Courage to Leap & Lead with Jared Fishman, part 1 - Episode 148

You've got courage to leap, courage to lead.

Be brave and be bold. Whoa, let it roar.

Welcome to the Courage to Leap and Lead podcast, where each of our guests share the stories of courage that helped them become powerful leaders. Before we start today's show, please remember to visit courage-consulting.com Where you can find all the episodes and other excellent resources, all at courage-consulting.com. Now here's your host, Leadership Courage Coach CB Bowman.

Hello everybody, it's Tuesday, and you know on Tuesdays it's CB with Courage to Leap and Lead. And today I was about to say we have a special guest. All my guests are special, and the men are always quite handsome, right? Oops, I think I'm not supposed to say that. Oh well, when you get to be a certain point in life, you can say things, and we won't discuss that any further, will we? Right. Okay. So today I have Jarrett Fishman. Now, you may not know that name off the top of your head, but you will when we finish this interview because Jarrett is a former federal prosecutor.

Uh-oh.

Watch what we say and what we do. And he's written this fabulous book called Fire on the Levee. But you know what? Forget all that. We want to talk about times when he, quote unquote, failed and turned that into success. Because how do you get to be a federal prosecutor, prosecutor, and a well-known author and not have failed at something? And obviously you're able to flip that around. So we want to get the inside scoop. From Jared. But first, I want to say welcome, Jared. How are you today?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on the show.

Oh, my pleasure. Hey, everybody, you see those stickies on the back of his wall? Does that not remind you of J.K. Rowling, how she wrote Harry Potter? So we know, we know we're in the company of greatness now. Jarrett, we want to know first, from the very beginning, tell us about when you were a little boy. I have a feeling you got into a lot of trouble.

I was, I think, the opposite of the kid who got into a lot of trouble. I was, I was a good student. I was the kid who was the teacher's pet, who people said, ah, one of these days you're going to go be a lawyer. You're going to go And so that was, that was my childhood. I grew up in a pretty homogenous community where people were all living very similar lives. And I grew up in a Jewish community where we had a big push to say the world is broken and let's try to fix it. And so that was a big part of the ethos of my childhood and the world that I grew up in.

So what did your parents do?

My dad was an accountant. He's the very practically minded, somewhat conservative thinking accounting type. My mom was a product of the '60s. She was protesting the war and helping, helping create job opportunities for low-income women of color and then eventually became a stay-at-home mom who took care of me and my sister. So my dad's— my dad and my mom were very different sides of the coin, but I think very influential in shaping the worldview that I would later Sounds like a wonderful match.

And where did you grow up?

I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia.

Mm-hmm. I thought you grew up in the Bronx or New York.

I, I've been called worse things, but yes.

Well, because it sounds like you've got great wisdom, so Of course, only people from New York and the Bronx have that kind of wisdom. Don't ask me where I'm from. So, Jarrett, so you went to law school, and then what happened next? By the way, did you pass your law exams the first time around?

I, I did pass my law exams the first time around.

That's just not fair.

So I went to law school because I was actually interested in working in war zones. My pre-law school life, I spent working in different places that had recently experienced conflict. I lived in the Middle East, I lived in the Balkans, I did work in Rwanda. And I went to law school because I was really interested in helping places that were just coming out of war. How do you rebuild your society when that's happened? Or even more interestingly, how do we keep that from happening in our own society? So I went to law school to learn those things. I never really thought I was going to be a prosecutor. That wasn't my plan. And my first job out of law school was working for the U.S. State Department in Kosovo, trying to help that country as they were building their legal system.

So does that mean that you'll be going into the Ukraine region after? Are you still doing that sort of thing?

I'm not doing that now. I'm doing that work here in the U.S., trying to help fix our own systems that are desperately out of whack at the moment.

