Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Communities are very appreciative that crime is going down, that it's not as dangerous in their communities as it used to be. And Chief Garcia will tell you, and I've heard him say it many times, he's never been in a community of color. That said, we want fewer cops.
They want more cops. They don't want to be abused by the police.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Right? The good people want to see more.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Cops, but they want more police, not fewer.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: It's the land of the great, home of the brave. Stairs in the house of the community.
One for the black man gone in the game, and two for the ball.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: Boys are younger.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: We know there are issues with modern policing. We know that communities lack trust in the police departments that serve them. But we also know that all good people want to curb violent crime in their cities. This next guest has researched and developed a program that has significantly reduced violent crime in cities across America. I know you're going to be fascinated with it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Please help me. Welcome to the tcast, Doctor Mike Smith. Even the criminal justice realm in general, I mean, is that still something where a lot of people are interested? Are you seeing a decline in a lot of that?
[00:01:17] Speaker A: No. I mean, our student population is, I would say, you know, growing slightly, you know, in terms of the number of students we have that want to major in criminal justice, I think that the.
But def. Very definitely over the course of certainly my career, but in the last, you know, seven to five to seven years, like ten years ago, you know, if you'd asked, you know, our students, what do you want to do when you graduate? Probably 50% of them would have said, I want to be a cop. Now, that's like two out of a class of 50, right?
[00:01:58] Speaker B: So how are they leveraging it and why are they getting a criminal justice then?
[00:02:01] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good question.
I mean, I, you know, not that.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: You would want to shoo them away.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: That's right. No, it's a good. It's a good question. And I, you know, I think some of them, you know, some of them, you know, they want to do other things in the criminal justice system. They want to work in probation or juvenile justice or something like that, and they see the degree as a way to get there.
You know, some of them are, you know, this looks like an interesting major. I don't know what I'm going to do. I'll do this.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess I get that. That's better than it, you know, majoring in PE or whatever. We used to do.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Right. And then there's, you know, there's some that want to go on a fair number that want to go on to grad school or law school, and they, you know, so they, I think they see some value in the degree for that, so. Yeah, but there's definitely been a shift, though. The point, my point about number of students that I see who want to be police officers, that's much less than it used to be.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Yeah, it seems like it. And the feds have always said, too, like, don't get a CJ degree because we're looking for diversification. We want somebody that's majored in computer science or whatever, all the different things. Not that it wouldn't help in some degree.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: I mean, that's certainly true. Like with the FBI for sure, I guess less true with some of the others, ATF and stuff like that. I still know lots of federal agents that have criminal justice backgrounds.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Well, most of them still do. I think most of them still go in with that, whether they're discouraged or not. And a lot of it's because, hey, that's what they're interested in, so they don't want to go do something else.
[00:03:38] Speaker A: That's very true.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: That's admirable, too, because you don't want to make yourself get b's and C's when you can make ace in something you're passionate about. So I can understand that, too. So what got you interested in law enforcement in the first place? You even. You grew up around here or.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: I'm from Virginia. Virginia, so. Grew up in Virginia, yeah. It's a good question. I have an older brother who spent 25 years on the job, and that was an influence.
I think partly I would, you know, I was in college. I would. I would go right along with him, you know, on Christmas break and stuff like that.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: And in Virginia.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: In Virginia. He was a Fairfax county police officer. I spent some time in that department as well.
So, you know, I don't know, man. We grew up. My dad was a marine.
For the longest time, I thought I was going to follow in his shoes and, you know, be a Marine Corps officer. And it's just that wasn't, you know, probably because I grew up with Marine, I guess I didn't. I didn't, you know, it was a little bit too regimented and structured for me. Yeah. But the idea of doing something cool and exciting when I was, you know, 21 or 22 years old. Yeah. You know, I was an athletic guy. Like, you know, you get it, you know?
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Yeah. All the cards. Well, that's. That makes a lot of sense, the military and police in your family. So that kind of just automatically. Especially if it's an older brother as opposed to a younger brother.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: How much older was he?
[00:05:15] Speaker A: He's four years older than me.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: Okay. So just enough to where as you're growing up, you're seeing him do something cool and you're still admiring your big brother. Right?
[00:05:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And it was, you know, you know, the old saw, you know, they give you a gun and a fast car and tell you to go find trouble.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:31] Speaker A: It's true. You know, it is.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: And that. And that was one of my questions. I'm jumping probably around. But, you know, we used to. All the guys in my academy used to talk about, you know, you want to go put bad guys in jail, and they would say that out loud, like that was what inspired them to want to become a cop. And now it seems kind of a faux pas. I mean, it's almost politically incorrect, even though technically it's perfectly fine, but.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: And necessary, too.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, you are defining bad guys in the sentence, of course, but it just seems like there's a different level now. Cause we, you know, I have a security firm, too, where we used to have people offloading yearly going onto PD's, and now nobody has any desire to go onto a PD because of the.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: You know, the narrative. Right?
[00:06:21] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. It's the community nerve. The.
It's just the lack of appreciation, I think, in general. And some of it deserved, you know, so a lot of. It's just a lot of the business of policing has changed, which obviously, you know about.
And communities are able to learn about instantaneously things that are happening in police work. So it becomes a lot more difficult. Difficult to discern how few and far in between some of those incidents.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: That's exactly right. There's no filter anymore. It's instantly on the news and in social media.
