Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. The current issues, policing, prison, and systems panel. Im a Los Angelesbased journalist reporting on gangs in the Los Angeles County sheriffs department. Thank you for reading. Im joined up here by a group of fabulous authors. I will let them introduce themselves. My name is robert samuels. Im a staff writer and coauthor of his name is george floyd, one mans struggle for interracial justice. If only my coauthor was hey, everybody. Im the White House Bureau chief at the Washington Post and coauthor of his name is george floyd. We have known each other for about 15 years, we wrote the book together, looking forward to talk about what we found. Im chris henning, and im a professor at georgetown law school. The director of the juvenile justice clinic and initiative. Basically that means i still represent children who have been accused of crimes in the Nations Capital and representing kids for the last 26 years. [applause] my name is justin brooks. I am a law professor and founder of the california Innocence Project. Ive written the book you might go to prison even though youre innocent. Available now on amazon or tent 100. Im a professor at ucla. Law school. My research is focused on litigation and police accountability. Im the author of shielded, how the Police Became untouchable. [applause] this should be a really exciting conversation. To kick it off, i would like to start by asking each of the authors what inspired you to write your book . Lets switch up the order. Starting with joanna. I have been doing Research Exploring the questions in my book for about 15 years for some civil rights litigator in new york city bringing civil rights lawsuits against Law Enforcement and other government officials and began researching these suits and trying to answer questions i first started asking as a young lawyer about what impact the lawsuits actually had. The answer was not much, not as much as they should. Over the past 15 years, a great deal of research about qualified immunity doctrine, the kinds of considerations lawyers make when they try to decide whether to take these cases, the challenges of holding local governments responsible. The ways in which state and local governments shield officers and departments from financial responsibility in these cases. I have written a lot of articles about these topics. After george floyd was murdered in may of 2020, i started talking with a lot of legislators and journalists about these findings and the way in which civil rights litigation works and decided to write this book to lay out in a way that people who dont read articles for fun on the weekend could understand the various barriers in these cases. To make clear, although a lot of conversation has been focused on defense of qualified immunity, it is really just the tip of the iceberg when people whose rights have been violated are seeking justice in the courts. Also to offer some path forward towards a more just system. How about you, justin . 27 years ago, i read about a young woman on death row in chicago whose article said she was sentenced to death on a plea bargain. That is a problematic sentence. I met with her on death row and she told me she was innocent. Her lawyer told her her best option was to plead out. I was teaching criminal law at the time in michigan, told my students about it, recruited four of them. Around the Kitchen Table with police reports, the Innocence Project was born. We ended up getting her death sentence reversed. It took me 25 more years to actually get her fully exonerated. Her case was dismissed this past october. [applause] thank you. I started the case when i was 29 years old, finished when i was 57. That case inspired me to come to california, the belly of the beast, the largest prison system in the u. S. , largest death row in the world, three strikes, mandatory minimums. I started the california Innocence Project in 1999. We have been freeing innocent people, i have been teaching about lawful convictions, talking to anyone who will listen about wrongful convictions. It is a real catharsis writing the book. Everything ive learned during all of these cases. We are about to walk our 40th person out of prison and a couple of weeks. [applause] thank you. One last thing to say, i was frustrated when i started this work because people argued about whether there were innocent people in prison. Now that we have documented more than 3300 cases of harmful convictions, it doesnt last long anymore. I still hear people say they dont think it will happen to them. They dont think it will happen to their family members. I wanted the book to lay out how in my career, i have seen many times regular people getting caught in a system who have nothing to do with anything. That im not going to take too much time. We wrote the book together. One of the people sometimes have when they hear about the project we continued with the Washington Post is why talk about george floyd . It is a pretty curious question to me, because a lot of people were chanting about the fact that his life mattered. If his life mattered, that means the way he lived mattered. One of the things we really wanted to do was to highlight and show this person who the face you see in those worst moments of his life, was a person who like so many young black people in this country, had dreams, visions, a persistence to continue despite all of the things and the broken systems we found truly operating in his life. Stepbystep every time he was there. What we found was before the cradle, the story goes back seven generations and looks at the legacy of slavery that continues to weave and complete the ambitions of his entire family. When you think about his name is george floyd and why they thought it was important to do, we understood the importance of helping to restore a threedimensional humanity to a man whose name the world had