City Talk; Jeremy Travis, Pres. Of John Jay College/Cuny

How I'm Doug Musio, this is City Talk. The NYPD's stop question and frisk policy is the source of much disagreement and conflict. Proponents say that the policy has had a substantial impact on crime reduction in New York City. Critics say the policy has had an unwarranted and disparate impact on communities of color and has undermined the legitimacy of the police and the entire justice system. There's no disagreement that the juvenile justice system in New York is broken. It harms children, families and communities, it endangers public safety, and it costs much more than effective alternatives. To talk about crime, policing and racial justice is Jeremy Travis, the president of CUNY's

John J. College of Criminal Justice since 2004. From 2000 to 2004, he was a senior fellow at the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, and for six years before that, he directed the National Institute of Justice, the research on the U.S. Department of Justice, prior to his service in Washington, President Travis was a deputy commissioner in the NYPD. Welcome back. Nice to be here. Thank you. Last time we talked was in May of 2009, I went back to the show, and excuse me, quoting Yogi, it's deja vu all over again, the problem seemed to be endemic. But let's start with, and perhaps this is what we'll conclude with, is two reports. One called stop question and frisk, policing practices in New York City, a primer which was put out by John J. in 2010 March, and then charting a new course of blueprint for transforming juvenile justice in New York State, which is a report to David Patterson's

task force on transforming juvenile justice released in December 2009. Let's start with the stop and frisk. This conflict is almost a culture war over the efficiency, effectiveness, racial impacts of this stop question and frisk. First of all, what are we talking about when we talk about stop and frisk? Well, we're describing a police practice, and the police are authorized both under constitutional interpretation and under the statute to stop people when they have reasonable suspicion that leads them to that stop, and in some cases to frisk them, pat them down. The concern here is not whether this is a good police practice at its core, it's a very important police practice, but whether the way it's being implemented now is excessive. Okay, now, what does it mean? Okay, I'm stopped, why would they stop me, what do they do when they stop me, what

are the contextual variables there? Yeah, so police will come up to an individual and have some questions for you, they'll stop them, they'll ask some questions, they may pat them down, they may throw them up against the wall, they may ask them to spread against the wall, we've seen all that in the TV shows, and depending on what happens as a result of that, some number, a very small number will end up in contraband being taken and a very small number will end up in somebody being arrested or given a summons. So it's a police practice that is as old as policing, but the question of the face is the city right now is whether that practice has been carried beyond what its reasonable uses. Okay, now let's go to this document itself, this document, this John Jay study, does not have recommendations, it just has data, but as I remember old Sam Irvin during the

Watergate hearings noted that you can have a picture of an E-Quine and just the picture, or you can have a picture of an E-Quine that spells H-O-R-S-E, this is the E-Quine without the spelling, our purpose in putting out this primer was to take available data, most of it from the police department, some of it from the Center for Constitutional Rights, and to display the data in a way that makes it understandable. There's a lot of controversy, a lot of question, a lot of confusion about what the stop and frisk issues are that face the city. So we want to have a document, it's on our website, so if you get questions about this, you can go and find out what is the nature of the phenomenon. We intentionally did not in this document try to interpret the data, try to figure out what's right and what's wrong in the debate. We wanted to just inform the public discussion. Isn't there an implicit interpretation here and implicit recommendations? If you read it, you come to certain conclusions about the scope and extent of stop and

frisk, its appropriateness, its appropriateness, vis-a-vis minority youth and impacts on those communities, it's almost inescapable that you come to certain conclusions looking at the data. Well, I'm glad you came to them, because I think this is a deeply troubling phenomenon in the city. And I think it needs a full exploration by people who are concerned about the well-being of the city, particularly communities of color, and the role of the police. And so the fact that we've had the significant growth, the city has seen a tripling. Talk about the numbers, the number of stops in the trend day. So last year, 2009, there were 575,000 stops recorded by the police, approximately. That's three times as many as in 2003. Now the police will say, well, we're keeping better records. That's probably true from 2003. But over the last few years, we've seen this continued growth in the number of stop and frisk encounters.

