equal. >> sunday night, aviva kempner talks about "rosenwald" and the partnership of the african-american communities in the south to build schools and bring elementary education to children in rural america. >> so first he said, oh, you know, sears puts together the kit houses. why don't we just use the kit houses? and the best thing booker. the washington ever did was sa, i want, just like we do, i want the communities to build it. so first these six schools were built. and that's amazing. but from that it morphed into 5,000 schools, all over the south, including maryland. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q and a. monday is martin luther king jr. day. with congress not in session we have featured programs on all three c-span networks. live coverage of the british house of commons debate on whether to ban donald trump from their country. that debate is expected to last three hours. coverage will reair at 8:00 eastern. university of wisconsin professor william p. jones and his book "the march on washington." jobs, freedom and forgotten history of civil rights. >> when randolph went to reorganize this march that he had called off back in 1941, everybody said, well, you better get martin luther king. you better get his support. he went to martin luther king and martin luther king said, i will support you but let's expand the goals of the march. the march is not just about winning equal access to jobs, fighting employment discriminati discrimination. it's also about winning the rights of vote in the south. >> at 8:30 georgia representative john lewis recalls his involvement in the civil rights movement in his book "march, book two," the second part of an illustrated adaptation of his life. and on american history tv on c-span 3 at 2:00 p.m. eastern alvandi, professor at the london school of economics and political science, on a iran's cold war partnership with the united states. >> iran had to look to a third power to preserve its independence and its sovereignty against the imperial ambitions of brit tacain and russia. in the 1930s iran looked to germany to play that role. after the second world war, a whole generation of iranian states men including the shah looked to the united states as a country that had no imperial ambitions and no history of colonialism in the region. >> at 8:00 on "real america" 1963 interview with reverend martin luther king jr. his comments on president kennedy's civil rights how gandhi influenced his work. for the complete holiday schedule go to c-span.org. police, sociologists and representatives of the muslim american community discuss the role of local law enforcement and preventing violent extremism. the discussion took place at duke university's washington, d.c. campus. this is just over an hour. >> that sounds better. yeah. okay. we will start promptly and try to close on time. thank you so much for coming to those in the audience. my name is david shanser, the leader of this project. and we're here to discuss a report that we are issuing today called the challenge of promise of using policing strategies to prevent violent extremism. very glad to see a lot of friends and colleagues in the audience. i think it's because all of us share a mutual interest in this topic. how do we prevent acts of violence like took place in san bernardino last month and in charleston, north carolina, last summer? you know, these acts account for a very small percent of the violence in america, but they generate a disproportionate amount of fear, they undermine confidence in our institutions. they tear at our social fabric, they cause a government reaction. some would say government overreaction. so it's really in our national interest to prevent these types of acts of terrorism. i think it's a very noble pursuit that i know many of you are engaged in on a day-to-day basis to try to prevent these -- this violence before it occurs. before we just dive into the subject matter, i do want to say a couple of quick thank yous. jeff harris and melissa dac at duke and d.c. office who put this together. our research was funded by the national institute of justice and the united states department of justice, friend, colleague, and our grant manager john pickerelli is here and he's been a great person to work with and i thank him for the support and effort he put in. of course the report is -- the opinions of authors alone, not any representation of the government. but it's very helpful to have fund that we received to do this research. also, i have brett steele from the department of justice has been a big supporter as well. my coauthors, charles kournlgman, professor of socialology at unc chapel hill. friend and partner in this for many years. working together. jessica to ver to his right from the police executive research forum, director of technical assistance there has been a wonderful colleague. our other coof author elizabeth miller is in the front seat and elizabeth did a lot of interviews and work on this report and did a terrific job. and on behalf of all of my co-authors i want to thank our guests for being here to comment on the report. we have chief jay thomas manger from the montgomery county police department. we're very honored to have him taking time out of his important duties to talk with us today. and we have dia mogahead, research director of the institute of policy and understanding which is a think tank with offices here and in michigan. and she is straight from an appearance on the daily show with trevor noah, so she is officially the coolest person in the room. certainly on the standards of any college student which charlie and i are very familiar with. and also dahlia and chief manger did not participate in the report. again, they're here to comment on it, but the findings and the conclusions, they're not responsible for them. let me just make a quick few overarching points and then i'm going to turn it over to my colleagues. so in 2011 president obama issued a national strategy which was called empowering partnerships with law enforcement to counter violent extremism. and really a key element of that strategy was to have police and communities build partnerships and together find ways to try to prevent these kinds of acts of violence. so what our project did, starting many years after the strategy was issued, was really to try to assess how this concept was being implemented in the field by local police departments and also how the communities that were going to be partnered with, how they were responding and what they thought about the policing efforts to do outreach and engagement. now, we're well aware and all the authors are well aware that there are multiple forms of extremism in the united states, extremism inspired by first al qaeda and now isis, maybe both of them, and also extremism inspired by anti-government, racist, anti-capitalists, and other ideologies. so we fully understand that. now, this project was focused primarily on prevention of al qaeda and isis-inspired terrorism because, frankly, we found that this was the core focus of the policing programs that we were able to identify in our field work. so what you will hear today is about the results of our discussions with police about their efforts to engage with muslim american communities and our focus groups with muslim american community members in the eight cities around the country. now, you will see in our recommendations, we discussed that a lot more work needs to be done on prevention efforts with respect to the anti-government, racist, and other forms of extremism, and i'm sure we'll get some questions from you and