So, you know, it was interesting because I interviewed somebody from South Africa, and I, and I want to get your take on this. One of the things he said to me which really stopped me cold, and I started thinking about it, he said that the one of the things that he sees in society being from South Africa— this is a Black man from South Africa— is that particularly in the United States or our part of the world, we pay attention to wars that happen in white countries. We don't pay attention to wars that happen in Black countries. And so we get— we focus a lot of our press on Ukraine, for example, but not a lot of press on the wars that are happening in Africa. How do you feel about that statement?

Yeah, sounds right. I mean, when we look at the things that have really drawn Americans' attention, the wars in the Balkans and Bosnia and Kosovo was definitely one that drew the attention, the war in Ukraine for sure. And I think when you look at the US response to the war in Rwanda, it's shameful. The entire international community's response to the genocide in Rwanda was shameful. So absolutely, we cover these things differently.

Yeah.

I think when you— like, for example, you know, I worked a case at one point that where the victims of the crime were Somali refugees who had moved to Kansas and were attacked during the course of celebrating a Ramadan break fast. And when you look at People who are in the country, right? The plight of the Somali refugees in the country is definitely not something that's on top of mind for people in this country when we think about immigration and we think on opportunities and historically who has come and helped to build this country.

Why do you think that is?

I mean, I think there is a very deep base of racism that runs quite deep in the way we conduct business in this country.

You, when you responded just now, I felt your heart break. Tell me about that.

I mean, I think part of the reason why I wrote the book Fire on the Levee that, you know, we're going to talk about is because it's the story of my own journey in the American criminal justice system. in realizing that many of the ideals that we had preached and learned about in our schools and in our law schools just simply isn't the way that our system functions. You know, I never wanted to be a prosecutor. Part of the reason why I even got in there in the first place was that one of my colleagues in Kosovo said, if you want to do this job, you got to work in our system first before you can go off and tell people in Kosovo and Bosnia that they need to fix their system. Go figure out what's happening in our system. You should go be a prosecutor. Now, for me, that was the furthest thing on my mind. I was a civil rights guy. I wanted to— I wanted to be out there defending civil rights of people who were exploited by others. And I said, I'm gonna go be a defense attorney. And he says, listen, no, if you really care about civil rights, you need to go be a prosecutor because they're the ones with all the power. And it's quite clear when you go and you watch how the system is functioning and you see who is in and out of our criminal justice system and what they're in there for and the debilitating fines and fees and impact of incarceration on the ability of those communities to create a healthier, more sustainable life, it's overwhelming. And so what I think I wanted to show is to educate people and to understand how this system was built. understand how the system plays out in reality. But most importantly in my mind is how do we fix it? Because the reality is our system is broken. And I've worked with plenty of people on the police side, on the community side, on the prosecutor side who recognize that we are not serving our communities in a way that's helpful. And so what we— but we can do better. And that's what we've been working at at Justice Innovation Lab is to help the people who want to try to fix their communities to make it more fair and more just.

So do you think that the solution is that you go in and you fix community by community, or is the solution to fix the country? And if it's fixing the country, it's like trying to eat an elephant in one swallow. So take us through what you think we should be doing.

I think there is so much low-hanging fruit that people in the community and people in law enforcement can agree on if only we were having a conversation in a way that's useful. And so one of the things that we did in Charleston, South Carolina, I got invited down to Charleston, South Carolina. I had prosecuted the murder of a man named Walter Scott. He was a Black man who was killed by North Charleston police officers. The video went viral and he was one of, one of held up as an exhibit at the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. because his killing was so egregious. I did work on that case, and ultimately we convicted the police officer for, for that killing. But what was clear was that this was about so much more than just one bad apple. This is about systems and processes and structures that routinely give bad outcomes for communities. And part of that is just the nature of the interaction between police and the communities they serve. And so what we think is, yeah, the system is broken. There are people who want to fix it. Let's help them try to fix it.

So, so you do a lot of critical thinking. But what I don't understand, and I'm sure many people don't understand, is that you— I'm trying to figure out how to put this so I'm not insulting. I'm not quite sure. Um, you're the bad guy, aren't you? I mean—

Depends who you ask. I mean, I'm often the bad guy.