And because the media, the mainstream media drive, it's all about clicks, you know, not, not. Not subscriptions anymore, but how many people click on your website? I mean, you know, they have. They have every incentive to sensationalize, you know, the.
Some of these events, and they're. They're horrible, you know? Yeah, you would agree. They're tragic. Like the George Floyd's of the world are set policing back ten years every time they happen. Yeah. And I, you know, Eddie Garcia, you know, my chief in Dallas, my friend, you know, he's. I've heard him say many times in front of aud, various audiences, you know, nobody, nobody hates a bad cop worse than a good cop, you know, because it makes their job so much harder.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's absolutely true. But it's also hard for the good cops to scream that out because they, they get drowned out every time. That goes with any profession, really, too. But it's just much more on the main stage when it comes to this kind of stuff.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:58] Speaker B: Is there something. So what made you leave cop work and then go into study? Or did you go and study this type of forensic or criminal justice type thing and approach it from the angle that you do now, which is interesting?
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Well, you know, I went to law school first, right. Thinking I was going to be a prosecutor. And like, you know, there's a fair number of police officers that go to law school, and I, most of the ones I know were exactly like me. You know, they wanted to be prosecutors when they, and a lot of them go on to do that. That was, that was my, that was my goal.
You know, I, and then about two thirds of the way through law school, you know, I had sort of a clerk for a, for a big law firm, which, you know, is what you do in law school, right. You clerk for law firms and you're, it's kind of your summer job, right. But it's basically a tryout for your, I for, you know, they're kind of feeling you out and you're kind of feeling them out for, you know, this is somebody we want to hire when they graduate. So I clerked for a big law firm between my 2nd, second and third year of law school. And it was, you know, you see how the sausage is made, you know, and wasn't impressive. No. You know, the thing about, about lawyers, you know, lawyers have the lowest, you know, job satisfaction rate of any white collar profession, really. And they, you know, in those kinds of firms, they work 100 hours a week, you know, they make a bunch of money, but they all, they're like some of the most miserable people you'll ever going to meet.
And I worked with them for three months. And I remember coming home to my, to my wife and I'm telling her, honey, there's, I just can't do this. There's just, I can't do this. And at the same time, I was, had an opportunity to do some teaching in those days, legal writing and research, which is a mandatory first year class that every law student takes in America to this day.
Those classes were taught by third year law students on the law review.
I was a third year student on the law review. And so I got to do some teaching, is my point. And I really liked it, you know? And I. I love law school. I love the intellectual aspect of law school. Um, I just didn't want to be a lawyer, you know?
[00:10:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: So. Or I figured out I didn't want to be a lawyer. So when I graduated from law school, I thought I would pursue an academic career as a professor. I was very naive and didn't really know, hey, I did good in law school. I got a lot of grass, spent three years, like, a bunch of money. I should be able to go get a job as a professor.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Send me to Stanford. I'm ready.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't. Doesn't really work that way, not if you want to be a, you know, a criminologist at a research university. You need a PhD. And I. And I. I was very naive to that, but I met a guy when I was in law school who ended up sort of being my mentor. His name's Jeff Alpert. He's a, you know, internationally renowned police scholar at. He was at the University of South Carolina, and he sort of showed me, hey, hey, Mike, this is what you need to do. If you want to do what I do, this is what you need to do. You need to get a PhD. And here's where you ought to think about. I'd go in, and he was very instrumental in kind of helping me figure that out.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: Oh, that's great.
[00:11:19] Speaker A: Um, but, yeah, that's. So that's what I did when I graduated from law school. I went straight into a PhD program and spent three more years. And so you didn't.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: There was an interim period in there where you stopped down and had to leave a vocation in order to go back, get your PhD. You just.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: No, because I left police work, went to law school, graduated from law school, went straight into the PhD. I never practiced law in any kind of conventional sense.
I took the bar and passed the bar, but. But I'm. But I never practiced law, you know, went straight into an academic career, and that's what I've been doing basically, for the last 30. Nearly 30 years now.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: So do you pass the bar in Virginia?
[00:11:56] Speaker A: In Virginia?
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Okay. Not that it would apply here, but that's also quite an accomplishment.
[00:12:02] Speaker A: Well, you know, it was. It was harder for me than the normal person because I didn't take the bar exam til I was out of law school for five years. Cause I was. I was too busy getting a PhD and trying to start a new career. And all that, and I just didn't have time, so. So, um, yeah, I studied one, one summer and took the bar exam, and thankfully, I passed it.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: Well, what inspired you to do it? Cause you knew you weren't gonna practice. Did you need it for anything else?
[00:12:28] Speaker A: You know, look, you go to law school. Law school's hard. You spend hours and hours learning that stuff. Yeah, I wasn't not gonna take the bar exam, you know?
[00:12:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: Um, even if I never used it, and I maintain it to this day, you know.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: Do you really?
[00:12:41] Speaker A: I do. Okay. So, you know, I've paid. I paid 30 years worth of dues to the. To the, you know, state bar in Virginia. Just, you know, just because that's meaningful to me.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: Well, it's your exclamation point on your law degree. Yeah, essentially.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: Yeah, that's admirable, too. That's. That really. That makes a lot of sense. And you never know. I mean, you're moving far outside of Texas to do a lot of your sharing, a lot of your ideas. So I'm sure a lot of that applies to when all the state laws are different, even though a lot of your thing is conceptual. We'll talk about that. But.