some discussion from our panelists on this pop tick topio along. >> thanks very much. again, i'm charlie kearseman, professor of socialologies at the university of north carolina at chapel hill and codirector of the carolina center for the study of the middle east and muslim civilizations. i'd like to say a few words about the methods that we used for this research project. the first method was a survey conducted with the help of our partners at the police executive research forum of 382 state, county, and municipal law enforcement agencies. we were able to get a response rate of over 70%. we got a huge portion of the large municipal agencies around the country, and a good number of state agencies as well. covering all told, 86% of the united states population in their cumulative jurisdictions. we asked them a series of questions, including what forms of community engagement were they involved with in the prevention of violent extremism and found that more than 3/4 of these law enforcement agencies were engaged in at least one form of community out reach in this area. among the large municipal agencies, the percentage was even higher. almost nine out of the ten of the agencies that responded to our survey. we followed that up with in-depth interviews with law enforcement officials at 19 agencies around the united states as well as with field visits to hold focus groups and interviews with muslim american community members in eight sites around the u.s. and five site visits for conversations with law enforcement officials. what we found in these conversations is a fir bit of mistrust between some community members and some members of law enforcement. but we also found numerous models of community partnerships such as sports league in one city where young muslim americans saw police officers as coaches and mentors. in another city, officers were working with muslim shopkeepers who had concerns about theft in their neighborhood as a problem there, criminal problem. in another area, there was a volunteer project where law enforcement officials in their free time helped partnered with local mosques to clean up vacant lots in the neighborhood that were being used for criminal activities and police officials and community members got to know one another through this activity. in another area we heard about a relationship with the police that helped put mosque members in touch with the social service agency in order to help homeless member of their congregation who needed assistance. that personal relationship with law enforcement turned out to be a really useful avenue to find out what kind of services would be available. so one of the central recommendations that comes out of our report is that the full range of these kinds of activities and engagements with community members can be a real boon to building relationships of trust, overcoming whatever bad media, bad press, and poor experiences may exist out there and are worth replicating we believe in communities and jurisdictions around the country. thank you. >> turning over to jessica. >> hi, my name is jessica toly ver. i'm with the police executive research forum. for those of you not familiar with purv we are research and membership organization and in addition to research reprovide management services, technical assistance and executive leveled indication to support law enforcement agencies. so i'll try and keep it short. they've given you a lot of background. i'm going to tell you about the site visit we conducted. the 19 agencies we spoke to on the phone, we chose 7 sites to travel to, spend a few days there, and we spoke with the executive of the agency, the supervisors, the line officers, and the outreach and engagement team members as well as the community members that they worked with. and for each of these agencies and folks we met with, we signed a confidentiality agreement because we think it was very important that they be able to speak frankly with us. not -- so we could identify not only these promising practices but also the lessons learned. we wanted to know about them as steps as well so we could help and form agencies to implement these similar programs. so the key findings based on the site visits and conversations, first is that it has to be a whole community approach. this means that the outreach program actively engages with all subsets of the community, not just a particular group. similarly this program should address the whole spectrum of public safety concerns and quality of life concerns. so, for example, if you're reaching out to a community and you're having these corporationcorporation conversations, you're not just asking them for information, you're explaining them. hopefully you're introducing them to other government agencies that can help them with quality of life issues. if there's a problem with speeding near, say, in their neighborhood near a mosque, then you can help them figure out how to get speed bumps in the area and that's a quality of life issue that will help. you can also help with getting lights installed in a stretch of the street that's too dark and makes them feel unsafe. so these are ways that you can build communication and trust with these community members, showing them that you have an actual interest and ability to help them with their quality of life issues. we also found that cultural competency of course is important when first recruiting outreach team members, but what really matters most is personality. so of course we say you should have a diverse outreach team and to the extent possible it should reflect the communities that you're conducting outreach with. but really the individuals you choose to be part of that team have to have not necessarily an outgoing personality that's going to, hi, nice to meet you, whatever, they can be shy. they can be reserved. they just have to have a genuine interest in making the connections and learning about the culture and the people that they're working with because everybody senses that. and they have to be willing, like curious to learn. tell me about your community. tell me about your concerns. we really found the most successful team members were those that didn't have any qualms about asking questions and making mistakes maybe but just so they learn. they're open to learning. they're curious. so our research also showed language training and cultural awareness training are very important. some of the lessons learned for cultural awareness training we met with an executive whose first attempt to engage the community was to host a town hall and invite muslim americans from a subset of their community to attend. and as an ice breaker they decided to bring their bomb-sniffing dog. well, dogs are considered impure for this subset of the community and they were horrified. they didn't want to go near the dog. this did not break the ice. this made everybody uncomfortable. it was a big lesson learned. if they had done some kur churl background they would have known. there is also another example where a male officer was trying to introduce himself to female members of the town hall audience and trying to shake their hands not realizing that it's inappropriate to shake the hands of the opposite sex unless you're related. so, you know, little things like that make a big impact. if you have some sort of cultural awareness, a great way is by connecting with leaders in that community. they are happy to give you that information and their with you, like when you approach people this is what you should do, this is what you should say. and you know a lot of law enforcement agencies don't have the