Improving Policing Through Effective Reform With Christy Lopez

When crime rises, the instinct is usually to hire more officers, increase enforcement, and ask police departments to do even more. But after spending years investigating police departments and working on reform efforts across the country, my guest today has started asking a different question…

What if we’re asking policing to do too much in the first place?

Christy Lopez is a professor at Georgetown Law, former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorney, and one of the leading voices on policing reform and alternative public safety responses.

In this episode, we talk about the limits of traditional police reform, why consent decrees have struggled to produce lasting change, and what it would look like to build a more diversified public safety ecosystem instead of relying almost entirely on law enforcement.

Christy Lopez is a Professor at Georgetown Law, where she teaches courses on policing, criminal procedure, and civil rights, and is the Faculty Director of Georgetown's Center for Innovations in Community Safety. Prior to going to Georgetown in 2017, she was at the U.S. Department of Justice where she led the Division's group conducting pattern-or-practice investigations of law enforcement agencies.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'm Jeff Asher, and this is Jeffalytics Podcast. When crime rises, the instinct is usually to hire more officers, increase enforcement, and ask police departments to do even more. But after spending years investigating police departments and working on reform efforts across the country, my guest today has started asking a different question. What if we're asking policing to do too much in the first place? Christy Lopez is a professor at Georgetown Law, former Department of Justice Civil Rights Division attorney, and one of the leading voices on policing reform and alternative police responses. In this episode, we talked about the limits of traditional police reform, why consent decrees have struggled to produce lasting change, and what it would look like to build a more diversified public safety ecosystem instead of relying almost entirely on law enforcement. A lot of this conversation comes down to a simple but uncomfortable reality. Even good police departments cannot be expected to solve every problem they're sent to handle. Let's get started. Christy, welcome.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

So, Christy, uh, can you walk us through what is your background? What brings you to us today?

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Um, I am uh a professor at Georgetown Law, uh, where I teach courses on criminal procedure, policing, civil rights enforcement. Um I also am the uh faculty uh co-director of the Center for Innovations in Community Safety, um, which um we may talk about a little bit more. Prior to this, I was at the Department of Justice. I've been um in the civil rights division twice uh for a total of about uh over 10 years, um, working in the section that investigates police departments and tries to ensure that their practices comport with the Constitution. And I have also worked as a court-appointed monitor to a police department and done other work related to policing.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

And what sort of motivates you to do this work? How did you come across this as sort of a field of study, an area of expertise professionally?

SPEAKER_00 1:59

I think it started when um with an interest in human rights, actually, international human rights, mostly. I'm just really being interested in the way that governments treat the most vulnerable and sort of disliked or disfavored people in a society. And I actually went to the Department of Justice to work on prison and jail cases. When I started working in those cases, it became apparent to me that a lot of the people in prisons and jails didn't understand why they were there. It seemed like there were a lot of people. My my first case would involve the LA County jails and um involving their treatment of people with male health diagnoses, and there were over 6,000 people in the jails. And then I did a case involving women in the Arizona prison system who were there for things like writing bad checks and a lot of crimes related to poverty and abuse. And it just made me think a lot about how the criminal legal system operates, and I wanted to understand it more. My father was a homicide detective for over 20 years in Southern California. And that for me, I think, complicated the picture compared to a lot of people think they just say, well, it's bad police officers doing bad things, and that's why we have a system that's so bad. And that just didn't ring true for me, knowing my dad and his friends and the how seriously he took his work and how important he felt it was. Um if that it seemed like a really complicated question that I wanted to try to understand more. And I've been trying to do that um for about 30 years.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

What is your grand conclusion from having done this for 30 years?

SPEAKER_00 3:25

My grand, I don't know if I have a grand conclusion, but my current current operating theory is that we have come to over-rely on police and law enforcement specifically to take care of lots of things beyond crime, including crime, but also different social problems and disorder. And we really it's I've been working for a long time to try to help police or encourage or coerce police into ensuring that they are effectively protecting the public while not violating people's rights. And I've just come to believe that we've that's kind of an impossible task the way that we've currently structured policing. And so that's kind of what I'm working on now is to sort of think about how we can have a more diversified response, a more diversified public safety ecosystem in which police still play an important role, but um don't try to do everything.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

And how does your your work, your experience with DOJ, how have you worked that into what you're trying to accomplish today with Georgetown?