I mean, if somebody's guilty, you're proving— like, if somebody comes before you, your goal is to prove them guilty.

That was my old job. That's not my job anymore.

Okay, well, your old job was to prove them Guilty. So how is that fixing the system?

I think in the end of the day, I mean, I think part of, part of why I wrote this book is my journey saying I'm not sure it is. I'm not sure this is the best way we can be spending our resources as a community. There are a lot of times where we have no choice but to use our system in order to incarcerate people who pose a danger to our communities. It happens. But the reality is the vast majority of the people currently in our system, that is not true of. They have other issues that, that need to be dealt with, and that incarceration and punishment is just proving not very effective. There's a lot of research coming out that the, that the prosecution of people for low-level offenses creates more danger for communities, increased escalation, because our system is so punitive. It takes people when they are down, and they just pushes them further and further down. And so if our hope— and what we know is that most, 95% of people who get incarcerated come back to live in our communities. So it begs the question, don't we want the people who are returning to our communities to be more likely to succeed, to be more likely to live in our communities? And a lot of that is helping people with mental health problems, helping people with drug use problems. But right now our system is only set up to punish.

So I remember seeing recently, and I was only half paying attention because I was working at the same time. You know how you do TV and work. Okay. And so it was about— it was about— sorry about that— How helping drug addicts with clean supplies was a huge discussion because some people felt that it enabled them and some people felt that it helped them. So as a prosecutor, what side are you on and why?

What I would like— the way I come out of this experience is Right? There's 2 ways that we can think about justice. We can think about it backwards looking and we can think about it forwards looking. When we're looking at backwards looking, we're saying like, how do we support this person that this bad thing happened to? How can we get them the support they need? Oftentimes the thing we throw in is punishment to the person who did it. And the way that we do that most of the time is sending people to prison, which is simply a punishment in our system. That's the only purpose it's serving these days. And, and then there's the forward-looking, which is, how do we make sure these things aren't happening? Because it hurts our community. It hurts our community when someone is hurt. It hurts our community when there's open drug markets in our communities. It hurts when, when parents have addiction. It hurts when children don't have their parents. And so the question is, which works? The status quo, the way we've been doing things for the last 400 years. has never had to prove that it works. It never has, and we just keep doing it. One thing we know is the way that we're doing it creates an inordinate amount of harm, particularly for lower-income communities of color. And so the question is, are we okay with that? I think the answer is no. And so when it comes to what you do about it is each one of these communities has a say in how they shape their future. So we often think about the criminal justice system in America as if it was just one thing. But really it's 2,300 things because each county and city and community has their own police and has their own courts and has their own prosecutors. And each one of those communities can make a different choice about how they are choosing to use law enforcement resources in their community in order to improve public safety and improve equitable outcomes. And what we're seeing is more and more bold leaders are saying, yeah, I want this for my community. Because the way we're doing it isn't working and we can do better.

Okay, so let's take California, for example, particularly San Francisco. Let's take San Francisco. Let's take downtown Denver, the homeless population. Mixed with the drug population, mixed with people who are working but can't afford to live there, so they have to live in tents. Where do you begin to unravel this atrocity?