So 90% of those, the person, there's no counterbanned, there's no arrest, there's no summons, the person is released, they're called by advocates in this topic. Innocent stops. That's a lot of people, hundreds of thousands of people being stopped. So you're talking about almost 90% of the stops result in nothing. So I think we have to be concerned about a practice that is so intrusive, we're stopping lots of people. So intrusive, particularly in minority communities, where I think we have to be concerned about the relationship between those communities and the police, and with a large number of people not being taken for further action. And where it's growing. And so the clear conclusion, I'll draw a conclusion from the data, which is that this practice has been growing basically without examination. And that brings us then to what are the justifications given for this. And the police department says, and some academics have said, well, this practice is responsible

for keeping crime rates down and bringing crime rates down further in New York City. That's a big claim. There's academic disagreement over whether that claim is valid or not. Now, is it that it is solely responsible or it has any responsibility? What's that issue? Well, the police department, when asked why it is the crime rates have come down over the last seven, eight years or so, basically points to a practice known as the impact program, which takes young officers right out of the academy and assigns them to a high crime neighbor. That's the major danger now, because a budget cuts, I would say, and it's still being done. And one of the things that these officers and others are doing in those neighborhoods is engaging this type of street encounter. So I don't think the police department would ever say this is the only thing that's bringing crime down, but the proponents of this policy give it a lot of credit for bringing crime down.

But if it's bringing crime down, and we want crime to come down further, do we increase this practice or not? So we're on a path here where the rationale for the practice is so compelling to the point of view of the advocates that it's stopping us from having a discussion about whether this is a good practice or not, because the crime reduction rationale, of course, we want crime to go down. Right. And we need a much more robust debate about whether this practice is good for the city or not. It seems to be a combination of several things, this approach, number one sort of the zero tolerance approach, you know, Giuliani, Brad, and on-foat. Then you've got this stop question, frisk approach, and then you've got comp stats. So you've got this piece that almost has taken on a dynamic of its own, and that to lower you, the more you lower the crime rate, the more you have to stop people to keep the crime rate going.

So let's make things more complicated. Stop question and frisk numbers are going up. We have increased number of summonses. You may have seen the New York Times article this past Sunday on summons being given to an individual in a virtually empty subway car for occupying two seats in the suburbs. There it is. Absolutely. So what's that about? Because the thrust, the pressure to drive the numbers lower, causing the cops to behave, and what seems to be illogical and maybe counterproductive ways or certainly unproductive ways? You've got to be concerned about the drive for numbers. Because the accountability imperative to bring crime rates down brings with it a productivity imperative, which is to do certain things that look like they're useful. They may not be useful. They may in fact be counterproductive. But the organizational dynamics are such that there's a push towards numbers. There was a piece on Channel 7 two weeks ago of a police officer.

Polenko was his name who complained about quotas being established for summonses. I actually had a tape recording of a supervisor demanding more. And I think he's within a Bronx one of the four to three things. One of the Bronx precincts and of course there has to be some expectation that you know what cops sitting around doing nothing. But there has to be concern and so it's the combination of the stop and frisk issues and the other issues about whether the drive to bring a crime rates down is causing behaviors at the low level of the department and at the mid managerial level that are producing just a quest for numbers. Well, one of your colleagues, Eli Silverman was on a couple of weeks ago and reported on the survey that he and Johnny Turner did regarding fudging numbers for comps that. So I think there is this pressure to drive down numbers and in some cases it leads to perhaps silly or unfortunate types of behavior.

And in other cases, you know, coverups, fraudulent reporting, et cetera, which is really quite serious, obviously. Now, I'm a big fan of Comstep and I think Comstep has been a very important manager, managerial tool and I was president of work for Bill Bratton at the time, Comstep was designed and spread around the country and spread to other government agencies. But there's a possibility of a dark underside to something like Comstep, which is it becomes a quest for numbers. And so we see the increase in trespass arrests and public housing, increase in summons arrests, increase in stop and frisk activity. Evidence coming from the Silverman survey from Officer Polenko, then the 82nd precinct in Brooklyn officer came forward and said that he was actually turning, instructed to turn people away and to go down where they're going. So you put these pictures together and I think there's enough there to say we got to take a closer look.

Okay. Let's continue looking at these stops. Where do they happen? Is there a geographic dimension to this or residential demands? Well, the primer lays out, again, using police department data, the precincts where the stops happened. And most of them happen in a small number of high crime precincts, mostly in Brooklyn in the 103 precinct in Jamaica. So there are precincts that are high crime and high stop precincts. These are also precincts that are mostly African-American or Hispanic. So one of the concerns, and I think it's a very profound concern, is that this ramped up activity of a very aggressive street presence by the police, justified as a crime reduction measure, is being carried out not exclusively, but mostly in communities of color and it makes you wonder over time what it's like to grow up in those neighborhoods and the relationship between those young people and the police. So I convened a group of John Jay students a couple months ago to basically ask them what