SPEAKER_00 4:24

So I think that work really taught me, it allowed me to really dive deep into a lot of different agencies all across the country, learn what makes police departments work, what challenges they face, how, you know, which of those challenges are through lines, regardless of where you go, um, you know, the differences in in different jurisdictions. Um it really taught me a lot about um a lot of the incredible people doing this work for police departments, line officers, of police department uh police departments, some of the greatest people you ever mate meet. Also some really people who should not be police officers for sure. Um members, community members who some are very critical police, sometimes unfairly so. But I often also found that some um community members are remarkably uh show a lot of grace to police, despite having been very harmed and are really appreciative of uh the difficulty of the job. So again, it just really reinforced for me the complexity of this um entire endeavor. And then of course, when I was the monitor of the Oakland Police Department, it taught me a couple of things. One is I was able to take a very deep dive for almost um seven years with one department. Um and it also really taught me a lot about the limits of police reform and monitoring and consent decrees to try to change some policing. Those, if you'll recall, I'm sure you know, and you know, I also investigated the New Orleans Police Department, and it's one of the reasons that we've had many conversations, Jeff, because he's done a lot of work there as well. And when you look at departments like that, you watch a lot of people working really hard to try to make things better. And you really realize how this is this is a problem that goes beyond sort of the will or the efforts of any individuals to fix it. There's something structural going on that we need to address.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

How do you address kind of thinking about consent decrees, having worked on several of them, that sort of criticism that they're expensive and sort of unnecessary, that they prevent police from doing their job, that they're sort of you're bringing in outsiders, fancy lawyers that come in and tell locals how to how to operate. How do you sort of address those those basic complaints, I think, that that I've heard a lot in New Orleans and you kind of hear it attached to most consent decrees?

SPEAKER_00 6:37

Aaron Powell So I think there's definitely some validity to the complaints about consent decrees and the concerns about consent decrees. I think what sometimes people miss is that, you know, you know, they they make it sound as if these are sort of these arbitrary agreements that people kind of rush in and and impose their opinion or their preferences on on a jurisdiction. And they're obviously hopeful people most people recognize that they're more thoughtful than that. The the problem is that um these are very complicated. When a police department has a pattern or practice of violating people's rights, it's often for complicated reasons. It's often for um reasons that have been entrenched for many years. Um the um and and it and it in this if the age if it were easy to fix, or if the agency were able to do on its own, it probably would have done so already. And so the idea that they don't need this and you don't need a monitor, you don't need this level of oversight. Well, then sort of belied by the fact that there have been in most of these places problems for a very long time and they've been unable to be fixed in any other way. And so I think that I think that the job of I think the job of consent decrees is to take on some of the hardest cases and try to correct some really harmful patterns. I'm working on an article right now with Joanna Schwartz where we're really talking about what consent decrees should look like in the future. I think one problem that people don't all often recognize is that the the statute isn't in the ground scheme of things that old. And it didn't get really started. It was passed in 95, really didn't get up and running until 2000. There's sort of the newer generation of findings reports or investigations of police departments and the and the ensuing consent decrees didn't start happening until the 2010 and 2012, in the case of New Orleans. And then we had sort of then it uh with a few years to sort of start to get those going. And then you had Donald Trump come in and kind of shut down the program, and then President Biden came in and the the division started working again, but didn't really get any consent decrees underway. And so, and then of course now Trump is is in office again and has eviscerated the the um division and and this work. And so there's been an opportunity for a lot of growth in how the investigations are conducted, but we really haven't been able to sort of learn from and apply new learning in the consent decree context. So when people say consent decrees aren't working the way that they should, I think that's correct. But I I don't think that means that there can't be better. I think we're still learning how to make them better and that we haven't had the opportunity. There hasn't, well, we haven't taken the opportunity to make them better. Um so I think that that's an important thing to think about. But I I also think that we should not be relying on consent decrees to try to fix policing or make policing better or improve outcomes, which is one of the things I wanted to talk about. I was hoping to talk about with you today, to really think about kind of again more structurally, the role that we ask police to play and the way that we sometimes we sort of read data or or talk about data in ways that seem to overstate the role that police must play. Um, and I think that's an important conversation to have as well.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

All right. Well, let's let's dive into that then. Because I do want to talk about that as well. We we talked about alternative response. Uh can you talk through, just sort of set the stage of what are the options that are available to cities or law enforcement agencies that aren't just sending a police officer to respond to every 911 call?

