Joining us on our callin set is Msnbc Chris Hayes who has written his second book called a colony in a nation. Where did the name of the book come from . It is a line from a Richard Nixon quote in 1968. It is an inauguration speech and thought of as a law and order speech. You have riots, protests, assassinations and he is calling for a return to order saying it is time for frank talk about the problem of order in the country. There is a line where he is talking about africanamericans and race struggles and saying they want the same as White Americans and dont want to just be a colony in a nation. That term, when i encountered it while reading the speech, really stuck with me and captured something deep about a lot of the reporting i was doing. Where does the book spring from . An incident this book sprang from . We covered criminal justice on the show and did that before Michael Browns death and before sort of the explosion of black lives matter activism and what happens in baltimore but when i started covering ferguson and then baltimore that was the sort of catalyst as i was thinking about where the country was at and what was it about this moment that was producing this kinetic reaction and started thinking about why we built the system we built. The project in writing it and trying to get to the bottom of policing and criminal justice. In your book, you come back to ferguson quite a bit. It had quite an impact on you . Yeah. You know, i grew up in bronx and new york city in the 80s and 90s when the city and borough were more dangerous and higher crime. I always thought about these issues about police and policing as big cities and it struck me in that everything that was tense and fraught about policing was in this small place and boiled down into this incredible essence and there is something about the intensity of it that struck me. You take on are you a fan . Part of the problem with Community Policing is the term gets really stretched. Broken windows get stretched too. What broken windows mean is it means about 60 Different Things depending on who you are asking. The idea behind Community Policing is the approach in which police are in communication with what kind of poli policeing you want. In some levels policing is a matter of law but in any Law Enforcement schema we select a level of enforcement and that can be driven by a lot of things. Budgetary constraints. We could catch every speeder in america if we wanted to. It would be within our power but that would cost a lot more money than we are willing to pay on it. Community policing at its best is a dialogue or partnership about the norms and order that the community itself wants, desires, and how police can work with the community to achieve that level of sincerity. You write the problem with Community Policing then and now is that so often now the cops bogue called to enforce Community Norms are not part of the community. That is the issue. We talk about Community Policing. You have a situation where particularly since the 1980s and rise of broken window as as model there is a focus on order preservation. That is the term. Order mant maintenance is the term they use in the broken windows article. If you walk through madison, wisconsin, or this campus on a sat in the fall, you will see what looks like a lot of disorder. College Football Game day is loud, drunken, people are consuming alcohol in all places. When i lived in madison one fall, couches were outside and people were passed out. That looks like disorder. That community has decided that that is part of the order of that community and tolerated it. So when you have an outside force making decisions about what is tolerated and not tolerated you will end up with a system that is intense. This all comes back to race in your view . I dont know if it is all comes back but it is inescapable if the fact some issues transcend race in some ways. The questions about policing are fraught questions in communities that are essentially all white. They are broad questions in society that dont have a lot of racial diversity. There is a certain degree to which people within the margined society or people in densely packed areas of poverty in whichever society they are in have friction with the police. This is a, you know, you can read about it in the lay miss and things like that. There are some parts that are l elemental. The particularities we have collected which is the most intensely imprisoned state in the world. Land of the free and of the brave so it is crazy. This is booktv and chris hayes is our guest. His book, a colony in a nation is what it is called. If you want to participate here is how. 202 is the area code. 74882 hp in the estern and central time zone. 7488201 for mountain and pacific time zones. Chris hayes, what is your take on this that you write in the book the drop in crime from the u. S. From 92 to today is one of the most stunning statistical mysteries of our time. You know, when i started going to manhattan to go to high school there were 2300 murders in the city. Last year there were 300. Thing about another metric reduced by that. Harvard admissions, car wrecks, poverty. It is a twoact story. 