their experiences were the police. And these are by definition, college students, many of you want to go into law enforcement or criminal justice. And they all have been stopped by the police. Those encounters have left them feeling distrustful of the police, these are not not pleasant encounters. You grow up in these communities and the word is you don't trust the cops. And some academics are concerned, very concerned, as was Professor Mears from Yale Law School, but the long-term erosion of the legitimacy of the law enforcement and criminal justice apparatus entirely. Some have linked this concern to the distancing from the criminal justice system and even to the stop snitching. So campaign, is it worth, so this is, these are not minor concerns. On the one hand you have this claim, it's bringing crime down, that's true or not. And if it's true, then we have to ask, do we just keep doing it, irrespective of the

cost? On the other hand, you have this claim that it's undermining legitimacy of the police and that it's racially divisive. That's true or not. And if that's true, do we just keep doing it? So I think it's one of the more important issues facing our setting. One of the series of pieces of data more data that is not here is criminality statistics. One of the statistics that seems to be missing and have the McDonald brought it out in the New York Forest Association hearings on this report, which you moderated, which was excellent, is that there are no crime data related to the various ethnic groups. And she cited some really extreme statistics that suggested the high rates of criminal activity among blacks and Latinos, for example. Well, as I said, the primer was written, I want to give credit to our professor, Dolores Jones, Brown, who heads up our center and race crime justice, as we were putting it together. The primer was written in a way that was intended to be neutral.

You talk about crime data only if you're trying to justify the practice or you're trying to explain the practice. We weren't trying to explain the practice, and we wanted to just describe the practice. But the explanation. Interesting distinction. I don't know if I'm buying it, but go ahead. Well, you serve different purposes with different types of public actions. So the academics who write on this, or the policy analysts like Heather McConnell who write on this, do try to look at the crime data, or the explanation that she and others give is, well, most, when you look at crime reports to the police, reports of robbery in particular, most likely name or identify by race African-American suspects. And therefore, we shouldn't be surprised the argument goes that we have highly disproportionate numbers of blacks and Hispanics being stopped by the police. Okay. Those data are from the police department. I'm not going to challenge the data, but the question is, that doesn't tell us anything about what the level should be.

Okay. So as long as it's proportioned to those numbers, we can ramp this up as far as we want to go. Okay. So, you can buy that argument and still come back to the same question, which is, is this practice, which is now a policy, rather than just an individualized decision? Right. It's a policy justification. Is this a practice that we should continue as at the level that it's currently at? Okay. Maybe I guess the final comment question on this report before we move to juvenile justice is that you're increasing the number of stops, but you've got quote-unquote modest returns. What's the criterion here? I mean, you're only finding one at 1.2% do you have guns? Is that high? Is that low? My problem was that I didn't have, I didn't have benchmarks or criteria by which I could look at these numbers and say, well, is that high? Is that low? Right. Is this high? Right.

Is that low? Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. So those who favor the policy would say, take one gun off the street and it's all worth it. Right. Or take a couple hundred guns off the street and it's worth it. But the yield, if you look at a percentage term, the yield here is indeed low. Low may be too conclusively a term for some, but we are stopping lots of people who are, in fact, not at that point, carrying contraband, carrying a weapon. And they're being sent on their way. So yes, there are some guns seized. We would hope there would be guns seized. Right. We hope that the police department would use this power that they're given in a target sort of way with good results. But the yield is very low. So it's down at 1% 2% in terms of weapons, guns, or knives. But you're right. We should look at the guns seized this way compared to guns seized in any other way. Right. Right. I mean, there's a lot more analysis than we should.

There's a competitive data from other jurisdictions. Right. New York has among the best data on this. Well, this practice around the country. So it is hard to do those comparisons. But we need a lot more discussion about whether this practice is worth the cost and we need to know what the cost is, which we don't understand. Okay. Let's move to the juvenile justice system and this report, which by the way is a model of analysis both conceptually and also in terms of its logic and its presentation. Congratulations. Gradually, it works, but what was the problem? I mean, it seems that the system is just virtually totally broken and not only unproductive but counterproductive. Talk about what you found and what the recommendations of this test for us are. And is anything going to happen or is this another one of these really excellent reports that doesn't have an impact? Go. First, thanks for the compliment, let me quickly say that the staff work and the design was done by the viewer Institute of Justice and it is just spectacular.