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Yeah, so I think um the first thing to keep in mind is that uh in the United States, we're sort of unique among wealthy countries in the way that we rely on um law enforcement uh and have a pretty meager set of social services and reliance on that. And we also have some really high crime rates compared to other countries. And so we're doing we're doing things, we've done things in a particular way, and we've come to think of that as the norm, right? And so when we and so what you so for example, we we we assume or we believe that in order to prevent crime and to address all the problems of uh social problems and disorder, that we really need to center police. And we really saw that with in with the spike in crime during the pandemic, right? Um, you had crime was was skyrocketing at some unprecedented levels, the number of police officers was falling. And, you know, at least arguably you could say, well, that's crime is rising because um police officers, the number of police officers fell. And so now uh we need more, in order to make crime fall again, we need more police officers, right? So really buying all into that, centering the police as the answer to all of this. Now, of course, that narrative has lost some traction. Turns out law enforcement agencies didn't maybe lose as many officers as they thought they did, and some smaller agencies, in fact, they may have um increased. They may have more officers now than they did before. As you and I have talked about before, there's not much of a correlation, even much less any sort of causal inference that you can make between the number of police officers and whether crime was going up or down. Um, and now, of course, we have violent crime going down at unprecedented rates to unprecedented levels, even in places where you have fewer officers in pre-pandemic, like Seattle, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, places like that. But it's still, but we still need to but that that sort of myth or or what I'll call false narrative is still there. And it's going to be retold the next time crime rises. Oh my goodness, we need to have more police officers. There's still a lot of disorder that people are concerned with and often gets conflated with crime. Um, and people are are sort of inaptly or perhaps in vain looking to the police to address. And importantly, we've got local governments who are right now facing some significant financial constraints and they're going to have to decide how to spend, you know, limited dollars. And so when I think about sort of alternatives, I think about, well, you know, we could, you know, kind of to what? We could just hire more police officers. And I know certainly in in DC and then in New Orleans, um and many other places, we have examples of how dangerous it can be for that narrative to take hold where crime is going up or disorder is is still high. We need to hire more police officers and we need them now. Certainly in Washington, D.C. in the 80s and 90s, there was a precipitous hiring spree, and there was a whole Washington Post series on how devastating that was. Didage agent investigation of um uh the department because of the problems that ensued. I don't know if you recall in the New Orleans findings report, we talked about how there were hundreds of officers hired in a relatively short time period after after Katrina. There were about 400 officers hired in those three years. And NOPDE lowered its hiring standards. They removed, um, they asked the Civil Service Commission to score the written part of the exam um, you know, less vigorously. And we heard from lots of NOPD leaders that this had caused a generational problem of police officers who really shouldn't be police officers. So there there's a real, there's a real um, there's a real danger when we look only to the police to respond to crime spikes or to social problems. But even more than that, in some ways, that sort of sense that, oh, you know, we need someone to respond to these calls, it should needs to be police. I think the problem with that is that it perpetuates this over-reliance on law enforcement to address crimes. Um, and in doing so, it sort of undermines efforts to modernize and to innovate in how we respond to crime. Um and that really brings us to sort of these other uh approaches. And so running through some of those other approaches, I do want to note that one, and I think you've talked about this as well, Jeff, but one of the ways to sort of shift some of this is to even within police departments that we we put a lot of police activity on sworn officers. A lot of that could be done by non-sworn officers, what's sometimes called professional staff or non-sworn, right? It can be done some of this work. I think what you see sometimes when there are crime spikes is you see departments moving detectives into patrol. When in fact, what you really need is is oftentimes you need detectives out there solving cases, getting clearance rates, um, because that's probably the better thing. And so I I do want to make clear that a lot, some of this can be done within police departments as well. Outside of police departments, you've got everything from CBI, community violence intervention, you've got what we are called is called alternative first response or community crisis response. And you've got changes to the built environment, you've got providing other places to take people besides jails, and then you've got some hybrid sort of responses, everything from after-school jobs to, you know, Patriarchy's done a lot of work on increasing nonprofits. And then, of course, that's even before we get to root causes. But that's just I'm happy to talk about any of those in depth. But that's basically the list of what I'm thinking about when I think of ways to diversify the public safety portfolio.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

How can cities one of the common complaints that I hear when thinking about those as strategies, alternative responses as strategies, is that a lot of times they'll implement a program and it'll be a drop in the bucket. And they'll it'll be effective or it'll be impactful, but you're talking about a tiny proportion of overall calls or a tiny proportion of mental health calls. How can agencies or cities scale these so that it's not a drop in the bucket, so that they are maximally impactful?