resources to put their outreach and engagement team through intensive language training but perhaps you can do key phrases, laminated cards so that when you approach these different groups, you're showing that you have an interest in learning their language and culture. this is all i know but let's talk. it's a way to introduce yourself. i know i'm going over my amount of time. i'm sorry. i'll just skip to the really, really important one. we found that outreach and the investigations intelligence function of your agency should be completely separate. that way there is no misinterpretation about your intentions. you are there to provide policing services and connect with members of your community. you are not there to get information about potential terrorist attacks. of course, if you build that relationship of trust you may at some point have a community member come to you with concerns and it should be clear what your role will be, who you will give that information to, and then you will be as an outreach and engagement team member completely removed from any next steps. okay. that was the biggest. >> thank you. thank you, jessica. let me quickly just make a couple of points about our recommendations and i'll turn it over to chief and dahlia for their review. jessica outlined a lot of the recommendations that are in the executive summary that you will have with you relating to what we recommend for the policing agencies. obviously we recommend that they follow these promising practices. we also made some recommendations relating to the federal government. and the first one was that if we're going to take this issue seriously, if we think that policing can really contribute to preventing violent extremism there needs to be resources put behind this effort. police departments have a lot on their plate. and believe it or not preventing terrorism, which is a very rare event, is not on the top of the agenda of most police departments around the country. it's about crime, violence, drugs, and other problems that face communities on a day-to-day basis. so these outreach and engagement efforts are well supported in many places but in many places they are not. and i think if we want to give a boost to this effort we need to see some form of federal funding for it. second, we found in a lot of our interviews that while people talked about the community members, you know, spoke well about their police departments and the people that they knew locally, their distrust flowed from a great extent on their interaction with at least some federal officials, and we heard over and over, especially about people's treatment at airports and immigration. we know the department of homeland security has been engaged in trying to iron these things out and get people's names off of lists that shouldn't be. we call on the federal government to redouble their efforts in this regard. you can't have people who on one hand are attending meetings with officials and promising their cooperation, their engagement, however, we can't, and then have that same person go to an airport and then miss their flight because they are held up because of issues that don't exist, that these are innocent patriotic people. indeed, who the police or other officials have asked to be part of this outreach engagement. and the third recommendation for the federal government is, you know, we do see a void in ideas, training, technical assistance, research relating to how police departments get engaged, especially with to try to prevent anti-government, racist forums of extremism. there's an idea that, well, these are not folks who like the government so how can we do outreach and engagement with them. but the fact of the matter is, everybody comes from a community and if we are engaging essentially with innocent muslims to try to prevent violence by muslims, we can certainly engage with innocent non-muslim communities to try to prevent those other forms of extremism. and finally, we do make a recommendation for muslim american communities. we interacted with a lot of them and we made recommendations at the end which pretty much said, listen, work with the police. have an open and can dade and transparent relationship. tell them what you want. tell them what your don't like. but have that dialogue. don't put up a wall to start due to past occurrences, maybe historical mistrust. but give them a chance. work together with them. and if they are willing and we believe that they -- all the police departments we interacted with are willing to abide by these, you know, promising good practices and if they don't do it at first they certainly are learning institutions. then they will do so in the future and you can build a relationship that will benefit you in many ways and then help us with security problems as well. with that, i'm going to turn it over to the chief. >> thank you very much. good afternoon, everyone. i'm tom manger, chief of police in montgomery county, maryland, and also the president of major city chiefs association. it's an association of the largest 70 police departments in the united states, canada, and now the uk as well. we deal with the issues that large urban police departments are dealing with every day. and countering violent extremism certainly is -- i like the way it was characterized. it's not the -- at the top of the list of the things i lose sleep over every night but it's on the list. there are certainly higher priorities for local police departments that we're dealing with, but it is dealing with terrorist activities and countering violent extremism certainly is part of the things that local police departments are now dealing with that, in fact, before 9/11 we really weren't dealing with. we felt that was a federal responsibility. so it's with great interest that i read this research. and i want to focus my comments on the 14 recommendations that start with policing agencies should, because that -- this is my area of expertise and as i read through i had thoughts about each one of the recommendations. and i will tell you that my over arching thoughts were, these are great recommendations. any police department, especially police departments in large urban area it is they're not doing this kind of outreach they certainly should be. the fact that it was mentioned that nine out of ten in the survey were doing them doesn't surprise me. in fact, it should be ten out of ten. one of the recommendations was to establish outreach and engagement units. there's really -- i have two views on that. one, you can have -- you can have a unit that does this targeted outreach. they can be very effective. a great example is lgbtq units that some police departments have. the fact is that my view has been that every police officer that i have i want doing outreach and engagement activities. and if you just create a unit, okay, we're to have this unit that deals with a specific segment of our community, then sometimes the rest of the department feels like, well, we don't have to because they do that, we don't have to do that. the fact is that a lot of police departments take the view that they want every sing 8 ole one their police officers to be engaged in policing and part of that is being engaged in outreach and engagement with all of the segments of our community. so i don't think there's anything wrong with creating this unit but you've got to make sure that you don't adopt that culture of, okay, well, i don't have to do outreach and community policing because they do it. everybody in the organization has to be engaged in that. there was another recommendation that talked about