I mean, this is, this is a byproduct of America neglecting its mental health institutions for 40 years. I mean, this is a byproduct of what happened because in, in under Reagan during that era, we saw a number of American mental health institutions shut down for good reason. They were abusive. They were not having a very good return on mental health. But what happened was we shut them down and we didn't create any alternative. We didn't come up with another plan for dealing with what was a very severe crisis in this country. And so instead, those folks are just out on the street, and the people who are beginning to having that interaction with them are law enforcement. And that is who we have sent on the front lines to try to deal with this problem. But law enforcement isn't equipped to do this. They're not equipped to do the analysis on dealing with a severe mental health crisis. If you look at who's serving on patrol officers in most of these institutions, They're guys in their early 20s. Their training isn't particularly robust. And those are the people on the front line dealing with America's mental health crisis. What I hear officers tell me all the time is, I can't do nothing, but the only choice I have is to take someone and incarcerate them. And what I know is this person is in crisis. This person is in crisis at the moment. which is leading to an outcome that's bad for everyone. It's bad for everyone 'cause it's taking place in the CVS. You know, it's bad for everyone because it's happening on our public parks. But what we need is to get the person the help that they need. And far too often what's happening in communities, we just lock those people up. But because of what they are doing, we're locking 'em up for 5 days, for 10 days, and then they get out and they are more destabilized. Because people who already have housing instability, you take them out of their circuit for a while, you destabilize them even more. And so what we can see are communities that want to think about this holistically. We can't simply think about this as an issue of punishment. If we really want to solve that forward problem of dealing with homelessness, we have to deal with the problem of affordable housing. That's— that is that problem. If we want to talk about addiction, I mean, I'm a big fan of if people are going to use needles and those needles are likely to transmit severe illness to more and more parts of the community, I would much rather have a clean needle exchange site so that people can do it safely so that we can mitigate risk. You know, sometimes we try to make things better by doing something new. Sometimes the best we can hope for is just to mitigate the risk and reduce the amount of harm, because the last thing you want is dirty needles being spread around in your community. That certainly isn't gonna help things get any better.

So, Jared, I threw into that mix people who otherwise would be living in comfortable housing, but because they're in San Francisco, They, even though they're working, they can't afford an apartment, much less than a house. So where do you— and so then they're thrown on the streets, and then they're mixed in with the drug population and the mental health population. I was actually surprised when I asked somebody who is in this area, I said, are people who are working Homeless. And he said, absolutely, absolutely. Where do we start there? Is it just a question of affordable housing? Because, I mean, you're talking a big area of California.

You have to solve an affordable housing issue in your community. I mean, San Francisco is a great example. of prices shooting up so fast that it displaced pretty much everyone. And you have a ton of homelessness as a result. And because it's good temperatures, that population can sustain. I mean, you don't see that kind of population sustainability in North Dakota, right? I mean, San Francisco, LA, Seattle are places where one can live outside for a longer period of time. And so without, without having that housing correction, you've got to solve that problem.

So, so you're saying basically that the government has no motivation to solve the problem?

I'm saying that, I'm saying that it's not Whether or not they're motivated to or not. I mean, what I've seen is a lot of people who recognize there's a problem, but the systems are complex, and the levers that are available to government officials are narrow. I mean, different decision makers have different levers that they can use to make a problem. But really, because this is system-wide and different parts of the systems interact, If you really want to fix it, you got to bring everyone together. And that means people who are closest to the problem, such as people who are living in— without housing stability, people who are working jobs and still are homeless, people like the police officers who are interacting with them on the ground more than anyone else, people like mental health and social workers who are also interacting with the communities, law enforcement. I mean, all of these people have to be at the table if you're going to fix the problem.

Why isn't it happening?

Because humans, I think the status quo, the status quo is pretty powerful. The status quo is a remarkably hard thing to change because the status quo doesn't have to prove its existence. It already exists. And so it's gonna just keep going unless we do something different. And so, you know, in law terms, we often talk about the burden of proof. Who has the burden to prove the story in order to win? And, and as I like to say, the status quo has no burden of proof. It's on the people who want to change it. And it's hard to build the evidence base. Part of what we're doing at Justice Innovation Lab is building the evidence base so that people can go to their leaders and say, hey, guess what? We can stop this discriminatory, discriminatory practice of traffic stops without impacting public safety. And engender more community trust. Like, we can do that. And then people say, oh yeah, I want to do that. That sounds good. Like, I'd like my community to be more safe and more fair. Of course, because everyone wants to live in that kind of community.

It's taking it bite by bite.

