conversation about race can be so toxic on one side or another that it either the delays that reconciliation or prevents it entirely. We have a president who is consistently using Violent Crime and immigration and terrorism to divide us, to demagogue the issue. And it is toxic. And we have extremists on the other side, although i really dont want to suggest they are equally culpable but we have people who are so passionate about social justice which is a very good thing and i am a strong proponent of criminal Justice Reform that sometimes they step over the line in my view and they use language to suggest that everyone in Law Enforcement is racist or that the entire system is so infected with racial bias that it has to be discarded entirely. But poor people were impacted by this issue needs of enforcement. If you speak to them directly they have a much more balanced view. They dont like how they are being treated by police but they dont want police to leave. And so, accounting for this crucial issue of race in a way that promotes reconciliation is critical. And that resonates with me. I know the arguments of they grew such as black lives matter who often advocate to the abolition of police and then conservatives on the other side to blame just about everything on the backs of black people, not even thinking about the history of how we have gotten to this place in the first place. And what is intriguing for me is because when you are on the ground and when you are working on the streets for dynamics are very different. I was talking about the apolitical nature of working with youth on the street and theyre not really paying attention to the politics on the left or right, they are dealing with the everydayness of trying to survive. And if we have more people who would concentrate more on that the name may get somewhere but the darkness continues. I want you to end on a hopeful note and because one of the fascinating things about this is that he has stories of ordinary everyday people and he really talks about the resiliency of these individuals shine through even in the of what we have with everyday lives. Talk about that it may be ends again on how she was able to move forward after the tragedy of the death of her son. Right. So, it is hard to get across but i hope i do a decent job in the book. This work is extremely difficult and it can be very dark and very ugly but it can also be extraordinarily gratifying. And extraordinarily beautiful. You get to meet people on the way who you just can imagine is on the cutting edge in chicago of engaging the highest risk young men and helping them turn their lives around. Did i think that i believe 18 years for murder and he came out of prison and he immediately set to making it right. He immediately threw himself in the service, ten years later he has a College Degree of masters degree, he is running this organization and he is making a difference. And he is, every day and so there is people like that, theres so many people who have been deeply impacted, deeply damaged by the violence they have experienced, suffered or perpetrated, who managed to turn it around and managed to engage. A pretty common story in this work is Police Officers and former gang members who used to run around after each other, locking each other up, long history sitting at meeting tables thinking of how to prevent the next shooting. So these are there are Beautiful Moments and even with whose loss was immeasurable, kim told her story again and again to audiences and turned her sorrow into his purpose. I described in th the closing sections of the book the last interview i had with kim we are sitting at the memorial which i didnt really realize until we were there only about a block away from her house it was really close. And, we sat there and she said, i need this to mean something. I need this, i need the story to not just be about my loss in my suffering, there needs to be some hope. And i thought about that and i said well, im not sure i would have written the book without you and you gave me hope. We sat for a long time just sat there. Sir, i do think the book is deeply sad at times, but i hope it ends on a note of optimism. Because we really can save lives, this is not the intractable problem that everybody believes it to be. I would like you to join me in thinking our guest. [applause] we will go to questions, i saw a hand in the back and hand right here. A few years ago i think it was john was involved in a Pilot Project in chelsea called a different september. In the premise, the simple sentence was, get them earlier than six and adding to that as you say, you would like to add your strategies, i think it was i forget who said an example is the best teacher, my question is, i think youre different september that concept was picked up nationwide and i was so touched by your frustration at trying to get it further and also fascinated by the fact that you spotted or found a way to spot the small sections that are the most important. Has anybody thought are included in your strategy to start early with stories or things that would directly target the behaviors that youre trying to protect people against her to arm them against . Thats a good question. Thank you for that question. The book does go into a lot of the evidence about early prevention. Things like early parent training, nurse family partnership, and a lot of family based programming. A lot of family functional therapies. The things that have been demonstrated through strong studies to reduce risk in children and adolescents, not just young adults. I also want to. Out something that is important, particularly in progressive circles there is a somewhat fatalistic notion which is that unless we reach these children early, unless we can connect in childhood that is somehow lost people change. So thank you for that question. For years and been friends for the person who lives on the streets. I was blindsided about a month and a half ago when my friend came up to me and was extremely physically ill and i thought it was important i also had a ten my homework the end what