don't use the term cbe, don't use the word countering violent extremism. i think that there's -- you can make arguments on both sides of that issue as well. on the one hand i fully understand why that recommendations was in there. you don't want to have you're out reach and this effort to be seen as antimuslim, you don't want it to be seen as anti-anyone in particular. the fact is it is anti-crime, it is pro-safety of our community. i understand using that term could make some segments feel marginalized but, in fact, i do think it's important that people know exactly what the goal is, and that is, in fact, to counter violent extremism, it, in fact, is to keep our community safe. violent extremism is not, as we all know, you know, no one thinks this is targeted and strictly targeted at the muslim community, countering violent extree extremisism has only to do with islam. the fact is 50% of what we do is -- you can look at the sovereign citizen movement that's ongoing, white supremacy. you can look at gangs in general. all of these things can fit nicely into this cve basket. so again, i think you can make arguments about whether or not that recommendation is critical or not. you know, addressing basically an all crimes approach that this is not strictly targeting any one type of crime or any one type of criminal activity is important as well. i think that goes to -- that recommendation is good in that it makes sure that the community understands that we're looking at everything. we're not, again, targeting one specific group or one specific type of activity. there's a recommendation that talks about making sure that you separate the outreach from the intelligence function. and i think i can name some police departments that got in trouble and kind of ran afoul of this concept. and one of the responsibilities of a chief is to make sure that there is that firewall between the outreach activities and the intelligence activities. and so that's an important recommendation and one that needs to be taken seriously if you don't want this whole effort to collapse because once, you know, someone is able to see that, geez, this outreach activity has resulted in nothing but arrests, all of a sudden it becomes questionable as to the credibility of what this outreach activity is really trying to accomplish. they talk about having a diverse workforce within a police department. that was one of the national conversations that came out of ferguson, is what does a police department look like, should it reflect -- it should in fact reflect the diversity of the community they are serving. that's obviously an important issue of all police departments to make sure we're reflecting the diversity of our community. cultural awareness training. that is relentless. start in the police academy with new recruits and it needs to continue throughout a police officer's career. i don't claim my cops are experts on every culture but you've got to have enough of an understanding that you don't have a situation where i'm knocking on a door and this happened to me, i'm knocking on a door to serve a warrant and a muslim woman answered the door and i said i had a war rabbrant individual, member of her family. she told me he wasn't there. normally what police would do is say, well, i've got a warrant, can i come in and look around. she -- i said, well, you know, can i look around. she said no, you can't come in. and i realized, it kicked in right then, okay, she's here by herself. and so i said, well, when can i come back. and she told me when later on when people would be in the house. i went back later and we were able to resolve that. it could have gotten ugly then. again, just -- me and my cops have enough cultural awareness training whether it's faith based, whether it's -- or otherwise, to make sure that we're not creating problems when we're trying to do our job. basic language training, tremendously important. again, i don't have to be fluent in every lange wage but at least having some ability to community and knowing where i can get the help i need to get translation services right there, right then is very important. outreach to the immigrant communities is tremendously important. i police a community that is majority minority. we're also one-third of our residents were born in a country other than the united states. so outreach to immigrant communities. again, it has to be a relentless activity. great recommendations. wide variety, again, you don't want to target one thing or one group. and i want to finish by talking about the fact that i felt very affirmed as i read these -- because we've got an effort that we have put in place in montgomery county, that's been in place for a couple years now, and we -- what makes it our -- whyabout ours and is a little different and you may want to consider this. our effort is a community-led effort. we are so fortunate to have partnered with dr. he'dia miramadi and world organization for research development and education that we have got a faith-based effort where we have individuals from every faith, 60 or 70 people strong, who have led this effort to educate the community, we've got the schools involved, and basically what we do is we're looking for folks that, through their behavior, have some -- caught the notice of a school counselor or schoolteacher, a parent, a family member, a friend, and that because of some of their behavior they're growing concern about if they're being radicalized or if they're headed down the wrong path in terms of their activity, and we are working with the faith-based community to intervene in these folks' lives as typically young folks, to intervene in these folks' lives and try and get them back on track to make healthy desessions. we've had a couple of cases that ended upcoming to the police department because there has been criminal activity involved but the vast majority of cases that we intervene in long before it becomes a criminal case and so this is a community-led effort. police department is a strong partner with this effort but it is a community-led effort, not a police-led effort. and we believe that's why it's been so successful for us in montgomery county. thank you. >> chief, thank you so much. dahlia? >> great, thank you very much. i'd like to open by saying that i think that the both the findings and recommendations of this report really take us forward and enormous improvement on the status quo and on what many people are experiencing. so i support the effort that was made and the recommendations, again, really are a step forward. i want to start my remarks just by kind of making an observation, which is i think the report makes the case that it's not just programming but also intentions, that the community wants to be seen as a group of citizens, not a pool of suspects. i think that that's really important. and everything has to start from there. and that's why this idea of a whole community and so you're not just focusing on muslim, you're focusing on all communities that are at risk of extremism or radicalization, and you're not just focusing on the cve aspect of public safety, which we keep hearing is actually among the more rare issues that are happening at the local level. and there are other things that are much more likely. that's often the response of american muslims is, yeah, we're worried about, you know, our kids joining isis but we're far more worried that they're on drugs, that they're getting -- that here looking -- they're lo porn. the frequency of are so far removed from what seems to be the conversation all the time when it comes to american muslims. i