It's the only choice. We have to win something. We have to win something. And the reality is, is there is so much low-hanging fruit that people already agree on. And so the question is, how do you bring the decision makers to the table to do the thing that we've already agreed on? It shouldn't be that hard, but it is. But part of what we try to do is help communities figure out how to do that better.

I think I want to be part of that Justice Lab.

Come on over. We have a, we have a good time.

Okay, we'll talk. So, okay, now leaping from there to your book, which is a big leap, but we'll go back and backfill. Tell us about— first of all, show everybody the book.

Fire on the Levee: The Murder of Henry Glover and the Search for Justice After Hurricane Katrina.

Tell us about the book.

Right after Hurricane Katrina, a man named Henry Glover practically went missing, and his body was later found burned behind one of New Orleans' levees. At the time, no one knew what happened to him until 4 years later when a journalist named A.C. Thompson uncovered that perhaps the police may have been involved in the disappearance and murder of this man. At the time, I was a young prosecutor at the Department of Justice. I investigated civil rights cases, so I was investigating police abuse cases. I was investigating crimes that were taking place in prisons. I was investigating hate crimes and human trafficking, and I would be shipped off to different parts of America struggling with one of these incidents. And so the report wound up on my boss's desk, and she said, I don't know if there's anything to this, but you should go look into this. And so I flew down. I lived in Washington, D.C. at the time. I flew down to New Orleans. I teamed up with a rookie FBI agent named Ashley Johnson, who became my partner in crime fighting for a long time. And together, we tried to figure out whether or not the insinuation that the police were involved could possibly be true. By the end of it, we charged 5 police officers who were involved with the murder and ultimately the burning of Henry Glover's body and the cover-up that followed. And so this book is a dive into that story, but I hope it also elucidates just so much of what is wrong in our system and how I think we should begin thinking about it if we're going to fix it.

This is going to be a dumb question, but I'll ask anyway. How do you begin to unravel something like that? Do you just go knock on somebody's door and say, did you know such and such? And what happened?

Well, yes, we did a lot of that. It's funny, the book— people tell me, you know, it's a longish book because it's a very detailed a lot of interesting characters over a long period of time. But the first draft was 200 pages longer, and that 200 pages was straight up perseverance. That's Ashley and I, that's Ashley and I knocking on a lot of doors without much to say. But that's the reality. I mean, when you're talking about tackling a deeply embedded injustice that's been hidden from the community for so long, we interviewed hundreds of people, including many police officers who were around and who were witness to the events in question. Almost all of them had stayed quiet about it for 4 years, many of whom lied, and others who actively tried to keep it hidden. And so this story is about what does it take to unravel that, just to explain how deep that is in the system, because there's so much in there that we could do differently if we decided that we wanted to do it differently.

Was your life threatened? Because we all hear about the brotherhood of the police.

Uh, there was a period of time where I had my own personal bodyguard, um, as I was traveling around New Orleans. Wow.

That's all I have to say on that. Drop the mic.

Yeah, there's nothing, there's nothing quite like having your own bodyguard to make you fully aware of your own mortality.

Are you going to say more about that?

No, I mean, I think, you know, the answer is, the answer is, yeah, we were, we were trying to take down a police infrastructure. They knew who we were. They knew what we were doing. At the time, my case, this one of the police officer shooting and burning a man's body, was just one of 9 investigations that were open looking into different misconduct by the police department. I handled another case where the police beat a man to death. I had colleagues who were handling cases where a group of police officers opened fire and shot up an entire bridge of civilians. This was the world as it existed. And so that was who we were trying to take down. That is the world that young Ashley Johnson and I dropped into. As we tried to figure out what exactly happened to Henry Glover.

Are you married?

I am.

Your wife let you do this?

She, she did. She was, she was alongside for the ride. You read a little bit about her in the book.

So this insanity is a marriage affair.

Listen, I mean, there's, there's, there's so much wrong in the world, CB. Someone's got to do something about it.