So it's been a while since you actually been a practicing law enforcement officer, too.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: A long time, actually.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: Have you seen any trends or learned of any trends through your teaching that has shown anything that AI is going to impact anymore in law enforcement than anywhere else? Is it going to be good or bad?
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that. I think, and I'm no expert in that at all, but I would say that, I guess from my perspective, the jury is still out. I think it's still out on AI writ large in any aspect or realm of society, but particularly in law enforcement. Like, I don't know. I don't know what it's going to do. I don't think any of us can really say clearly what it's going to do. I think that in some ways, it's going to make things better and easier, you know, easier for sure.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: I think we're there for sure.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: I think we are, and we're getting there anyway. But I think that there's unintended consequences that none of us can really come to grips with or imagined at the moment.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: And that was kind of where I was leading to also, because I think in a lot of different, not just in policing, but I think particularly in policing, we're seeing a lot of, not only do you have a new generation of people coming in that have learned differently. It's not, not even their fault. They're just so different because information is instantaneous and that's how they learn things. Or the reason why they don't learn things, because they can always refer back and get it whenever they need it. Right.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: Yeah. It's going to change everything.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And then you go into a profession where, you know, everything is easily accessed. Once again, you're not having to do a lot of the gumshoe work and go around and knock on doors like you used to because you can pull up information that's readily available and it just changes the way things work when, in essence, a lot of the work is still important to do, the gumshoe style investigatory work who seems to be kind of missing in a lot of police departments. Do you see any of that in your students? And I don't need to call your students out, but I just mean generationally, do you feel like whether it's AI or just the generation that's coming through, is there a difference in the way they approach police work or there's a.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: Difference in the way they approach everything, learning school, how they, you know, how they think about professional, you know, what a profession looks like for them.
We've already talked about the declining number of them who want to be police officers, but students today, and I've been doing this for 30 years, I got some perspective, I think, and in a number of universities, I've taught at a different bunch of different universities, they're much better at some things than kids 25 years ago were. I mean, they can multitask and they can take in information and they can find stuff in using the tools that we all have available to us now in impressive ways. By the same token, they've got attention spans that are about that big.
They can't read much more than a text message and keep focused on it. If you give them, you know, a heavy book, heavy book or even a, you know, a journal article and say, hey, read 30 pages of hard stuff, they, they struggle. They really struggle to do that.
And I, you know, I think that's, they're digital natives. They've grown up with a device in their hand, and there's good and bad things about that.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: Are there ways around the reading part? Because that seems like there could be a real big loss there a big gap in that? Is there ways that you make accommodations for things like that that you would normally assign 20 years ago?
[00:17:12] Speaker A: Yes. You know, and I, you know, I, I don't want to sound like the old, you know, curmudgeonly, professor, you know, but we're both. Have we watered things down? Yeah, we have in some ways. I mean, compared to the, and again, it's, it's not an apples to apples thing. Like, do I assign a less reading and less sort of heavy academic reading, even at the graduate level, than I used to? Yes, I do. And I, every one of my colleagues do, too, by the same token. So that's the kind of the downside. And are we losing something generationally? Yeah, I think we are. You know, by the same token, they do have the ability to navigate multiple information streams at the same time and, and make sense of them pretty quickly.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: So you think in terms of the end game, they can still be competent and successful?
[00:18:09] Speaker A: Absolutely. I think that you see this, you talk to people who train young cops in police academies and so forth, and they'll tell you the same thing about the new recruit coming into the field today is different than 20 years ago or even ten years ago. You know, good and bad, you know, they're less, you know, they've spent much of their lives playing video games, not playing pickup baseball or football outside, you know, so their ability to do cop stuff that you still have to do, you know, you still have to shoot, you still have to be able to drive, you still have to be able to wrestle and fight with people sometimes.
Many of them even are not very good at it, you know, because they haven't grown up that way.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, it's super interesting to me to see how that's transitioning. And a lot of it, a lot of the onus of responsibility is on us, too, to understand how to allow that change to happen, because it's happening.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: It's happening.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: So you can be the old crookedy man, like you said, and say, this is the way we do it, damn it. And you're going to read this, you know, 700 page book or you figure out other ways to make accommodations so that we can help people be successful.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: That's right. And I think you have to do that, you know, like, you know, to just draw on the line, line in the sand and say, well, you know, you have to do it the way that I did it 25 or 30 years ago. You know, that's, that's not helpful. It's not helpful to them.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: And in retrospect, we only make it sound like it was easy for us to. It was also a pain in the ass to read a bunch of stuff back then.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: I think it was more natural because we had to do it often, but it didn't make it any easier. But it's so necessary.
So I'm curious now to talk about how you ended up getting into this program, the hotspot program, from. Just lead me into it a little bit. So you got your PhD. You started being an educator at different universities. Kind of tell me a little bit of the history there that led up to this paper.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: Well, I've always been a police, you know, researcher. From the day I finished my PhD, that was my own research focus is, you know, I was. Because I was a police officer, that's what I was interested in, and that's, you know, what I knew and my background would help me, would help open doors for me with police agencies. Right.