had a question though. is why isn't our national cve strategy reflective of the realities on the ground? i never get an answer, a really good answer to that. if the realities on the ground is that other forms of extremism are more likely than isis-inspired extremism, why is the cve strategy at a national level only focused on isis-inspired extremism? why isn't there a national security strategy for these other types of extremism with equal level or proportional levels of funding and resources at the local level? i want to briefly talk about some of the details of the police training recommendations. again, i support the idea of cultural training and cultural competency. i'd just like to add though a few things, a few thoughts to those excellent recommendations. language is of course a great thing to have but it would be unrealistic to expect every police officer, of course, to know every language but what would be probably even more important is to examine the kind of training that police officers and law enforcement in general are getting. so we know that there has been an unfortunate number of cases of incredibly bigoted and slamaphobic material that they are exposed to. the problem is not having training but having train that is very buy answered. i'm surprised i didn't find that in the report as a really important red flag. so where is the training coming from and to make sure that it's reputable and accurate. the other piece that i didn't see enough of is a call out of the fact that radicalization actually does not occur in mosques. this is just a fact. so if we look at all of the very high-profile cases of american muslims and radicalization, they did not get radicalized in their local mosque. so we are engaging local mosques, i think the implicit assumption is somehow that's where it's happening. it's really important to understand that it is not where it's happening. a lot of these cases, they are being kicked out of their local mosque, which may be is another problem but what is what's happening is they are being excluded or kicked out or self selecting to leave because their perspective is not in line with the majority of the community members. so they're getting red callized mostly either overseas or online where they're able to -- they're either getting exploited that way or they're able to find like-minded people that they're not finding in their community with these radical views. so by engaging the local mosques, are we kind of going to where the problem is? maybe we need a much stronger cyber security strategy than just to simply a community outreach strategy. where is the problem coming from? it's not in the local mosques, so maybe a different strategy is needed. and then two other recommendations in general that are not covered by the report directly. one regarding media and one regarding definitions. so what i think you must have heard from muslims and i think it's been referred to is this idea that the community is stigmatized in the media when there is an arrest or when there is a suspected activity and it's all over the media. it's likely not even just the local story but a national story. and equivalent amount of media is not afforded to anyone else who, you know, might be arrested. and so they're not really sure who to blame. some of the blame goes to the media for only selecting those stories. so i just recently read this buried article. i was shocked by this. but that last august a group of people were charged with 99 years of prison for what the federal government -- what the fbi called weapons of mass destruction that were targeting mosques and they also wanted to kill the president. they're getting 99 years in prison for this attempted crime and none of you have heard of it. and neither had i until i read this article somewhere in the obscure website. and i was so unsure that it was true that i actually clicked on the link and found the actual fbi, you know, reference. so this is an actual story. this is true. i did not make this up and it's not a hoax. and yet a story like that, no one's heard of it. and i don't know if it's the fbi doesn't, you know, hold press conferences about stories like this and only about muslims but this idea of stigmatization and media outreach and media involvement in muslim arrests is very problematic. the second thing is just, i think you've heard this from every muslim you talk to, i'm sure, because i hear it from every muslim i talk to which is definition of terrorism. it's -- i will voice this frustration on behalf of so many people. what gets called terrorism is not being -- this definition is not being applied consistently or even close to consistently. i think this is a very important issue when it comes to community engagement. people -- you know, i will -- i'll make this case. i don't think there's a community in america that is more interested in preventing violent acts in the name of islam than the muslim american community. they are hurt by it in every possible way. so there is not a lack of interest in preventing these things, but there are all of these other obstacles to engagement on this because of all of these -- all of this baggage around stigmatization, around inconsistency and engagement and inconsistency in definitions. thanks. >> well, thank you so much, dahlia. yeah, i think the thing to do now is open it up to questions. i know there are members of the media and other officials. so please do us a favor and state your name before you do the question. jeff has a microphone, so would anybody like to ask. please. here. right here, jeff. jeff, turn. >> hi. you didn't tell us the number of civilians that you spoke to or any data about the civilians. you talked about the police departments and all of that. it would just be good. >> sure. we did focus groups in eight cities around the united states. each of those visits lasted two or three days. we spoke to roughly two dozen or more in each city, focus groups ranged from three to eight people. in addition, we had conversations outside of the focus groups. this is not a nationally representative sample. the idea was, as with focus groups in general, to get conversations going that can juxtapose different perspectives. and we made sure to include people who were of different ethnic, racial backgrounds and different generations of having come to the united states, men and women and different age groups as well. >> what percentage were muslim americans? >> these were all muslim american groups, within muslim american communities, yes. >> i think almost on our police site visits sometimes different police departments did arrange for us to interact with some of the top leaders that they were working with. >> yeah. we went to seven agencies and we met with between 15 to 30 because we spent three days at each site, and each night we would try to go to an event so we would speak with people at the events as well as one-on-one interviews during the day that were arranged for us. >> i do want to say we saw a lot of the things that dahlia mentioned. not everything could make it into the reports on policing. but a lot of those themes we certainly heard. and i hope if you go back and actually -- the report is lengthy but if you look at some of the quotes that we pulled out, i think you will feel the passion that we experienced in talking to community members about a lot of these issues. please. >> john scanneder from the foreign service institute. thank you for the report. two quick questions. one for dahlia. i don't think you finished your thought about the definitions problem. at least i didn't understand what your pointing