this person had done and how to find medical help sorry did everything i could do on the spot and carried on with my own life and eyes suffered for a month and a half remembering what i learned when i was little about the good samaritan. And i dont even, that one story stayed with me and arguably motivated my concern. Thank you. Thank you. I guess i have a question, my question was, i read a print interview that you gave yesterday and you mention something i thought was important which is even though these communities are isolated and we were in affected by violence the costs are spread out to every american. I want you to talk and use your imagination and explain to us what are some benefits even those who are not affected by urban violence that we can see that u. S. Is less plagued by gun violence. Thank you. These questions are setting me up perfectly. And i did not plant these questions, i want to. Out. So, the cost of urban violence to the Broader Community are often sort of invisible to most people. But they are significant. They range from increased taxes, insurance premiums and decrease Property Values just to name a few things that we are all paying when we talk about urban violence. The interesting thing is, there has been some studies looking at what would happen if you had a significant reduction in violence. Where would those savings goal . Even modest reduction in homicide can yield a huge dividend in terms of a bloated cost particularly in terms of increased property rates. When increase property rates go up you get more tax revenues and tax revenues can then be reinvested into communities. They are necessarily reinvested in communities of something we need to make sure how much it happens. Its important to know the total social cost of homicides the conservative is 10 million per homicides. The weak conservative is 19 million per homicide. So just avoiding know if you homicides creates enormous social value. Thank you for the social value you mentioned we mentioned the ten strategies. And in particular, how couple of those examples synergize together to amplify the positive effects. Sure, very briefly out talk about the intervention that has the strongest evidence of effectiveness according to a recent systematic review on that is so focused returns. Recently it was done in oakland. What it looks like on the ground is community members, social Service Providers on Law Enforcement get together and study the problem. They identify the people and places that are driving the silent. And then, they engage the people, they have a series of Small Group Meetings and reverent than involved in many, many of these. And cap to these young men and almost exclusively young men directly and they say, we know it is you who is doing the shooting, the shooting has to stop. If it stops were here to help you. If it doesnt stop we are here to stop you from and they follow up on those promises. They follow up with safety planning educational training, cognitive and behavioral therapy and other services. But they also follow up with targeted enforcement for those who persist in violence. So, that is an example. Its also targeted gun controls and there is also as we talked earlier, getting ahead of the problem with family functional therapy, engaging the entire family in a clinical approach to work with kids while their behavior is simply unruly before it becomes violent. So, during the 1990s and the 21st century there was a fact dramatic reductions in Violent Crime and emergencies. In new york state, new york city was the poster child for that. Do you think those efforts have stalled out in more recent years . Or just that theres a lot more that can be done beyond that . Thats a great question. How you look like urban violence really depends on if you look at where we are in relation to where we were 25 years ago, the story is one of tremendous progress. If you go back 50 years ago we are essentially standing in exactly the same space with no progress made whatsoever and with the homicide rate that is five times higher than the rate of any other hiding from generations. To your question about how that impacts the work today, i think its interesting because its essential issue over challenge the book talks about which is that we had success and in some ways we have shrunk the problem down to where its really impacting a small group of people. The most disenfranchised and disadvantaged people among us. But for them, nothing has changed. The violence seems to be as bad as ever. And, that is one of the things we need. In 1991 you did not need to convince anyone that addressing Violent Crime was important because everybody felt personally impacted or personally at risk. But today this is an abstract issue for many of us. What i am asking is for people to make a small leap in terms of empathy and imagination to push that reality that peaceful reality that most of us are living with and make that a reality for some of those lease disadvantaged among us. Two things. One i was appreciating year balancing the criticism on the far right and the far progressives because at times they find inclination of the juvenile justice and the focus on diversion is so strong that we are losing some of the ability to collaborate the way they fit. But i have a question about drugs and the sustaining factor of the gangs there are times when there feels like a wall thats going to be hard. Sure. I do covered in the book. You have a lot of the answers on many of these issues. But i have a chapter in the book called gongs, gangs, and drugs. Piecebypiece is to take apart our approaches and conventional wisdom comes on three subjects. In particular in relation to drugs. In the late 80s and early 90s a a lot of urban violence was driven by drug activity. It was intense violence competition for openair drug market as there were territorial. That is not where we are today. There has been a really profound d coupling of illegal drug activity in gang Group Activity that sparked violence. One of the things we will often see is there is a violent incident between two drug dealers. So we