known. But also in recognizing that when we understand his humanity and we see the system that continued to debilitate him through the course of his life, we understand something about our society, the roots that poison us all to make prejudice decisions, to look at people with a sense of bias and a fear. That is one of the things we hope the book accomplishes. [applause] in the book you might go to prison even though youre innocent, justin recounts the story of the folks convicted of crimes they did not convict commit in the long path to freedom. He highlights criticism of the Innocence Movement through the words of jodi david armour who writes the excess of blame and punishment of guilty black offenders, especially the violent and serious ones, who most inflame the urge for retaliation and revenge, is a much more pervasive and pernicious problem. Running throughout every phase of the criminal justice system, and the problem of wrongful convictions for executions amidst blacks. Giving your work and writing in the criminal investigation of black youth, im curious to hear your perspective on this. [laughter] have to Pay Attention differently exactly. I can set up a decent story. Why i got into that. I was on a panel with jody, i read his book. He had a legitimate criticism on the Innocence Movement i wanted to address. The Innocence Movement gets a huge amount of public city every time we exonerate someone, and it is a fraction of the people who are suffering from this criminal legal system. I wanted to talk about that and recognize it as a reality. Our movement has done a lot in terms of performing police issues. Again, people only seem to care about that reform when it is in the context of innocent cases. It creates an opportunity to create better procedures, birder concession better concession situations. I think it is a criticism about the Innocence Movement it does not deal with the bigger issues with race, incarceration and legal issues. I definitely would weigh in and agree on that assessment. All of the innocence work, all of the high profile cases in the george floyd brought the attention to the limelight even then, it obscures what goes on behind closed doors everything today. I urge people to read and become knowledgeable about the routine misdemeanor courts all across the country. The routine Juvenile Court. I tell people all the time whenever i talk about the arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of children, people assume i must be talking about high profile violent crimes, murder, rape, gun cases, carjacking, that we hear so much about and we are all afraid of. The reality is, the vast majority of children, some were well over 80 , 90 of children who find themselves in the Juvenile Court, are there for lowlevel behaviors i daresay most, if not all of you, engaged in when your children, but never found yourself in court. I feel like it is interesting. The Innocence Movement, telling an intention george floyd got are important to these questions. But we cannot stop short of the big questions. And lets be clear, when i talk about innocence, there is innocence like im not guilty of the crime for which i committed. There is another frame of innocence in my view, the criminal invasion of adolescence it could technically be a crime on the books, but if we as a society choose to criminalize, punish some population for behaviors, but yet let others go free, you have created a very unequal system. As far as im concerned, im talking about the innocence of adolescents. This westernized notion of innocence of childhood and every single child in this country should be allowed to experience and enjoy that innocence. It is a different frame on the concept. What behaviors and acts should we be criminalizing to benefit society . I talk about that in my book, as well. Like everything in this country, it is always one team or the other. Either get rid of prisons or build more prisons. It is crazy. I have not seen in my lifetime on these issues. And i worked in prisons for three years, in d. C. Most guys we had were people that should not have been there. I think we put so much energy into putting so many people in prison, that if we start to think about it is the most uncreative thing in the world. For 1000 years, weve had the same punishment. It is different time in that punishment. It is as if your child steals a cookie from the kitchen and you say go to your room for an hour, where your child kills someone and you say go to your room for one million hours. So i think we need to look at the entire system. It starts with things like decriminalizing things that should be decriminalized. We need to increase resources to do a better job of it. That is why we are at a 98 plea bargain rate. That is what we have the largest prison system in the world. Why we incarcerate the highest percentage of our population in any country. And when you think how is the richest country in the world incarcerating the highest percentage of its population . It is a direct connection between crime and poverty. These questions need to be answered. So there a lot bigger questions than addressing whether innocent people are in prison. Looking at the system and i sat on death row with people who have done acts that are unthinkable. I spent time in texas, he may have killed 100 women with his bare hands. I have seen people who are extraordinarily violent. I have seen sociopaths in prison. They are a tiny infant is more percentage of the people we incarcerate in this country. Yet those are the faces we see, the stories we hear going back to lily horton. You put this guy in front of the country and says mike dukakis is soft on crime. We would have a president dukakis if it wasnt for that philosophy. Every politician has learned it doesnt pay to appear soft on crime, bs tough as crime as you can, build more prisons, put more police on the street, get the support of the Police Officers