to on the other side of that, where the lack of consistency is. if you could please elaborate on that. for everybody from the chief as well as the members of the research, one of the things that i've -- in my -- i'm not in the law enforcement side of this but i encounter people. one of the things i've been interested in is how do you do prevention, which is the whole purpose of what you're talking about, and it seems to be one of the crucial aspects of this is getting, as you said, chief, to people before they engage in actual criminality because once they're in that world then everything comes down from law enforcement. and yet certainly i think one of the common conceptions in the community, certainly arab community and i think muslim communities broadly, has been that things tend to -- that law enforcement tends to direct things towards criminality, if you will, to a place where you can get convictions, thereby stopping, say, terrorism as opposed to preventing things before they actually happen. so, chief, you mentioned that this is something that you try and do on a really regular basis. i'm wondering what you all in terms of your research have found police departments and other law enforcement people including the fbi are doing to try and stop and redirect away from criminality in ways that are actually more productive. thank you. >> okay. so i'll start with what i -- i'll elaborate a little bit about consistency of definition. that we have to apply the definition of terrorism consistency across communities. and the impression that many american muslims have and i think is quite accurate is that, you know, the going definition of terrorism at least in sort of public discourse is a violent act committed by a muslim. and when other people commit violent acts in the name of some other ideology it's called lots of other things, but not terrorism. and it's not just about pr. it's really actually much more serious, in my view, because convictions and jail time and things like that matter in terms of how it's defined. so there was a case in i think 2002 of a man who had the intention -- he had blueprints and a manifesto and police found it in his apartment because his wife called the police because of domestic abuse. totally different thing but they happened to find all of this bomb making material. he had the plan to bomb like 40 mosques in his area in the name of a specific ideology. and he was charged with a hate crime. hate crimes and terrorism are very, very different, you know, consequences. so the issue of a definition that is -- that we come up with, that we agree on and that is applied consist tensely, i think is really important. >> there's -- twvl years12 yeart on a task force that was a trying to deal with gangs. and we developed what we thought at the time was a pretty comprehensive strategy. and it was prevention, intervention, enforcement. of course the police have the enforcement side but what our philosophy was if we were dealing with enforcement issues then prevention and intervention had failed and that's where we really needed to make our investment. so i think that the prevention piece of this is tremendously important. and you know, you can interview 100 people that are, you know, spending -- that are living in a prison somewhere and talk to them about what got them there. and you know, you see what at-risk issues they dealt with, you know, whether it was that caused them to join a gang, to cause them to get involved with drugs and, you know -- and drug abuse, to cause them to commit suicide. you know, so investing in our community partners, schools are number one on that list, you know, to try and deal with some of the mental health issues and some other things that if we can intervene early in someone's life, you know, look at the behavior, catch a red flag somewhere, and think, you know, let's put some time and effort into trying to get this individual back on the right track. that's -- for us, that's what prevention is all about and that's where we really want to invest our resources. and police don't play as big a part in that but we have a big stake in it. so we're willing partners to do whatever we can. >> you know, let me just quickly comment on some of the interviews that we did. all the different police departments we spoke to said, hey, we would love to have a developed infrastructure to deal with intervention, people who seem like they have adopted possibly a violent ideology but haven't committed a crime yet or done some precursor kinds of things but don't feel like they have to charge them, that they could be diverted to try to, you know, turn them away from violence. that's been done in other areas of law enforcement certainly. but even in some of the develops where, you know, been working on this for a long time, that's still very undeveloped. and those are not going to be government programs as the chief said. to have that community partner that provides that kind of programming and knows -- has resources, that can be turned to. that's what police departments really need and they would love to see those things develop. i think the programming needs to be done at the community level and then there has to be partnership with the police departments. so there can be the right people can be diverted. and then the whole point of our report is for that whole system to work you really need trust. and relationships. and if those don't exist first, then this more advanced step isn't going to be able to work yet. >> just one quick thing. to echo what chief manger said and reiterate some of the things that have already been said by the panel. we did meet with some agencies that had developed partnerships with other government agencies in the keebcounty. after building those relationships of trust and assessing the needs of some of the community members they would connect them to appropriate people within the community like social workers or help them get food stamps or reduced fee bus passes or language assistance. and these are forms of prevention because they are helping the members of the community feel like they're part of the community. >> okay. >> community policing is a concept which has existed for many years, right? decades even. it's not just about outreach done by law enforcement. it has several other principles with it and it also requires adjustments of how police departments are structured. again, the basis also has an assumption of geography. it is geographically focused. given the reality of how the muslim population is distributed across the country and where we do have numbers, a lot of recruiting is happening online. in your research did you find what principles of community policing at the very core of it have to be adjusted, improved, or changed to actually meet the needs or the concept of violent extremism or the way recruiting is happens of violent extremism because a lot of these recommendations are just about better community engagement? >> i think the chief got to one of those issues in terms of structure in his comments. certainly let him reiterate that. is that because most muslim communities are not large concentrations, it is much more diffuse over geographic area, that's i think one of the reasons that led us to the idea of, you know, out reach specialists that were not, you know, people who had assignments for a particular precinct. that said, it's good if you can spread the philosophy across as many people within the bureau. and i just want to point out. you know, we started with the whole idea of community policing. it's in the title of the report. we did, you know, start