And that's all that's hard to do, you know, to get a. To get a police department to let you in the door as a researcher and say, here, you know, here's our data, or here, you know, you know, that's. That's. For many, to this day, for many police organizations, that's a scary thing, and they've been burned and.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. And so maybe that's a plus for the AI thing, where we're learning how to deal with things on a statistical level now more so than 25 years ago also.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: Yeah. The field is certainly developed analytically in terms of the use of data and analytics to drive decision making, 100%. But it still takes people like me who have an interest in that or some expertise in that to help police departments navigate that. At least I would argue that it's helpful to partner with. With researchers to do that, but a lot for that. That's a scary thing for a lot of police departments. So the fact that I was a police officer helped me get in the door, and I did a lot. I've done a lot of research projects, applied research projects, meaning the outcome of that. Of these. Of these partnerships is not, you know, to produce some academic treatise that no one will read, but to actually produce something valuable or useful that the agency can make use of in doing its every day work and hopefully, you know, be. Be better, be more effective, be more efficient. That's, you know, so, you know, that's the work that I have done over the course of my career. The engagement, the recent engagement in violent crime reduction strategies really came about through my relationship with. With Eddie Garcia.
I knew Eddie when he was chief in San Jose, California, before he became chief in Dallas.
We had done a. I did. We had done a big research project for the city of San Jose and San Jose PD. Interesting.
So when he retired from San Jose, he called me, it was about four years ago, about this time, and said, hey, hey, Mike, I put in for the Dallas police chief job, which surprised me because he always told me that he would never wear another police uniform once he retired from San Jose and he was going to go coach football.
Things change, right?
[00:23:11] Speaker B: Yeah, they do.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: So he called me and said, hey, I'm putting in for the Dallas job. Would you help me think about a strategic plan to reduce violent crime in Dallas? Because the next job of whoever the new Dallas police chief is, is going.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: To be that have their work cut out.
[00:23:27] Speaker A: And so, you know, I said, absolutely. You know, love to, love to do that. So.
So that's how the conversation started.
Originally, I drew upon evidence. This is what I do. I've done for 30 years. I know the research literature. I've done a lot of it myself.
We have a pretty good idea, actually, today of what works and what doesn't work to control violent crime much more than we did 30 years ago.
And so, you know, I just cherry picked from that, from that evidence.
And we put together, initially it was a PowerPoint, you know, series of PowerPoint slides that Eddie Garcia used in his interviews for the Dallas police chief job. Now, I don't take credit for the fact that he got the job. I don't. Let me say that up front.
If you know Eddie, you know why he got the job. But that is how it started. And, and then when he got the job, he called me back up and said, hey, I got the job, and now we have to do this.
[00:24:32] Speaker B: And so I got to implement it.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: Yeah. So that set of PowerPoints became a plan, an actual strategic plan that Dallas began to execute in May of 2021.
And they've been doing it ever since. We just did the three year report that I'll present to city council next week.
And, and it's been remarkably successful.
[00:24:57] Speaker B: It, I mean, I've watched along the way, being a Fort Worth resident, you get all the news from both those cities. And, and I've, I've seen the improvement. I don't know how the morale is among police officers over there because I know that was another struggle, too, when he came in. But I've seen a lot of the impact and a lot of the talk about the stuff that you've developed. And so it was interesting to me because when I was coming up through law enforcement, they were still leveraging the Ramsburg stuff. And when you say, hey, we have lots of crime over here, and they're just throwing more officers at it and they're doing fine legal reasons to make stops and aggressively fight the dope and the guns and the whatever. But it seemed somewhat random. And then when you have poor communities with high crime, you end up also having a profiling issue. So that's. That's where it ended up really biting everybody in the butt, I felt like. So can you talk a little bit? Did you run into any of those issues during your research or anything? I know you said you were a racial profiling expert as well and things like that. That's super interesting to me to figure out. How do you reduce crime amongst a lot of those communities where there's a lot of disdain, yet still make a positive impact to where ultimately they're appreciative of how you do that?
[00:26:25] Speaker A: Yeah. And so that's what we've learned how to do better in the last 30 years. Right. And when you were on the street, certainly when I was on the street, you know, you dealt with crime problems in poor neighborhoods by flooding the zone with a bunch of cops. You know, we call those crackdowns. And crackdowns work like, you put a bunch of police officers in a small area and you tell them to stop everything that moves, they'll stop everything that moves and crime will go down. Right, right.
And there will be unintended consequences as a result of that, of course, in the community.
And you can't sustain those efforts. Even if you're willing to tolerate that, you can't sustain those efforts for very long. It's. They're too resource intensive.
And so inevitably, the crackdown will end after 30 days. That group officers will go somewhere else and chase another set of problems and the problems will come right back.
And so what we've learned is you can actually control violent crime strategically with a light footprint approach that is evidence based.
It doesn't rely on crackdowns, it doesn't rely on stop and frisk.
It relies on police visibility in the right places, doing the right things and targeting the right people.
Because what we've learned over the last 30 or 40 years is that violent crime is highly concentrated in a relatively few number of places.
And I'll give you an example of that. In Dallas, we use a grid system to map crime and to respond to crime.
300 grids of 330ft by 330ft. So basically a football field on either side, right?
There's 101,103 of those. In the city of Dallas, we treat with our hotspot treatment, we treat about 40 of them every 60 days.
You can do the math on that. But it's 0.005% of the land area of Dallas is being treated in any given 60 day period, and only about 1.5%. Well, put it another way, 93% of the land area of Dallas produces no violent street crime.
So all of the violent street crime in Dallas, and this is true of any big urban area, is accounted for by about 5% of the land area.
And so when you know that, you know that you don't have to be everywhere all the time, you only really, if violent crime reduction is your goal, you only need to be in that 5% of the grids that are producing violent crime, and you need to be there when violent crime is most likely to happen.