1996, 1992 increase in crime across all category and big and small cities across the country crime increases show up in every category. And starting in 1992 the trend reverses and goes away everywhere and the cause for that, the basic story of what happened there is incredibly poorly understood. Ultimately, i think the best cases i have read is it was multi factor. There is a demographic component, the drug war and structure of the drug market particularly the introduction of crack cocaine, there is a story about incarceration which in the beginning did reduce crime rate, there is a story about lead and the prevalence of lead for the period of time that produced a cohort that was committing the most crimes. But the fact of the matter is we dont have a great handle and comprehensive view. So the people that think they have figured it out which are Police Departments in major cities who lived through it. I say this with tremendous respect because if you oversaw a crime like that you would think you have unlocked something profound. There is iminated from that a superstition or rain dance approach which is this fear that if you stop doing the things you were doing yesterday then the battle days will come back. And we have seen this with politics of that playing out intensely in chicago and baltimore which have experienced pretty significant and really worrying upticks of violence. Host ruth is calling from flagstaff, arizona. Go ahead, we are listening. Caller hi, i would like to ask chris what we would ask President Trump if he were able to interview him in person. Guest you know, i think i would Say Something i would ask him to walk me through the basics of his health care plan. Or walk me through the basics of his tax reform. I think he seemed incredibly hardpressed to give any granular details or broad brush strokes of his policies and i think that it would be illuminating and helpful in a sustained setting to actually have him attempt to talk through what his policy is. Host rashad, norfolk, virginia. Caller hello, chris. How are you doing, man . Congratulations with your book. My question is i wouldnt speak ill of President Trump but, you know, the lack of knowing how a system like this works, america works, i am not an expresident so i dont have a tremendous amount of advice to give mr. Trump or President Trump but my thing is with his attorney general and how he is trying to implement the stopping of crimes and he should, you know, speak to the police chief about the lack of education and the lack of interaction with the police. The police has a tendency to use stop tactics when it comes to police or traffic stops. They are using gustopple tactics and brutalizing the citizens. And you know, that right there has to seize. Host all right. Thank you. Guest he said that term gistopple tactics which was said at the convention in chicago in 68. Those tactics by the city police force. Host governor mayor daily who used that term . Guest no, it was a critic of mayor daily who said it was also mayor delay who said the police are not there to cause disorder but are there to preserve disorder which is an amazing quote as well. Jeff sessions has essentially put a hold on a variety of descent decrees that have been negotiated under the Obamacare Administration and those consent degrees come from investigations of civil right violations by Police Departments in major cities including chicago and baltimore and cleveland among others. And he is basically put those on hold. A judge went ahead and without the dogs thumbs up and i think rashad is right. There is something worrying about an attorney general whose perspective on the issues seems to be a step backwards. From your book, the worlds most punitive system, black men age 2034 without a High School Degree have an institutional rate of 37 . For white men without a High School Degree it is 12 or three times lower. Dave damon is calling from hope well, virginia. Caller am i on . Host we are listening, please go ahead. Caller i was just wondering. There are different issues that disproportionally affect black people and i am wondering how to get White America to sort of feel like they have a stake in whether or not something is wrong with the black community. Like, for example, White Americans, 9 of White Americans live in poverty, 24 of black americans live in poverty. Somehow to get White America to care about issues related to black people. Host damon, we will get an answer in a second. Tell us quickly about yourself. Caller i am just an africanamerican millennial, big Hillary Clinton supporter, democrat all my life, you know, the standard black person as far as voting and things of that nature. Host thank you, sir. Guest you know, in some ways the project of the book is to do precisely that. It is to get White America to care about these issues in some ways. Even if you look at just White America the inkcar incarceration rate is high. If you just look at Police Shootings of white people it is way higher than other countries. We have huge amounts of sort of social ills relative to other countries even if you isolate for white people in the country and one of the things about this moment that i think is interesting is we are seeing with this experience of really intense, profound, economic distress, material decline along large swaths of White Working Class america particularly with the Opioid Epidemic gets more intense, a real question about whether we are going to use the sort of tool kit that was developed on people of color and sort of ratchet up or get tough language and mandatory minimums and launch a new war on drugs or take a different approach. In that way, i think everybody has stake in the outcome of that. Everyone is going to rise or fall together depending on what it produced. Is there a similarity between the way the Opioid Epidemic and the crack period in the 80s are being treated . The rhetoric is entirely different. The rhetoric around crack was dehumanizing. It was crack babies and, you know, these peoples brain were rotted and Demonic Forces were going to come and beat you up and kill you to get a hit of crack. And all sorts of myths were propagated. For instance, the idea it was more addictive than powered cocaine which is not true. That gave rise to crack and cotain sentencing disparities. It was a more intense drugs cocaine. What i think has happened is that the language around opioids is father more empthetic. Why do you think that is . I think it was an