by looking at the literature and the tradition of community policing and certainly felt that it was a model that could have applicability to this problem. let me turn over to chief and i know jessica wanted to comment on that, too. >> couple rel actions to that. one, i absolutely agree that what dahlia said radicalizations are not occurring in mosques. i'll tell you where it's occurring. and i'm not talking about just -- this is not unique to muslims. any radicalization, white supremacy, sovereign citizen, you name it. it's going on in a basement somewhere, in a bedroom somewhere with the individual sitting in front of a computer. that's where the radicalization is occurring. the -- and in terms of the community policing, it has been around forever. community policing is not a program. it is a philosophy. there's two cornerstones. one is community out reach, community engagement. the other is problem solving. you identify a problem and you've got to come up with a solution. and one size does not fit all. for any problem nor any community. so i think that police departments need to be adaptable, they need to be flexible, and they need to be creative in terms of how they approach these problems and if you want to just pick the problem of countering violent extremism, again, one size does not fit all. you've got to be adaptable, flexible, and you've got to react to the issues in your particular community. >> charlie? >> there's a couple of points that long tradition of community policing has many different strands to it. i think you're referring to some of the strands that we didn't make large reference to in our report. one being, for example, community oversight of law enforcement and government agencies. another though is if radicalization is occurring in front of computers, still face to face interaction remains hugely important in improving relationships between law enforcement and communities on a whole host of issues. and remains important on that side of community policing, the face to face side may not catch every single instance of potential violence. there will probably still be violence in the world even if community policing is fully adopted as a philosophy. but it's good in its own right. that's what we're seeing is the building of trust among communities, between communities and law enforcement is a good thing in its own right, regardless, even separate from isolated instances of radicalization. >> i don't think community police officers are going to necessarily be having the face-to-face with the young person in front of the computer. that's not the idea. that person has a family. that person goes to work. that person interacts with others in the community. i think what you're trying to do is create an early warning system and to have that kind of early warning system you have to have broad reach into the innocent people and that is the case of community policing that's been applied to other forms of violent crime, gang violence as well. the community police officers are working with, you know, non-criminals, non -- community leaders to build those kind of programming, trust, outreach, and, you know, to then use that to reach the more difficult to reach elements of the population. i think we had somebody very interested in asking a question back there. >> sure. senior fellow at ward. first of all i want to thank you all, david, chafrrles, and jessica. i look forward to this report. i commend you for the effort. it's been a long time coming. thank you, chief manger, for the mention. the question i had was in terms of preventive policing, as we've been discussing, this is not necessarily a new concept. we've used it in gang prevention efforts and so on. but it's sort of a new twist to apply it towards cve. so in a lot of our trainings and our engagements with communities, with police we find that, you know, training individuals on how to identify vulnerable individuals, understanding what the various potential risk factors of violent extremism are, this almost requires a cultural shift, particularly within law enforcement to kind of get in touch with the sort of social work aspect of their job. so i was wondering if that came up in your interviews and in the focus group discussion it is you can talk a little bit more about that because as chief manger may be able to speak towards, you noeks we' know, we've been able to implement a social worker directly in the montgomery county police department which i believe has been instrumental in improving community policing and especially in cve efforts. so is that something that you would recommend that could be applied in other jurisdictions, would you recommend greater funding to support that type of work? so any thoughts on expanding and push that needle in that direction would be great. >> sure. jess? >> i'll just comment on what we heard from our interviews and -- that wasn't me. that goes back to our recommendation about picking the right people for the outreach and engagement team because it has to be folks do have that ability to connect with people and realize that the social work part of it is so important. this is not the crime fighting police officer who wants to go arrest people. this is the officer who wants to engage and connect with folks, learn about different culture, different religions, is naturally curious, and also willing and able to connect individuals to the different organizations i was talking about, the. different county agency or community or organizations that can offer the other social services that they are in need of. so, yes, we did hear that and, yes, we think it's important for, if you're creating a specific outreach and engagement team. >> let me just bolster that because jess and i were on the same interviews. we asked that very question, that very term allergy came up. and we asked them, that sounds a lot more like social work than police work, they said absolute absolutely. and what these folks who do this on a day-to-day basis, they're interested in solving problems. and whether the -- and the preference is to solve a problem without using the criminal justice system, if that's necessary they're more than willing to do it. but they admitted fully and that the people who do this really like trying to solve those problems. i mean, that is what they are doing. but they admitted that that is not necessarily the culture that pervades either in their entire department or in law enforcement in general. but it certainly does within some. so we think that attitude is really what's needed to get a handle on this particular problem. chief, did you want to follow up? >> the only thing i would say is that because there is so often a mental health component to many of these interventions, that having a social worker actually within the police department has just been invaluable. just -- >> can i just add one thing? >> sure, of course. >> i really wish that this -- everything you just said would be broadcast nationally and everyone would understand this. this idea that there's a mental health component is never discussed. it's like i joke sometimes that, you know, we think there's no prevention for mental health but, in fact, being a muslim makes you completely immune. you cannot be mentally ill if you're a muslim according to the public discourse. so to understand that there's all kinds of complexity to where people go wrong, where people become radicalized i think is essential. the second thing is this idea of where and how people get radicalized, that it's closing down mosques is how you increase radicalization, not how you decrease it. >> so we'll