union, prosecutors union, Correctional Officers union, which most of you dont know the Officers Fund christian Officers Union funded the commercials to increase overtime pay. That is the kind of stuff going on in the background of this system. Politicians use fear so effectively to have us follow along and follow in those things. The first is to take a sensible look at this stuff and be more creative in our approach. [applause] i will second everything justin said and amplify it for children. This idea, what should be criminalized. Virtually, nothing should be criminalized when we talk about adolescents. That is not as radical as it sounds. When we think about the perfect of purpose of it, it is Public Safety and for adolescents in particular, it is about rehabilitating children. So that they are productive, healthy, meaningful contributing members of our society. All of that can be done without traditional legal intervention in the lives of our children. We can do all of that. And at some point we will talk about solutions. Heading down that road by a Public Health approach that cultivates and supports all children. That educates all children. Smaller class sizes have been shown to correlate Public Safety. All of the things we are doing to our children to regulate them and make them better citizens is actually more harmful. There is a growing body of research documenting the extraordinary harm policing imposes on children, especially black and brown children during those adolescent years. Research showing children who engage are brought into the system criminalize, labeled with anxiety, fear, depression, helplessness, they become hypervigilant. They question the legitimacy of law and Law Enforcement. Our over policing, over criminalization of all things america actually increases crime instead of reduces crime. We just got it radically wrong. Especially for adolescents. Tagging onto something the justice said, i have young folks who have engaged. The numbers are even less to adolescents who have engaged in serious offenses. And in our country, it is beyond redemption. We are more likely to prosecute a child as an adult when they are black and brown, more likely to impose severe life without the possibility of parole sentences. We put them under the jail. Notwithstanding, our whole philosophical framework for Juvenile Court is rehabilitation. It goes out the window when we talk about the finger mongering fear mongering associated with your blackness and criminality. Depending on which part of the country, whatever the marginalized group is, that is the group that has the highest disproportionality in that regard. My answer is radical, we need to decriminalize adolescents, period. [applause] this is another switch up question to keep you all on your toes. In joannas book shielded, she explains the various legal cases that have given us our Current System that leaves police largely impervious to accountability for their violence in both civil and criminal court. The murder of george ford marked one of the rare occasions where Police Officers responsible were prosecuted criminally and floyds family settled with the city before a federal civil claim can go to trial. Why do you believe the officers who killed george floyd were charged and convicted when so many others were not . That is a great question. We go through so much of it, we spend a lot of times with the prosecution in terms of them trying to build a case. A few things make what happened to george floyd really distinct when you think about the legality of it. The fact you have really good witnesses. Not only a video, several videos from several different angles, but the people who testified. The bravery of the 16yearold girl, her nineyearold cousin who was with her who said get off him. Emts who saw the action and said check his pulse was ignored. In the book she says i wonder if i was a built white male if they would have treated me that way. You have an mma fighter who was on the scene who recognized the brutality of what derek children would have called the maximum restraint technique. Then we also look at the way the system usually works. One of the things that surprised me was the number of medical examiners who said in the past they had been asked or forced to change their determination of what killed somebody because of a Law Enforcement official or a civic official who said you cant have that. This becomes important to George Floyds story. When the case first came out, he had a medical condition, there was an incident, police did not do anything. That was the original thesis of why he died that day. But the prosecution decided they need to think more like defense attorneys. That meant they had separate medical examiners examine the body, which turned away this hypothesis that still oddly lingers today about whether he died because of a fentanyl overdose. One of the things i think is interesting about that is we had two different medical examiners look at the work originally done. Both of them concluded the autopsies did not look enough to notice the crush of what happened to george floyd physically. It was easy to say we dont know if he choked to death, if it was us fix the asian. Us fix ea. You have to wonder people with wrong things that happen to black and brown folks do not have the investigation go deep enough. I think that is a big part of it. To add to that, one of the things we focus on in the book is the initial statement from the Minneapolis Police department. The statement essentially with a nothing to see here statement. A middleaged man had a medical incident during a police stop, no weapons used, and lets move on. It wasnt until the video came out and people took to the streets and were engaged in the public got engaged that we saw the propulsion of the officers being fired and charged and tried. That showed us the importance of Community Engagement and policing the police