Yeah, I get that. I get that. But I'm in awe. I mean, truly. So, okay. Former prosecutor and undercover, uh, Truly undercover work being done, and then it becomes out in the open. Why did you continue to do these things?

Because this is the world that I live in. This is the society that I live in, and I don't want it to be this way.

Hey, yeah, but here's the deal. You're not a Black person. Why do you care?

For sure.

Why do you care?

Because I know plenty of people who have been hurt by this system. I mean, I think way too often we disregard, we just disregard the pain of people of color in this country.

So why is that important to you?

Why isn't it important? I see it as an issue. I see it as an issue. We live as humans. What kind of world do we want to live in? You know, I grew up on a system that said that people are truly created equal, and I believed it. And then I got out there in the world, and it turned out that wasn't true. And to me, that was an affront to everything I had been taught as a kid. And I think as a community, we should stand up and say, no, when we say created equal, we mean created equal. We mean that people are going to have opportunities to thrive. And the reality is, in America, the people at the bottom happen to be people of color. And part of this is because it's been baked into the system for generations and generations. And if we're actually gonna change it, people who have access to positions of power, people like prosecutors, people like police officers have to say, you know what, we can do better than this. And that's how I feel. I've been working on this for 20 years. I believe we can do better. And I believe that I have an obligation to be a part of that solution.

Hey, Jarrett. Question, do you feel that this call to attention for the police department has weakened their abilities to support, in quotes, justice? I mean, are police now afraid to do anything?

I think there are many factors at play for what's happening. And we've seen drastic decreases in employment. Is some of this a byproduct of people saying, hey, I don't want to be prosecuted, I don't want to be, you know, my every move second-guessed? Like, fair enough, you shouldn't be in that profession. I mean, part of Part of what being law enforcement is, is saying that we're going to hold ourselves to a higher standard because these are people who we give license to use deadly force. They're walking in our communities with the ability to take lives, and our legal system and our structures go out of their way not to second-guess them. It's why we see so many, so many in-custody deaths. There are 1,000 every year. 1,000 people are killed in interactions with the police. Every year. I think last year it was 1,200. And so what we should be asking is, okay, 1,200 is a lot. That number should be zero. How do we get that number down to zero? Because what we see is a whole bunch of stuff where people are shot who have mental health issues and a gun. It's justified. They're allowed to use force, and they do. Now, our question should be, how do we create a situation where that doesn't happen anymore, where that guy gets the help that he needs so that the police aren't forced to have that interaction? We can do something different about that.

Well, I understand that about mental health, but— and not but— and if a police officer sees somebody being held up with a gun, an innocent person, will they think twice about helping because they are being held accountable? I mean—

But they're different, they're different things, CB. I mean, I think we tend to think that like all police are doing is responding to violent crime, and that's the role that they play in our society. That's just not true. When you look in any given jurisdiction of what people prioritize for their public safety, we do this all the time. We survey people in the system, both in law enforcement, in the communities. We say, What do you prioritize? And guess what they prioritize? Fighting murders, getting rapes, getting armed carjackings, things that truly are these public safety incidents. And you ask 'em, what do you think are the least important things? And they're gonna say drug possession, traffic. Now, it doesn't mean that people don't want those laws enforced, but in the scheme of what their concerns are as a community, the stuff that we all care about's at the top, the stuff that we care less about's at the bottom. But then what do we show them? We can show them, this is what you're actually doing in your community. These are what you were arresting people for in your community. And guess what? It's not very many armed robbers. You're not solving that many of your murders. But what do we see? See a lot of people, drug possession. You know why, CB? You know why we see so many? Because that's really easy. It is really easy. prosecute a drug possession case. And it's really easy to make an arrest for that. And where we put our resources, we will find it. But what we also see in communities that are taking that approach, there's less trust between witnesses and in law enforcement. There's less trust between victims of crime and law enforcement. And so what we see in jurisdiction after jurisdiction is that victims of crime are opting out of the system by not showing up. And they're saying, you know what, I don't want to be a part of an armed robbery trial. I don't want to be a part of a homicide trial. And that's because they're living in these same communities that are mixed up in, in the overpolicing of low-level offenses. And so if you want to tackle that problem, you have to change the community trust between who is being impacted and who is doing the policing. And we should have a conversation where we figure out collectively, how do we make our communities safer without hurting the people in our community that we need. And far too rarely do people come together for that.