take a couple more questions and then we'll try to answer them all at once and then we will finish up. so let's go over to mike and then two people have had their hand up on this row. and we'll try to answer those all at once. keep it to one concise question, that would be great because i did promise to try to end as close to 2:00 as possible. right here, mike. >> jennifer bellamy, aclu. my question is, are there consequences to being identified as in need of prevention and, also, what are the criteria for determining that youth is at risk and in need of prevention. >> okay. mike, behind you. >> mine actually follows up on that, which is, number one, what are the criteria by which somebody gets referenced and, for chief manger, what would be the criteria that would have you say this goes to social work and this goes to the police. >> sorry, jeff. two folks over here had their hands up for a while. >> thank you. isha iran with korama. quick question. i'm heartened by this discourse of broadening definitions and saying number one there are a lot of issues that are besides cve and secondly what dahlia is talking about is how are resources allocated. and my question is, the very first recommendation that you have for muslim communities is that we should comply with law enforcement. and i'm troubled by this recommendation because as an advocate working in this field, i have always heard so many stories that i could spend, you know, the next 20 minutes on of how muslim communities in fact have reported incidents or suspicion or what not to law enforcement have always complied. so i want to know where did that recommendations come from, what evidence do you have to suggest that muslim communities are not, in fact, complying and working with law enforcement? and i'll leave it at this since -- yeah. >> hi, i'm daniel tutt with unity foundations. my company trains police departments across the country p and eric holder made a reformat the level of trying to tackle these bigoted trainings. i wonder if you think that reform has been effective. the issue is there's two types, cultural. competency and counter terrorism. it's in the category of counter terrorism where the bigoted stuff happens. cve stuff since obama is very fine for the most part but it's really former veterans and military officials and former marines, people that went to iraq, that are giving those trainings and that definitely have an ax to grind with islam. how do we tackle thatting? that's my question, because they're still happening. >> right. let's see if we can cover a couple of these. i'm just looking at the recommendation, the first one for muslim american community, says engage with police departments to address public safety and other core concerns of the community. so the comply -- you know, i was surprised because i -- that's not the kind of language that we generally use. and charlie and i have been doing research and talking on this very important and he's compiled lots of data about the number of tips and all that have been provided to muslim communities to, you know, identify individuals and stop plots. so, you know, i think muslim americans are really the part of the solution. and we talking about that many times. so maybe we can talk afterwards if there's some language difficulties if it wasn't intended. on the training point, we do talk in the report a little bit about training. didn't make -- that part didn't make it into the recommendations. you know, there is just a little bit of -- almost a cottage industry as you mentioned and, you know, we do talk about in the report, i'm sorry it wasn't highlighted in the executive summary, but that's really on the chief of police, i would say, chief manger can talk about that. but they've got to be very aware of who they are exposing their departments to. and understand that, you know, you can talk about the history and where this threat comes from in a realistic way without whitewashing it in any way. but you can also do a lot of damage with that kind of training that is so biased. and we recognize that. we saw examples of communities that complained bitterly about that. and you're right, it can come -- this can come from even a former police officer as well. so that's on the -- that's on the police department's -- >> we do say in our report that one of the ways you can mitigate that is to vet any sort of training with some of your community members, have them take a look at it. i guess it just didn't make it to the executive summary but that is in the report. it is in there. >> thank you. >> chief, did you want to talk about the whole question of how people might be id'd for prevention? and if there were consequences for that? >> i was trying to answer every question and i've got notes for all of them. so whether an issue goes to the intervention strategy or whether it would go over to, you know, where we would initiate criminal investigation has -- one thing, behavior. what is the behavior. what is the action that has caused this to come to our attention, that someone has brought it to our attention. we've actually had very few that the first -- where the case was brought to the group's attention was already a criminal matter. very few of them actually end up that way. most of these do go down the prevention and intervention path and it all has to do with, you know, was the kid involved in a fight at school and he said, you know, he said some things that caused people to, you know, some alarm because of some of the things that he said. those would not go to law enforcement. assume that the fight is just, you know, just a typical fight in a school. you know, when, you know, comes to our attention that an individual has not only gone to several websites and talked at school with his friends about how he's making these bombs in his house and, you know, we, through some way we find out that, you know, he's actually purchased bomb making materials, that might end up going to the police first for investigation. those are fairly rare. and in terms of the training, great answer. i mean, first of all, most of our community training we get from the community. we don't just go, oh, some guy says he's an expert and bring him in. it's typically we have -- montgomery county, we are blessed with great community partners and we actually go to the community and get recommendations from them or we have people who offer to come and do the train. in fact, if i took everybody who offered to come in and train -- do you know there's not one problem in our world that cannot be involved by better police training. i'm convinced of that. we get people all the time. oh, we can come in and help you with training. we take advantage of those and we vet the training. and do invite community members in to, you know, give their evaluation of the training. and what we find -- i could go on forever about this. what we find is you get an individual to say, well, that was good but, you know, i could do better. so we end up, you know -- i think we're in a pretty good think we're in a pretty good place with that. captioning performed by vitac captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2008

Related Keywords

Alabama , United States , Germany , North Carolina , Iran , Town Hall , Wisconsin , Georgia , Russia , Michigan , Chapel Hill , Washington , District Of Columbia , United Kingdom , Iraq , Montgomery County , Maryland , Americans , America , Iranian , British , American , Martin Luther King Jr , Jeff Harris , Jennifer Bellamy , Jay Thomas , Martin Luther King , Al Qaeda , Elizabeth Miller , Trevor Noah , William P Jones , Brett Steele ,