in several cases and being willing to challenge police in the appropriate ways. I think if there were no witnesses willing to stop and pull out their phones and speak out and testify, this would be a story that ran on the inside of the paper about a man who died of a medical incident during a police stop and it would be like countless other incidences where people were killed under suspicious circumstances and their family members believe with all their heart they were murdered by the police, but dont have the evidence or engagement from the public. And for those reasons, those cases get swept under the rug. That made this case different and caused there to be the kind of accountability we rarely see when it comes to police. Derek children was the first white Police Officer ever convicted of murdering someone in the Minneapolis Police department. The only other officer ever convicted in that department a barter happened to be a black officer convicted of shooting a white woman. So it is rare for these things to happen. So when you have the mix of Community Engagement, people willing to testify, and public outrage, you can have the kind of accountability that has eluded this country for so long. [applause] i do want to emphasize the importance of the Public Engagement and protest. I want to emphasize that in part because i think there are other there are injustices that happen around our country and have happened around our country that have not resulted in the kind of consequences, public outrage, and consequences. Six weeks after george floyd was murdered, there was a case dismissed from court. It was a case brought by the family by a man named tony amber, a white man who is an executive making a quarter Million Dollars a year. He had schizophrenia. He had not taken his medication. And he called the police asking for help. He said he needed help. The Dallas Police came and zip tied his hands and feet and put their knees on his neck and back for 12 minutes until he died. The entirety of that event was recorded on body cameras. Six weeks after george floyd was murdered, that case was dismissed. The officers were granted qualified immunity, which meant the court was essentially saying even if the officers violated his constitutional rights, there was no prior case with sufficiently similar facts to make it obvious to those officers what they had done was wrong. Before the case was kicked out of court, there was an initial thought the officers would be prosecuted. I think the grand jury wanted to move forward, the da dismissed the charges. They were not disciplined at work at all. At the end of the eight minute disciplinary hearing, the officers were told if you keep doing what you are doing except for this one little thing, we see a long and successful career for you. One of the officers has been promoted. So this is a case that has wound its way through the court, the court of appeals reduced the finding of qualified immunity. But this is a case where there has been no discipline, there were no criminal charges. I think one of the differences in these cases, and theres a lot we can talk about. One important one was the lack of Public Knowledge and engagement. Part of that may have been it was the Police Department with the body camera and would not turn it over, and did not turn it over for more than a year. In the case of George Floyds murder, we have the video so quickly. I think it speaks a lot when we are talking about solutions and what every day people can do, drawing public attention to these events, it shifts their trajectory without a question in the courts and in Police Departments across the country. Your books speak to the systemic racism and rampant corruption in Police Agencies and double standards given to police that ultimately make people who are not Law Enforcement officers into secondclass citizens, respectively. You also state you believe Society Needs police. How did you come to that conclusion . What i think i say is we dont need to come to an agreement at this moment about what the future of policing should be, and that people reading my book can come so very different answers to that question. But no matter how you answer that question, we are going to continue living in a society where government officials violate peoples rights. I feel confident about that fact, no matter what our system of Public Safety looks like. My view is we need to have a system of justice and accountability that works in those instances. I agree with what justin and chris both talked about, the need to reduce criminalization. We need to reduce the front end interaction, or do away with lowlevel traffic stops, get police out of responding to people in Mental Health crisis, and much more. My interest is less in answering that ultimate question about whether there will be police, what the police will actually do, and thinking about in addition to reducing these frontend interactions, think about having a system that actually works in the instance with peoples rights being violated by the government. Let me answer the race part of it and the police part of it. The last chapter in my book was the hardest to wrie. Write. Top 10 reasons you might go to prison. Top was you are a person of color. Everything else in the book i was able to bring the issue in as a reason to exonerate someone. They were convicted because of bad science, let them out. That concession, let them out. But what i have not been able to do in our modern era, and very glaring cases, is to come in and say my client is innocent, there were convicted because they were poor, because they are a person of color. When they look at the 30,000 foot view, it is Crystal Clear that is going on because the numbers are so dramatic. Particularly when we look at victims within the system and the responses so dramatic when there is a white victim. Some people even have this thing called white women syndrome, californians