We know that because we map crime down not to the. Not just to the geographic location, to those grids, but also temporarily. So by the time of the day and the day of the week.
[00:29:39] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: And so having that.
That evidence base, you can put police officers there where they need to be at the times they need to be there, just to be visible. And that's. That's what most of the Dallas. The hotspot portion of the Dallas crime plan is. Police officers sitting in lighted patrol cars, like every emergency light of that vehicle turned on for 15 minutes during a peak crime hour, during a peak crime day.
They get out of the car, they walk around, they talk to people. They don't jack people. They don't. I mean, they will if they have to, but that's not the goal of. The goal is to interact with the community and to gather information and intelligence while they're there for that 15 minutes. Then they get back in their car, they turn the lights off, and they go back in service.
And then that happens. Repeat, repeat, repeat for 60 days, in about 30 or 40 places in Dallas during any 60 day period.
And we know that that will drive violence, because we've got years and years of evidence now that will drive violent crime down between 30 and 40% in those treated areas during that 60 day period. And that that reduction will persist for about 30 days after the police leave.
[00:31:03] Speaker B: Okay, my next question was, you know, there are plenty of dumb criminals, but a lot of them are smart enough to know there's been businesses out there that can't afford, for instance, to have full time police presence or whatever. So they contract with them to swing through every 4 hours and this and that, and every criminal there knows when they're coming and when they're gone.
[00:31:24] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:31:25] Speaker B: And then they act accordingly. How. How do you handle that scenario, knowing that a lot of this is preventative and a simple solution, and oftentimes, if not all the time, the best solution is always the obvious, like, why didn't I think of that? Which I think is brilliant.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: Well, so there's a couple things.
You know, crime will. Will go down dramatically while the police are there. During that 60 day treatment period, it will go back up in about 60 days after they leave, between 30 and 60 days. But in that 90 day window during treatment and 30 days afterwards, you've now reduced violent crime by 30 or 40% in the very places that produce the.
[00:32:08] Speaker B: Most of it, do they ever just move over to commit crimes?
[00:32:13] Speaker A: So we call that displacement. And there's tons of evidence about displacement, and that evidence overwhelmingly shows that no crime doesn't just move around the corner or two blocks over.
And there's a reason, there's theoretically a reason why that is.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: So they're familiar with the places that they.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: You know, the reason that places are violent and some places, many places are not is because you have a combination of factors that come together in time and space, in particular places that make them criminogenic. Okay, so crime is. And if you know that, you know that crime is just not going to just move around the corner, because that place doesn't have that same combination of factors that makes it conducive to crime. So we measure displacement every 60 days. Not only do we measure what's happening in our treatment grids, but we build out a catchment area, about basically 1000 foot buffer, around every treated grid where we look for displacement.
We rarely see displacement. In fact, what we see is, it's called the opposite of that, diffusion of benefits, where the area around the treated hotspot benefits from the treatment as well, not to the same degree. So crime goes down seven to 10% in the area around those. Around those treated hotspots, but it doesn't go up.
[00:33:39] Speaker B: Interesting.
Do you tackle any other part one crimes, the thefts, burglaries, stuff like that, that aren't necessarily personal assaults.
[00:33:48] Speaker A: So our plan is a violent crime reduction strategy.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: It makes the most sense, I mean.
[00:33:54] Speaker A: Designed around the evidence for how to. How to deal with violent crime. Your question, though, is a really good one. In fact, we're in the middle of writing a paper right now to see whether or not the violent crime reduction treatments that we've been implementing in Dallas and in other cities, do they have a tertiary impact on property crime or other kinds of crime?
I don't know the answer to that yet, because we're not finished with the analysis, but I'll get back to you and I'll let you know tonight. I hope. I hope we find that it has an effect. That would be really cool.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And I know that when you talk about the intersection of events, a lot of us know what the intersection of events are when it comes to, you know, getting your car stolen or getting, you know, getting your house broken into, depending on where you live and where those common things are. And it seems a little more obvious, but also a lot more rampant, because now you're dealing with a crime that's probably a lot more widespread. And I know a lot of departments really get dinged for thefts. Thefts. And.
[00:34:59] Speaker A: Absolutely, it's a. It's a, you know, the public doesn't like it when their cars are getting broken into or getting stolen. You know, it has. You know, there are certainly, you could. You could conceptualize how a strategy like we've been implementing in Dallas could impact property crime. I mean, makes sense. Um, you know, our analysis is going to show whether or not that's true or not.
[00:35:24] Speaker B: General deterrence is always great. I mean, that's. But when you're talking about Dallas in particular, where there's a shortage of officers, there's only so much you can do. So if you have a lot of wider grid, I'd really be interested to see, you know, we do. We do this when we do vulnerability assessments and stuff, too, and teach people what they can do, you know, whether it be poor lighting or I, you know, porous ingress, egress every which way and restricting all that. I mean, there's a lot of different things you get stuck with citywide that could be cost prohibitive, but for a police department, might be something really advantageous. I'd be really curious to know what.
[00:35:58] Speaker A: You find so that. That crime prevention through environmental design, which is what you just said, in a different way.