assume it is about drugs. You talk to people and do further investigation, it was over a girl are was over in his cell posted on social media or Something Like that. And, we have a massive drug epidemic in this country with opioids. It is killing thousands and thousands of people. It is horrible and tragic. It is mostly nonviolent. It is surprisingly nonviolent. So thats it. That is one of those counterintuitive notions. We assume this must be driven by some illicit criminal activity but a lot of it is not. A lot of it is just these vicious disputes that go back and forth. When you talk about reconciliation, what does that look like . Cerro, i think thats a hard question but i think that reconciliation works from the inside out and i think it is hard to do when we think about it in the broadest terms. It is hard to reconcile a nation it is much easier to bring two people together or two dozen people together. What i see is in the cities that are making a difference they are not creating a massive reconciliation, theyre not changing and entire cities dynamic but what they are doing is creating a safe space for a small select group of Law Enforcement, Service Providers community representatives, the jeff browns of the world. If you can get the transformative power, if you get a few dozen old of those people together and they are on the same page and one of those people is the mayor, one is the police chief, a few key players, you can really deliver a tremendous amount of safety to the city. One of the things i want to urge people is, dont look at this from the outside in. If you really want to understand it, get your feet wet. Go to roxbury, go to dorchester. You will be surprisingly well, and start engaging on these issues. That is how you reconcile a person other time and work on it from the inside out that the outside and in my opinion. Thank you all again. [applause] every year book tv covers book fairs and festivals around the country. Heres a look at some events on the calendar. This weekend were live at the brooklyn festival. And then from october 11 from the 13th is the southern festival of books in nashville. The following weekend the boston book festivals welcome speakers and anticipates 15000 people in attendance. Later in the month of june and for live coverage of the texas book festival in austin. For more information and to watch our previous festival coverage put the book fairs tab on our website booktv. Org. Honor Author Interview program afterwards, representatives and mclean cluster of New Hampshire spoke with journalist about the contribution to the opioid graces. Heres a portion of the program. Heroin like we said is a natural plan. But fentanyl is made in a lab and is 50 times stronger. So, drug dealers will now use pure heroin and cut their hair went with fentanyl because its way to save money. It is so much cheaper to make. Its so much more powerful. The problem is, the way they mix them together is not precise. Its not scientific so you use these dealers in st. Louis one that i talked to said they would mix the heroin fentanyl using a mr. Coffee grinder just the same thing you would use to drive a coffee bean but the problem is you cant do it precisely. So, one dose may be weak but another dose might be so strong as to kill someone and thats exactly why so many people are dying from street fentanyl. And one of the comments you are quoting people because it does seem counterintuitive. If you think of this being a product that is literally killing the purchases of the product it doesnt sound like a Good Business model but you quoted people saying they find out about a death and they will want to get that batch because its stronger. So help us understand that it is the level addiction that will cause someone to take that step or did you get more behind talking to the users on the high that they are chasing. Well, many longtime heroines users dont even get high anymore. From heroin. All it does is it gets rid of their withdrawal symptoms and back to baseline. With fentanyl they can get high again is so much stronger and so unfortunately what happens is when someone overdoses and another addictive user hears about that, he or she doesnt say well i better stay away from that they say no, this must be a really powerful batch. I want that. You get that euphoria. Exactly. And so that is a very unfortunate aspect. I think it is hard to get your brain around certainly for policies part of what our taskforces about trying to educate members of congress from all over the country dealing with this to understand what the impacts are and how people are responding the other part of the book that i thought was fascinating was your take on the war on drugs and going back to the history of that starting with president nixon, president reagan, nancy reagan, just say no. Talk about that a little bit. Like what your impression is on whether that approach has been successful. Ever since i was a little kid i been hearing just say no about the war on drugs. And unfortunately where we are at right now is that fentanyl is killing more americans every year than any drug ever. So we have been through the crack epidemic the method of pandemic, pills, like oxycontin, that was the first part of the opioid crisis, first wave then heroin the second wave but fentanyl is the worst killing the most people. So, to me it is all evidence that the war on drugs is not succeeding. We help take out Pablo Escobar the famous kingpin and yet his death did nothing to slow so were getting more cocaine from columbia than ever before there is el chompo who was imprisoned it and tried recently thats not stopping the flow of drugs from mexico at all locking people up for small drug offenses in the u. S. Has been devastating for minority communities in terms of the money spent and so to me, who were on drugs is a working. To watch the rest of the program and find more episodes of afterwards, visit our website, booktv. Org and click on the afterwards tab near the top of the page. Normal. Our surviving the white is forth coming from simon and schuster. She will be speaking with