know it well. If a white woman goes missing, it becomes a new story. If she turns of debt, it is a bigger new story. Prosecutors step in the limelight and go with the death penalty. After that, a legislator will name a law after her. That is how legislation goes in the state. Outrageous racial issues in the system i talk about in my book. Using Virtual Reality to have people watch trials. All they did was change the race of the defendant and they found huge differences on whether what the verdicts were and what the sentences were. Erent story. Do you have thoughts on this . One of the things we learned about in the book is as journalists looking at things from a binary way as the way to do it we would have missed the nuances of george floyd and the many things that happened to him. I think it is important to note some of the minefields of issues we heard today that were so present in the Minneapolis Police department and so much a part of George Floyds life both in texas and minnesota. One of the things i think is really important is talking about what happens to a body camera when the footage is taken, what happened what joanna highlighted also happened with derek chopin who murdered joyce floyd george floyd. At least 38 instances where people complained about him. At least eight times where he used a similar technique to how he murdered george floyd, including on a teenager for more than 17 minutes. There was body camera footage of that incident. It is another thing for a Police Department to investigate what happens and say maybe we should look at the body camera. It is also true when we think about Something Like complaints, you are doing the right thing. Civil oversight. You calling in saying this Police Officer did something to me. What happens to that complaint . What our research showed, even the police chief who ran the minnesota Police Department, Minneapolis Police department, would tell you by the time a complaint came to their desk, it was likely the Police Officer could say i dont know what happened. Because the system was so labyrinthine, it is not a justifiable excuse. When doing the reporting, we were not looking for solutions about this. We were looking to be able to highlight a world in which we all live and empower people with enough information to question those systems and be able to empower themselves to make good decisions for themselves. Just to add to that and to speak briefly about the present system in addition to the policing system, george floyd spent a decent amount of time in prison, mostly for nonviolent drug crimes during the war on drugs in this era of mass incarceration that started around the time he was born and kicked into gear when he was a teenager and a young adolescent. One of the things we found was the prison system is supposed to be about rehabilitation, most people going to prison are going to come out. Lofty ideals. But in reality, you rarely see those things coming into place in the life of george floyd. We saw a more pernicious version of the prison system, a profit driven version. One of the prisons george floyd spent time with a place called bartlett state jail in texas. The town had recruited the jail to come to this rural part of texas as a jobs generator. The largest employer in the city, they donated to the city government, helped pay to redo the pipes in the cities. At the time, the sense of incarceration was slowing down and the prison population was falling in texas and wanted to close the prisons. They wrote to the legislature and said dont close the prison, we rely on it for the budget, jobs, to keep our people employed. The people who were bearing the brunt of that where the black and brown, mostly men, who were being incarcerated mostly for petty drug crimes and being sent into this prison system far from their communities and families on what was essentially a Conveyor Belt to sustain this dying town where globalization and other things had stripped away all industry and what was left was the prison system. That is where everyone was getting their paycheck. It is important for us to see the prison systems for what they are. In many cases, it has an economic benefit for a certain segment of people, corporations, and the forprofit prisons that run these institutions and the whole idea of rehabilitation, health care, getting people treatment for Substance Abuse issues and all of the other problems people have that sometimes lead them to getting locked up, never get any kind of treatment or any focus, and it is essentially a profit driven enterprise. We found that in George Floyds life. One of the things we wanted to do was show he was not this anomaly, he was represented of millions like him who were stuck in some of these prisons far away from their families and the state is paying millions of dollars to lock these people up and the recidivism rates and all of the challenges we see among a number of people in these populations has not gone down. Rehabilitation gets thrown out of the window. Because of the profit motive, people are being held without treatment or any of the things that might cost money to make them better and all of the profits being stripped out and sent to corporations and sustaining some of these dying towns. It is important to look at the reality of what is happening in some of these prisons and think about those things when we think about what to do with our policing system and broader criminal justice system. [applause] we have just a few minutes left and we have covered a lot. I would like to end on a hopeful note for everyone tuning in. What is the number one way people can make a substantial difference in addressing the inequities we have seen . I will start with joanna. Great. [laughter] we have discussed so many new on one hand, the system is completely messed up. On the other, so many things to fix. I guess the upside. I focus on the civil legal system and the