[00:36:04] Speaker B: The dumber version of it.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: Yep. There's a. There's. Well, no, just in a different way. There's. There's a whole. There's a whole bunch of research on it as well. And I. We use those strategies in part in conjunction with the hotspot stuff that we've been talking about as part of our overall strategic plan to reduce violent crime in Dallas. So we do a lot of that stuff. And in Dallas, like in a lot of cities, you know, our violent crime tends to be concentrated in apartment complexes, low income apartment complexes, and so that are very amenable, actually, to septed crime prevention through environmental design. Strategies. You know, where people who know how to do this, like you go in and say, yes, you, you know, you've got lighting problems here. You have, you know, you can't see here in this area because.
Because you've got overgrown trees or bushes or. Or other things that block visual sight lines. You know, you've got ingress and egress problems. And here are the things you can do environmentally that will help reduce the likelihood of crime.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: And the biggest thing that I run into is it's always cost prohibitive because they're section eight housing, whatever, so their cost is low. Even if they have security, they're paying the lowest possible rate and got these.
[00:37:22] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:37:23] Speaker B: You know, $11 an hour, people walking.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: Around, some of whom are compromised.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Getting paid that little and putting down a single person in an environment like that, too, and expect them to be able to deter or engage even worse with that.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: No, you're exactly right.
And we work in those kind of communities, and we have those same kind of challenges dealing with absentee landlords who own hundreds of these properties across the country, and they live nowhere near in Texas.
They have zero incentive to spend money on them.
And it's a challenge. You know, the city obviously has legal tools that it can eventually bring to bear on stuff like that, you know, nuisance abatement lawsuits and things. And Dallas uses that. Lots of cities use those.
There's increasing evidence that you have to. You really kind of have to use those tools in order to move the needle on some of the, some of these problem properties.
[00:38:20] Speaker B: I would agree. And, you know, it's usually the police departments that get, you know, hit upside the head over it, even though it's not necessarily anything that they could possibly do with the limited amount of resources and people that they have.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:38:33] Speaker B: But I know they're still the ones that are accountable to it.
[00:38:36] Speaker A: So, you know, part of what we do, our midterm strategy, and Dallas is to bring together an interdisciplinary team across government to deal with those kinds of problems. So it's not just the police, the city attorney is there, code enforcement there, animal control, parks and recreation, they're all on the team, and they're designing comprehensive strategies to deal with the problems that are identified through a lot of data analysis.
So it's not just the police. In fact, in many cases, the police are a relatively small part of what the solution is going to be.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: I agree. Yeah. And that was the irony of the fact that they're the ones that are most accountable because they're crime prevention.
[00:39:26] Speaker A: It's crime, and everyone thinks that. Well, that's the job of the police.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. And like I said in that the lowest economic suffrage is the problem, because they just, they can't afford. They can't even afford to hire me to come in and do the assessment, let alone have me give them a document full of things that they need to change and then have the money to do that.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:39:48] Speaker B: It's a, it's kind of a catch 22. But that's an interesting way to do, is bring in city entities that can come, parks and rec, and come and use that expenditure to cut away some of that stuff, even under private property or whatever. I don't know how that would work between private and city, but.
[00:40:03] Speaker A: Well, you have to have a willing partner. Right.
And some, in our experience, some. Some properties are more willing. Others, the ones that are the most willing have the best success.
Yeah. Our number one crime grid in Dallas when we started three and a half years ago was an Oak Cliff apartment complex that has been the epicenter of violence in Dallas for you talk to cops that have been there 30 years, they'll tell you, oh, yeah, that's been our worst problem in Dallas since I got here 30 years ago. Yeah, that's where we went first with the strategy that we're talking about, and that now is off of our hotspot list.
[00:40:44] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:40:44] Speaker A: And the crime reduction has been remarkable there, but in no small part it's been remarkable, because the city sued the owners, forced the owners to do things on the property that they would otherwise not have done. They hired a competent management team. Who cares? Um, and it's really, those are the key factors, you know, I think so, too.
[00:41:11] Speaker B: When you talk about cooperating partners, I've. I've experienced that too in Fort Worth as well. When you have an issue or a high profile crime, and all of a sudden, you know, they're, they're demanding an abatement or whatever, and that, and the ownership is the saying, you know, what do we need to do? You know, at that point, if they're facing an abatement or something like that, then that's much worse than the expenditure to get the thing turned around.
[00:41:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
So it's key, though, the partnership and the willingness of the owners and the management to work with the city in partnership is vital.
[00:41:47] Speaker B: So you also have some experience in use of force and racial profiling and stuff. Those were. Use of force has always been a huge issue in the forefront, and racial profiling has always been very interesting. And I know when I was still working, that was, it was a hot topic as well. But what were your findings and what inspired you to get into that? And what did you end up finding about racial profiling? That might be interesting.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: I got involved in that line of research literally at the very beginning in the late nineties and right around the 2000, when racial profiling kind of entered the national conversation, you know, first started to appear in the media and, you know, what is this thing?
And so I did one of the, one of the first racial profiling studies in the country in Richmond, Virginia, when I was a brand new assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, because I had been a Richmond cop and they knew me and they reached out to me and they had a kind of progressive chief at the time. And he said, you know, I've been reading about this stuff and, you know, I want to get ahead of it, and, you know, can you help us figure out, you know, is this happening in our city? You know, and so there was no roadmap in those days. Like, no one had done that, really, that research, you know, there was no methodology to really draw upon. It was, it was figuring it out.