It makes sense that police officers should have more exposure to the psychological aspects of behavior. Like, yes, it would be mandatory that they take a class in mental health or You know, some of the diseases that are affiliated with mental health?

And some places are doing it. I can't say that I'm an expert in the quality of the training, but, you know, I used to do a lot of work on use of force training. So how officers are being trained and when they were allowed to use force or not allowed to use force. And the reality is most of this training is not very good. There are places that do it better because part of it is we need to experience these things. We need to understand more about decision-making. We need to understand about, you know, there's some things that we do automatically, and there's some things that we do because we, we have a different kind of deeper thinking and, and understanding physiology and understanding the likely backgrounds of people that you're going to come into contact with. If we want to have better outcomes, Yeah, you need all of those things. And most of the time, the people who are interacting with the community are rather young, undertrained, and don't have a whole lot of experience in communities like this.

Hmm. How do we take what you're saying? Because it seems like, you know, I agree with what you're saying. It seems like it's a long, long road that we won't see in our lifetime, but we need to see it in our lifetime. So how do we take something as massive as this and solve it faster and solve it permanently?

Well, one of the things that we do— so when we engage with the community, we pick communities that are taking on a problem that we know are affecting other communities around the country. And so while that problem may be really local in that it's affecting the people who live in a given county, it's the same kind of problem that we see in many of these other 2,300 jurisdictions. But we think that communities working together with our design process that analyzes data, that breaks apart systems and understanding the way that the structures actually engage through this thoughtful process, that they can find solutions to fix a problem in their community. And then the solutions that they find, we can scale by giving them to other communities. So for example, we have these great— this intervention in South Carolina that reduced the number of cases in the system and got cases that didn't need to be there into alternatives, about 1,000 of them. And so, and that number is gonna grow even more as certain other interventions have been better at identifying the cases that shouldn't be there. identifying these low-level, low-priority arrests and trying to get the people involved something that can actually begin to solve their problem, whether that be mental health crisis or substance use crisis. Can we use the mechanisms to actually get the people the help that they need instead of doing what we've been doing, which is making the problem worse? So I think the answer is every intervention we've seen so far has been thoughtful, has made sense, and then worked out as it was expected. I think that communities can build these solutions. And then when we study them and we finally provide evidence that there is a solution that is better, well, guess what? The status quo now has to defend itself. And that's how you move the status quo.

Is there something in the process that you're creating and that you're having success with that you can make mandatory for all police that will help?

I don't think mandatory works. I think part of what works about the process is that it starts with this recognition that we can do better. Now, most people are there, and that's good news. Like, when people are willing to be self-reflective enough to be we can do better. I think that is a large enough sample size for us to start with. Let's fix those people first. And part of what we do is we help remind them, what are your values and why did you do this? Why did you get here in the first place? And it really helps communities, both law enforcement and people in the community, figure out what do I care about? Well, I care about public safety. I care about, you know, knowing that my mom can walk at night without being worried about being jumped. You know, I can send my 16-year-old Black boy out there without worrying he's going to be shot. Like, this is what communities want. And so let's help them build that. Let's help them build that in a thoughtful way.

So we've taken this conversation, and I'm just going to tell everybody that we're going to stop here and continue with part 2. Because we never asked Jarrett what failures he's experienced. We got off on a wonderful tangent, which I'm known for doing. I admit it. A great discussion about our law enforcement. So audience, stay tuned for part 2.