barriers to release that the Supreme Court and the state and local governments have created. Those are there are a lot of things the Supreme Court and government could fix i am not optimistic either will. On the bright side, there is a lot that can happen at the state and local government level that i outlined in more detail in the book. But for example, requiring that Police Departments actually pay settlements out of their budgets instead being taken from central funds that are invariably coming from the most Vulnerable People in our society. Very briefly in chicago, the Police Department has a budget for payments. When they go over budget like every year the money comes from other parts of the budget and a City Attorney said to me that in chicago when Police Budgets go up lead paint testing goes down and that should not be. I do not think that one shift will improve, you know, creating a golden age of police accountability. But, Police Departments across the country are playing with house money. I mean, money that would test for lead paint in public housing. We need to change that for sure. Local governments can play that role. They budget and provide the budget for the Police Departments. They can require them to take more financial responsibility and also require them to do a better job gathering and analyzing information from these lawsuits and incidents of misconduct with a name to preventing these things from happening in the future and those are changes that can happen at the city Council Level meaning people that talk to their City Council People can agitate for the changes to happen. [applause] to end on a positive note and still a page from oprah. You might go to prison even if you are innocent. You might go to prison, you might go to prison, you might go to prison. That is the whole reason i wrote the book. What can we as citizens do about the criminal legal system because we are responsible for it. It is supposed to be out there serving us and we funded with tax dollars. We vote for people that run it. Yet, most of us do not think about it until we are caught up in it because it is horrible to think you might be in prison one day. I literally have a plan if it ever happens to me. That is how confident i am that it could happen. As a white male 57yearold law professor that stays home most nights with my wife and watches hd tv i still know this could possibly happen. I have a plan. Day one i go out on the yard and i see all of the gang leaders and i say, i will be your lawyer and your lawyer and your lawyer, and your lawyer. Keep these dudes off of me because i will be in the law Library Every day. We have to think like that and act like that because we have all been patsies the politics for a very long time. I am always telling my students about Willie Horton and how that changed america. Because, politicians figured out we are suckers and we will vote in response to fear and we will go along with it. And, most politicians are not running on, i will reform contract law. They are not running on i will change the law of the city. They are messing up our gig running on criminal justice and criminal law. They are making poor decisions based on what will get them votes, money, and power. You talk about privatization. People talk about private prisons. All prisons are private because they are all industries. They are hiring things, dutch hiring people, buying things, charging huge amounts of money for clients to order a book, tv, or commissary. Its a massive industry. Do you know what the latest industry is as we have seen the population go down in prison . Immigration detention facilities. That is what they are building now. Surprise surprise that is the big message in all the campaigns. Maybe we are not selling as well a fear of young black men. Lets try caravans from Central America that are about to invade to fill these detention facilities that we lock them up in. Lets stop being suckers and things will get better, thank you. [applause] what was said about paying attention to local politics, do not be a sucker, be active, be a voice. I want to switch it up. Particularly think about kids. One of my psychologists friends said to me that every single child deserves at least one irrationally caring adult in their lives, right . And, children would do better if they had an entire team of irrationally caring adults. What i throw out to an audience like this is, where can you be that . Beyond your own biological child, where can i be an irrationally caring adult . That means i know you will make a mistake in life. I know that you will engage in some behavior that technically meets the elements of a crime but we will not shame you. We will not embarrass you. We will not put you under the jail. We will care for you, support you, and redirect you. That is what my call is very much. Lets be an irrationally caring adult to some child that is not your own. It requires us to get out into the community and see where kids need our help. To stand up and to be a voice from them when they do get stopped by the police. We see that article in the newspaper and we ask not the question, how do i keep myself and my family safe . But the third question, the fourth question. Was it the arrest justified . What were the surrounding circumstances . Maybe there are stories where journalists dig deep to ask hardhitting questions. Every single one of us as an irrationally caring adult can be that inquisitive mind that stays curious and skeptical. I love that you said do not be a sucker. Be skeptical about what you hear about black and brown kids to be that support. [applause] i am sorry to cut you two off. We are at time. The authors will be signing books and i am sure they have lots of thoughts on additional topics for you all. I encourage you to come say hello. Thank you for attending the panel. Have fun attending the rest of the festival. Good morning. Thank you for coming