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Yeah, well, that takes us right back to the the issue of sort of assuming that if we want more public safety services, that those services should come from police. Because when you look at these, uh and I'll take um community crisis response or alternate first response, um, when you look at those, if you look at uh many studies, um, including the um there's almost half of call types could be safely addressed by non-police, and that 26% that the and that those call types represent 26% of police hours, right? So that the potential for these units to take up a lot of the calls that are currently being handled by police is quite high. And when you look at um some of the more mature crisis response, enterprise response um organ uh units like Albuquerque Community Safety Department, Durham Hart, Denver Starr, the limiting factors on their ability to respond is not that there are not enough eligible calls for them to respond to, it's that there are not enough people to respond to those calls. And that's just a matter of funding and demand, right? The same way that when crime goes up, you get legislators, politicians, sometimes community members saying, we need more police. Look at this, crime has gone up. We need to sh have a shift in mindset where people understand that like what they need is maybe not more police. They do need more government response responders, but maybe that should be people in these, in one of these community safety groups or these alternative first response teams instead of police officers. Those people can take the calls. You know, these calls can be complicated. Police don't want to take them a lot of times. And they allow people who are specially trained for those sorts of calls to respond and spend the time necessary to hopefully provide better outcomes and um connect people with services that will can prevent recurrence.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

And even going more simpler, how do you get agencies or cities to see the value of what we um my partner Ben Horwitz and I talk about is like civilianization. In New Orleans, an enormous drop in police officers from like 1,200 to 900, under 900 officers, 2019, just 2019 to like 2023. And they spent $80 million to hire new officers and are below the number of officers they had when they started spending $80 million three years ago. So you've got this enormous problem, response times through the roof, and then they hired a contractor to respond to non-injury traffic accidents. They hired something like 100 professional staff or civilians or whatever you want to call it, and response times plunged. And so they have uh they went from 150 minutes on average in 2022 and 2023 to now they're at like 50 or 60 minutes on average, which is not great, but is about the historical norm, despite the fact that they still have very few officers. And so it's been enormously successful, but it's not something that the city is advocating as like here's a solution to you know staffing problems, here's an easier way to do it. And they're not, I wouldn't call them innovative in terms of looking for new ways. One of the ideas that comes to mind is this idea of civilian responders to non-emergency, like almost civilian detectives that can go out and process scenes that you don't necessarily need an officer at. Your car was broken into, three pennies were stolen, you want to report the crime, the officer goes out there, you're not gonna give it the CSI treatment. You're just you want to note what happened, and your choices are not responding in time or having a very slow response and having a civilian response. And often the agencies will choose the not responding fast. A long-winded way of saying like, how do we get advocacy from a policy standpoint on this sort of minutia of improving efficiency through less sworn responses?

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Yeah, no, I do think that is the question because there's so much evidence supporting these sorts of alternative responses and not and responses and shifting work even within police departments, as you're talking about, from sworn to non-sworn positions. There's so much evidence that this produces better outcomes, you know, in on several different uh levels. And I think that there's, especially since 2020, the problem has been, or maybe since 2021. The problem has been to some extent that the conversation has been derailed by people accusing people of wanting to abolish police or defund police if you support any of these sorts of shifts. And this is of course, you know, it it kind of makes sense, although it does, I'm not trying to entirely make sense for police unions to be like, no, don't don't shift these things, right? I say kind of makes sense because a lot of their own law enforcement officers are are saying their members are saying, hey, we don't want to take these calls, can someone else take these calls? But I understand why they want to want to say, like, hey, we want to, we wanna hold on to as many positions as we can. But if you look at this from a whole government sort of perspective, the evidence is all in favor of a more diversified approach. The conversation has really been shut down because uh partly because of sort of our assumptions and our mindsets, we just reflexively go to police when it comes to taking care of crime and disorder and problems. We don't think about these other options. And then even where we do start to think about those and talk about those, people are often afraid to really support that and demand that because they don't want to be accused of not supporting law enforcement. I really do think that's a lot, a lot of it. So the both the sort of preconceptions and the assumptions that we fall back on and the very real resistance from people who have an interest in maintaining the status quo, even if that's not if that status quo is not best for public safety.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

And are there like if you were advocating, if a city hires you to consult on what what was should we implement, what are kind of the the go tos that sort of X, Y, and Z are the things that you should think about first? As what you should be looking to implement.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