issue of race. Crack was coated as black people in the inner cities and allow aed this dehumanizing rhetoric to flourish. You saw Chris Christie and ted cruz and others opioid is my cousin, my brother, my friend, my grandchild and it had a real effect on the rhetoric. The question i think to test is whether the rhetoric transfers into policies that are different. I think there is a big temptation to sort of relaunch a new war on drugs that is just as destructive as previous generations. Host lets hear from margaret in levanworth, kansas. Caller thank you for your tv show and your book. I think we have lost humanity in your country since the vietnam war. I dont think we have ever healed and have been in one war after the other. To drop the mother of all bombs on other human beings and be cheerful about it . To do the horrible things we keep doing as the world becomes closer and sees this is an absolute despair. To lock people up you have to label them first. I have a people that work in prison and i said to them havent you seen the people . How many would you say are mentally ill or got mentally ill since placed in there and they laugh and say at least 50 of them and im like so that is the way we treat people instead of having care . And it is very easy to become labelled. Now we have a dangerous president that labels women are going to be put so back, anybody that is low they laugh at education, science. Everything good that would unite music that brought people together. We have lost all of that and continual war. Continually war somewhere. Host i think we got the point, margaret. Lets hear from chris hayes. Guest i think there is a n contenuity between how america treats citizens and how it conducts internationally. There are forces of fear and punitiveness and toughness. A constant obsession with toughness. Get tough on crime, get tough on drugs, tough on foreign counterparties. I think that is something woven deeply into the american cultural dna. I think you see it and margaret is right. There is a country in a state of near perpetual war for decades. We have been in the long est war of the republic. 2001 and grinds on to this day and the incarceration rates i think there is something to do it. Host carol, fairfield, california. Go ahead. Caller hi, chris. I am a great fan. What made you write your book . Will your book help the racial divide in the country . Guest i dont think any book is going to do that and any single act is going to do that. In some ways, i dont think there is some final fixed state where it will be solved. It is an eternal and continuous work for American Society and american citizens. What made me want to write it was a feeling i thought i had some perspective to offer because of how i had grown up in the city and the time i had and what i experienced first hand and reported i thought i could offer some insight into the sort of set question about how the system was built and why we built it and that is part of the project of the book. Getting people to ask themselves that question when they think about the politics and the language of crime and justice and police. Host is there a relationship between this book and your first book . Guest i think so. They are books attempting to diagnose what i would say are democratic failures; right . Failures of our democratic ideals. I think they are in some ways an interesting dialogue with each other. Little field arizona, jeff. Go ahead, jeff. Caller hey, i have seen the changes over the years and when you are in certain places and situations host jeff, i paul apologize. There is a bad connection. I dont think we heard you well. Lets try to get in malory in mapleville, illinois. Caller hi, chris. I saw you in chicago when you had a Book Discussion with natalie moore. I must admit at the point you did your Book Discussion i was about, i dont know, a fifth of the way through and now i am half way through. The more i read the more depressed i get. It is not a i dont know what i expected but it is getting more and more depressed. Specifically i am at the point where i am at the part where you are talking about white fear. I am wondering if you could espound on that. I think white fear is the reason for all of this. Host before you do i want to read one line from your book which is americans convert white theory into policy. To malorys point that one of the key pieces of the book is it a foundational. That, you know, the first captain of the ship that landed at james town. The first entry is we were set upon by the saveraages. From that moment, all the way through experience of settlements, frontier, the project of slavery and the incredible amount of fear and terror that required and the constant fear of the slave revolt. Of the social order spinning out of control and that is something deeply woven into the political and cultural dna. It is a part of who we are as a people because of the sort of foundational ways in which the country was instructed. We share and pass it along to generations. I stopped to call the police and the book ends on me holding the phone. The reason i wanted to end on that was because part of the effect of doing the reporting was to think really carefully but what are the cost of involving the police in a situation. Thats not something i grappled with before. Its something that millions grapple with every day. I want to communicate to people what it feels like or for them to understand that theres a cost to policing. The one did you push the button . [laughter] host is a show airs on msnbc at 1 00 p. M. The macbook tvs live coverage of the los angeles festival of books continues were here on the campus of Southern California another beautiful california day about 150,000 people are due here this weekend. Attend the festival. Will go back inside and this is an author panel on california