[00:43:22] Speaker B: And so, and even implementing some of those processes seemed like pushing your luck a little bit, too. All of a sudden, you're filling out the race of someone that you're stopping, and, and already you're, you're coming into question as to why you're doing this, even though it's unknowably right.
[00:43:39] Speaker A: Absolutely. Especially in those days, because no one was doing that, you know, and, and, yeah, the police. The cops were not happy about it. Anyway, we did that study. I published a paper that I. It's the first 1st peer reviewed paper, to my knowledge, that's ever been written on racial profiling.
And it gets cited all the time just because it's the first one.
[00:43:59] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:44:00] Speaker A: But anyway, that led to like, ten years of. That's all I did for ten years. You know, departments calling. You know, I worked for the justice department as a, as a consultant for a while on, on both sides of consent. I've been on both sides of consent decrees. Most of the work that I've done has been for police departments, helping them understand the trends in their own data, identify whether there are unexplained disparities and if there are, giving them some advice on how you can go about eliminating or at least reducing those disparities. So I've done just dozens of those kinds of projects.
[00:44:38] Speaker B: What are some of the things that you've had to tell police departments without calling them out. Is it retraining?
[00:44:44] Speaker A: Some of it is retraining. Some of it is raising awareness. Some of it is. You got to change your tactics, guys. Like, to the point we were just talking about earlier, if you got a high crime neighborhood, the chances are that that's going to be a minority neighborhood.
That's the unfortunate reality of the structure of our society.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: Socioeconomic.
[00:45:09] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. It's socioeconomic. The two are linked, though, right now. And so, um, if you're, if you're. If you're the strategy you've always used, because that's what, you know, is, well, we're just going to send a bunch of cops in there. We're going to tell them to stop everybody. Um, and that's what police do.
[00:45:28] Speaker B: Right.
[00:45:28] Speaker A: Um, historically, it works and has all sorts of unintended consequences that are bad.
[00:45:33] Speaker B: That being one.
[00:45:34] Speaker A: That being one. Um, you're.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: You're targeting a bunch of people that, of course, they're mostly black or hispanic if that makes the 85% of the populace. Right.
[00:45:44] Speaker A: So. So some of the advice sometimes is you have to stop doing that.
[00:45:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:49] Speaker A: You know, there are other ways. Look at the Dallas crime plan. There are other ways to accomplish the same goal without doing that, you know?
[00:45:57] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. Has there been any pushback from communities that where even with you implementing this, that don't understand the premise behind it? I've, I've done a lot of work in communities where, you know, even my undercover work was predicated upon salvaging a neighborhood of people who are not criminals from the few that were and were holding them hostage. But it's not always easy these days to just come in with a police having a new plan and implementing it and having this presence there, that necessarily means it's acceptable because there's still kind of an aversion to whether or not there's going to be a trustworthy, you know, solution to what their problems are. Do you get any pushback or is the chief up there got any pushback?
[00:46:41] Speaker A: So it's a great question, and I'll be real upfront and say we have not directly measured as part of our evaluation of what the Dallas Police Department and other cities work and have been doing, we have not directly measured community sentiment around the strategy for a number of. Not because we don't think it's important. It's actually very important.
It's also really hard to do, and it takes a lot of money.
We're not funded to do that, and.
[00:47:15] Speaker B: You probably would need it to run for a little time, too, before you start measuring the sentiment.
[00:47:20] Speaker A: Well, ideally, what you want to do is you'd want to measure the sentiment before the strategy went into a place, put it into effect, and then measure it again six months or a year later. We haven't done that empirically. So what I'm about to say is that's the caveat.
Now, anecdotally, I've been in lots of community meetings.
I've talked to lots of Dallas police officers. I've talked to lots of community activists and others in Dallas who will tell you that, no, largely the answer to your question is no. There's not been pushback. In fact, it's been just the opposite of communities are very appreciative that crime is going down, that it's not as dangerous in their communities as it used to be. And Chief Garcia will tell you, and I've heard him say it many times, he's never been in a community of color. That said, we want fewer cops.
They want more cops. They don't want to be abused by the police.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: Right. The good people want to see more.
[00:48:24] Speaker A: Cops, but they want more police, not fewer than.
[00:48:28] Speaker B: Right. Interesting. That is interesting because, again, the loudest voice is always the one you hear, so. Same with the extremists. Everything we have in this new culture, you're just going to hear the crazies talk because everybody else is so sick of screaming. Yeah, I find that very interesting.
So with all this in place, and I find this fantastic, I appreciate your explanation of this because, you know, the first that I hear of it sounds a lot similar to the crash type scenario or a community policing thing. I assume that you're working within a community policing structure of some sort, since you're trying to collect some kind of intel from the. From the neighborhood, or is that just a separate deal?
[00:49:15] Speaker A: So, you know, community policing is a very amorphous concept. You know, what is that?
If you asked 100 people, what is community policing? You've asked 100 cops or 100 experts, you'd get 100 different answers.
Part of the problem with community policing is it's ill defined. It was always ill defined.
It was the watchword. It was the mantra. Back in the nineties, the federal government threw a ton of money at it.
There was all kinds of efforts to measure community policing. Super hard to do, because what is it, let alone how do you measure? Does it. What it work? Well, what is it like? So, no, we don't. You know, we're not. We don't claim to be implementing community policing strategies. Okay. We implement evidence based crime reduction strategies.
[00:50:10] Speaker B: And that's fair. Yeah. And I've never been a. I understand the premise behind wanting to do that, but I haven't seen it really be super effective in very many cases. Really, it just depends on the officers. But I don't think.