So one of the tricky bits, of course, is that there are 18,000 law enforcement agencies. Many of them serve the same jurisdiction. But in every city or county you're going to go to, you're going to have to look and see what that jurisdiction needs. You may have a jurisdiction where they actually need more police officers, or maybe they need fewer police officers, but they need to be better paid. But in a lot of places, you are going to need, again, a more diverse portfolio of public safety. And what I would look at, you would have to sort of see what is needed in that jurisdiction, but I would look at, you know, what kinds of community violence intervention programs do you have? We've got focused deterrents. There's a lot of evidence, you know, that indicates that's a much more efficient and effective way of reducing violent crime. I would look at what cognitive behavioral therapy types of programs they have. You know, Jens Ludwig talks a lot about this in his new book, Unforgiving Places about how valuable those programs can be. Rokha is a similar program. He talks about becoming a man, but there's programs like this. So all of the David Mohammed's work with kids has been amazing. So I would look, what are you doing in that realm that is adjacent to law enforcement but is different? And then I would look, of course, at the um, and this is a lot of the work that we do at My Center, um, the work with community crisis response. Um, you know, what kinds of call type types are you able to take? Are you able to shift to a um non-um police responder? Um and and I would encourage people to listen to the um the podcast that was done about Durham's heart program because it really starts off by um addressing sort of the law enforcement concern about that program and then and then indicating how much law enforcement came around once they realized how valuable it was. But it also indicates that that's not enough and that you really do need some social service, a so sort of a social safety net, right? And so what you see in in a lot of places now, sobering centers or sort of some kind of crisis stabilization centers, all over, from Pennsylvania to Alabama, all over, these sorts of places are are cropping up to kind of give you an immediate sort of, it's not the long-term social safety net, but it's an immediate social safety net. And of course, there are the things that we've always known about, um, and not always, but for some time known about that we should be investing more in everything from street lights. Liz Glazer has a piece in Vital City, um, or maybe the Atlantic, very recently talking about, hey, just you know, the built environment can really help, right? So everything from redesigning public spaces, planting trees, fixing derelict buildings, street engineering, all these sorts of things I would be looking to. And then I think what I call the hybrid programs, I would be looking at like, well, what you know, summer youth employment programs. I always think about Scott Thompson, um, the chief in Camden, a very challenged community in New Jersey, telling me that he would trade 30 officers for another boys and girls club. You know, that's a police chief who sees the value in some of these non-law enforcement ways to prevent and and address crime. Um and then, you know, I think it is, it makes sense in that this is not as attractive to legislators often because it's more long-term. But if you look um at John Roman's sort of analyses of these, and Brendan Beck has a piece in the annual review of criminology, really talking about basically we need to stop hand-waving at the importance of addressing root causes if we want a sustainable way of preventing crime. And so, you know, I grew up in the 80s. I'm very aware of how cynical people have been for a long time about trying to prevent crime through addressing root causes. But there's just there's a lot of evidence that housing and education, employment, those sorts of things, that's the way you sustainably keep crime down instead of expecting police to do it all through arrests and you know, that's just not that's not a long-term plan for success.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

So what do you see as the path forward uh from here on policing reform, improving policing, continue to sort of move the ball, move the ball forward?

SPEAKER_00 26:08

Well, there's certainly nothing predetermined. Um I think as with so many things in the world right now where it sort of feels like we're on the cusp and things could fall either way. And so I don't think that there's, you know, nothing is we shouldn't take anything for granted. I mean, we just need to decide are we, are we gonna try to be the best versions of ourselves, or are we just gonna fall back on our on you know, tried and true methods, even um recognizing some of the very real harms um, you know, that things like uh, you know, sort of mass misdemeanor arrest programs and mass incarceration have on communities, the race to the racial inequality they result in, you know, the way that we have been policing um has not had a as strong of an influence on keeping on crime as one would expect for something we invest so much in. And it has had a lot of harm. So is there a way that we can rethink the way that we are um that we are approaching public safety? And I think that the path forward really is to sort of look at some of the programs that are being piloted, invest more in the ones that are shown to be promising. We can't demand, of course, a randomized control trial before we try the new things or reinvest in new things, um, just as we haven't invested, we haven't replied a randomized controlled trial with policing. Um we have to sort of just really look at what's promising, try that out and see how it goes. And I think that's, you know, we just have to we just have to opt for a more constructive and positive approach to um public safety and sort of use police for that sort of judicious, you know, sort of try to get policing to be that sort of, they are the, they have the um our police are the ones who we give the authority to use force, including lethal force. Let's like make sure that they're able to do that when we need it and do so in a way that is most judicious and restrained um and effective, and really try to get some have a more sort of specialized and diverse um toolkit that we can respond to these problems more fully. I think that that might that might require a sort of right now, police are kind of a um multi-tool, right? They go out to the scene and they what they kind of assess it and see what is needed. Some of that might need to happen more at the um uh at the stage where the 911 call comes into dispatch. So really trying to make sure that our dispatchers are are better at sort of making those calls, but also we might need some sort of non-police sort of generalist to go to those sorts of calls and and and do those sorts of assessments.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

And I guess the big question uh from where you sit is is there a way for DOJ to become involved again? Like I know that the civil rights division has has obviously been sort of eviscerated at this point. Is there a way to rebuild this and effectively continue what was before or improve on what was before?