So we have a deeply, deeply troubled system of juvenile prisons and I've been in this feel for a long time and I thought I was beyond shock, I was shocked with some of the stuff that I saw. You know what? You kept that through this report that there really was this surprise. This has been off the radar screen, people don't pay attention to it, but we have young people are held in these, I'll call them prisons, they're placement facilities, prisons who are abused by staff, suffer broken bones, broken teeth, concussions, mental illness beyond description. It is horrific. And then the Justice Department in August of 2009 actually released a report that found serious physical, psychological, constitutional violations and threatened to take over the system, then the governor creates this task force, you come up with these conclusions. What? So we were just to be fair, we were in existence before the DOJ report, that's fine, but the DOJ report really has given us an added impetus to the recommendations here because

they were able to do because the power they have, things we couldn't do in terms of documenting instances and patterns of staff reviews and the mental illness issues. So we have in rapid succession the DOJ report in August, our task force report in December and then legal aid has sued the entire system in January. So yes, what's going to happen? So it's a mixed bag at this point, the governor's budget came out, executive budget in January and I think all of us on the task force were disappointed as a mild word to see that there was no investment in the community alternatives that we suggested and to the extent there was an investment in sort of the system, it was in the four institutions that had been named by the DOJ investigation. So we hope for better from the legislature, we've had briefings with the both the Senate and the Assembly staff here, but the real power here is the DOJ report is pushing the state to do things the state would not otherwise have done because it's facing the possibility

of a federal takeover. And that's happened in other states, we don't want that as New Yorkers, we shouldn't want that to happen here, it would be just a sad day for the state to have our system taken over, but that is a real push. Then we have the report which we call a blueprint and it's being used that way most interestingly by Mayor Bloomberg and he gets a lot of credit in my book here because he has decided now to take the Department of Juvenile Justice, merge it within the administration of total services with a clear mandate set forth in his state of the city address to basically not send kids from New York into the system less unavoidable. So his administration is now committed in his third term, a great initiative to this notion of community-based alternatives and keeping young people out of these prisons because they are making them worse, they're very expensive and the kids emerge with very high crime rates which is not good for public safety.

So it hurts the children, it hurts the communities, it hurts the families and it doesn't increase safety. So why does it exist? Why it exists the way it is now is a statement about where the country has gone over the last generation, overall in terms of our desire to punish people. We've become a much more retributive, punitive country. I think that's starting to reverse itself which is, I hope I'm right. I hope I'm right. Right. And that's a good example of how we are seeing some reversal, but the juvenile justice system which in many ways as we became more punitive, the people we became angriest at were kids. So the juvenile justice system and our juvenile laws felt a lot of that retributive power. And so this system became much more corrections oriented, much more like a prison, we made these kids into adults when they're actually 15 years old and younger. In our minds we thought of them as sort of ogres who needed to be put away for a long

time. So the system reflected that point of view, so we're now talking about reversing course. And other states have done it, Missouri is the example we cite here often that it took about 10 or 15 years for them to reverse course. They downsize the system, put the facilities closer to the communities, develop community alternatives, totally change the culture of these institutions and they're having fabulous results. We can do that as well. Well, you're talking about cultural as well as organizational and institutional change. We need both. Now, I can almost see the some beginnings of the cultural, but are there in trench institutional interests that want the status quo, economic and that's the facilities, the same on the adult side as well. But these juvenile facilities are located in counties that have elected representatives who want to keep them there because they employ their constituents. The state has already started to downsize the system, which is our number one recommendation

to start downsize in the system. They have closed facilities, those elected officials have resisted, the state has been able to do it. Nevertheless, this is an example of where the fiscal crisis is our friend in a sense to try to get these recommendations implemented. So and the union will resist and has already and some people who are on the period of the side of the spectrum will say they're there they go again coddling, coddling criminals and we'll deal with that as it comes. But I think there's a strong momentum. I've been impressed by how strong the support is for the recommendations of the task force across a wide spectrum of the political landscape and I think over time this will get done. It will get done. You're optimistic about this. This is both feasible, practical and inevitable. Inevitable is too strong a word, but I think there's a lot of momentum. Okay, let's 30 seconds. What's the strategy? The strategy, there's a New York City strategy that the mayor is taking the lead on which

is to rethink the way that New York City participates in this state level system. The governor's budget strategy is to close facilities so that helps. And the next thing we have to watch for is how the state responds to the DOJ report. That state response which is in basically to hold off a federal litigation and a possible takeover is the key. And if that's the response, the follows the recommendations. When will we know this? When are you coming back? I'll come back whenever you invite me, but that should be known in the next couple of months. Okay. My thanks to Jeremy Travis, president of CUNY's John J. College of Criminal Justice for being on the show. Next week I'll talk with John Avalon, author of Wing Nuts, how the lunatic fringe is I'm Jacking America, see you then. Go on the museum, let us know what you think about this show.

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