SPEAKER_00 29:01

So there theoretically is. I don't know if it's going to happen or how long it's going to take. I think the Department of Justice has lost a lot of legitimacy for, you know, appropriately so. And so I and I think it can and should take a while to rebuild that legitimacy. And, you know, and there were always communities who didn't have much trust in the department already. And so I think it's going to be um a effort at rebuilding trust and legitimacy, and also just being willing to try some new bold ideas. And I think that is going to require um putting I I think the Department of Justice is going to have to relinquish some control over these agreements under these and these reform efforts and really let empower local communities, including police departments and the communities who are impacted by policing, empower them to develop more of these solutions for themselves and support them in that. And again, I have that's a whole other conversation. I'm working on how that happens right now. But I think that that's the role for them is really kind of having a little bit of humility and really empowering, doing figuring out how it can best empower local communities to sustain reforms on their own.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

And then my last question is just uh, and I started asking this to all my guests, but what role do you think that AI can play in improving your work or kind of this broader idea of police reform in general?

SPEAKER_00 30:26

Um I'm not as I you know, I certainly have lots of concerns about AI as we all should, right? It's it's certainly again, who knows how it's all gonna turn out. It's gonna depend on a lot of choices that people make. But I do think there's some potential there. There's some opportunity there for some real gains. Everything from I I actually like a lot of the ability, and this isn't necessarily AI, but it can be AI, of some more technological enforcement that takes sort of the human out of it. When done properly, it can remove some implicit or explicit biases. It can also reinforce them and mask them for sure. Um, but I think there are ways through, you know, everything from stop light enforcement and stop sign enforcement and speed enforcement to sort of make some gains there. I also think I'm most excited, frankly, about the use of AI to review um body worn camera footage in a more efficient way. That is huge, both for accountability purposes, but also for learning purposes, to be able to sort of figure out where are the key points in this day, in this officer's day that we should be focused on to figure out, you know, how to conduct traffic stops most safely or to handle a domestic violence response most safely. But also, hey, how can I ensure that what the officer wrote in their report was true without going through, you know, many hours of watching video? Their AI may be helpful there. So I, you know, I I'm familiar with Ian Adams work and others' work, um, talk about some of the risks of over reliance on AI. And that's certainly, that's certainly going to happen. And we're gonna have to get through that. But I think that they're it it can also, I think it's it can be promising as well.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

And where can people go to learn about all you all are doing at Georgetown and and find out more information about this sort of work?

SPEAKER_00 32:13

Well, the we you can go to the website at uh Center for Innovations and Community Safety at Georgetown Umlaw. And we have um a few uh white papers that we're putting out on everything from how you get um a uh alternative response community crisis response program started, how you staff it. Um these are not panaceas, these are not, you know, silver bullets. There are still gonna be there's lots of work, lots of things that can go wrong. It's not uncomplicated, it's as complicated as policing, just different. And so there's a conference that we're having in June that we do in conjunction with the policing project and others to um really help bring people together to try to figure this out. So you can look at those materials and you know, obviously talk with me or um with our the leaders in our in that practice for our center. They really, they're some of the experts in the in the nation on this. And it's a really I really appreciate it's one of the most it's been nice to have a new, fresh conversation that feels a lot more promising than having the same conversations, trying to sort of fix placing in all the same old ways and coming up with the same, coming up against the same obstacles. And this seems like um this is this is proving to be um a way past some of those seemingly intransigent obstacles.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Great. Well, thank you so much. This has been a great conversation. Uh I love the perspective, and I think it's so important that giving all of the staffing issues that policing are having, that this is something that's sort of forefront in the conversation of how do we move forward, because it's not just, as you say, hire new police, because that's not easier said than done. So thank you so much for coming on the show, Christy. Thanks for listening to the Jeffalytics Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and to learn more, head on over to ahdatalytics.com for more information and previous episodes. If you like what you heard, please leave a glowing review, which will help others to discover the show. Until next time, I'm Jeff Asher.