[00:50:23] Speaker A: Now, now, to the extent that.
Do you want to implement crime control strategies that don't alienate your community? Absolutely. You know, do you need community intelligence and information to do the evidence based things effectively? Absolutely. So to the extent that you. That DPD is in these communities, in these challenges, communities with their bike teams, you know, with our CRT teams, and they are. They are interacting with the community in. In non threatening ways to get intelligence and information from them that will allow them to help make their community safer. If that's community policing, then that's going on every day. Yes.
[00:51:05] Speaker B: Maybe it's just a broad term I used, and I know that it to be broad as well, because, again, it's just.
It just seems like people go there to retire anymore anyway, whether it be a school initiative or, you know, an NPO somewhere where they just are a liaison to the neighborhood and they have an occasional meeting. And it doesn't seem to be anything really insightful. But I. Again, I'm not the one that implemented it. That's just a humble opinion from somebody's been out of the game for a while, too.
[00:51:36] Speaker A: Well, you know, one of the things that, that. That we use resource that DPD uses extensively are their bike teams. And their bike teams are assigned to our hotspots, the kind of the worst of the worst hotspots. And they're in them all the time, and they're. It's not at all like a NYPD style stop and frisk. You know, they're there primarily to gather information, and that's how they're. That's. That's what they're told to do. And now, that's not to say that they don't do police work and they don't arrest people that do stuff in front of them, because they do. Yeah, but that's really not their. That's not why they're primarily there. And they don't really see their role as they're probably. They know what they're supposed to be doing and they do a really good job with it, you know, and they get a lot of. Of kudos from the community for the work that they do, and they gather a lot of useful information.
[00:52:22] Speaker B: Well, that's good. I mean, I think that was something lacking in the old days, too, was just being relational in general, just walking up and having conversations. Instead of stop and frisk, you're just stopping chatting, getting to know people. You collect the best intel that way because you have a rapport. People learn to trust you. You're authentic, you know? So I think that. I think we're missing a lot of that, too, which is why I'm a little bit concerned about the lack of folks that want to be there. It just seems like things could get worse before they get better in terms of recruiting, because they're just having so fewer people that, you know, graduate college and want to take on a police job.
[00:52:58] Speaker A: I'll offer something that may. May make you feel a little bit better.
[00:53:02] Speaker B: Please.
[00:53:03] Speaker A: Although I see fewer students wanting. Wanting to be police officers, the ones that still want to do that are much more motivated now around wanting to help people and wanting to help communities than they were when I was a young guy coming up, I was more motivated about, you know, let me go chase bad guys and lock people up. Yeah, that's a good point. So the people who want to be police officers, I think, are motivated differently than they used to be, and I think that's a positive thing.
[00:53:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Millennials do. The social impact is important to them. That's right. Yeah. I mean, if the things that I've gleaned or correct, and that's a great point, that's a perfect motivation to go into police work if you really want to improve the community, as long as they teach you to be empathetic and relational.
[00:53:59] Speaker A: And I think the good police departments have figured that out. Right. And, you know, the kinds of training that the men and women get today is much different and much better in some ways than the kind of training that you and I probably got.
[00:54:15] Speaker B: Probably.
Well, what is your next project? Anything you're working on now that you want to share? That's. I mean, I kind of forced you to get into some of the stuff that you haven't completed yet, but what else are you working on?
[00:54:27] Speaker A: Well, so one of my earlier streams of research that I was involved in is use of force. I've done a lot of that over the years, and that's sort of come back around in recent years, obviously, with Ferguson and George Floyd and these sort of horrific, high profile events that have raised that awareness and concern about the abuse of force by the police. So the city of Chicago is under a consent decree right now to reform, and a big component of that is use of force and the perceptions that the force had been used in discriminatory ways in Chicago.
That's a big chunk of what the consent decree is about. So I was hired, contracted by the city of Chicago, the Chicago police Department, about nine months ago to do the analysis for the Chicago police Department that's required under consent decree, and then to report out to the monitor and to the court with respect to our findings. So Chicago's second largest police department in the country, they've got lots of use of force cases, and we're doing that analysis for the city of Chicago.
[00:56:03] Speaker B: Do you find it a lot easier now that you have footage? I mean, doing this before body cams and dash cams must have been. I mean, you're having to take a report that was written by an officer as evidentiary and try to glean stuff from that and statements and everything. Do you find it easier or more?
[00:56:21] Speaker A: Again, I'll probably surprise you, what I'm about to say. We still use data. The vast majority of what we analyze is the use of force data that's collected by the police officer on the scene.
One of the, going back to our discussion a minute ago about AI, one of the things that, one of the promises of AI is that we can begin to harness it to analyze, to mine the terabytes of data, body worn camera data, that are out there in the cloud, that right now are just sitting out there in the cloud, and no one ever looks at it. And the reason that no one ever looks at those is because it's enormously time consuming to do that. And you can't do it at scale. You can only do it when there's a complaint. Well, then it can pull your body worm camera footage and I can look at it. Right. But you can't do it at scale. There's no.
Well, now tools are just now beginning to emerge that will allow for the analysis of body worn camera footage at scale.
[00:57:30] Speaker B: Interesting to do kind of spot checks.
[00:57:32] Speaker A: And so it will be much more than spot checks in the near future.
[00:57:37] Speaker B: It'll be complete.
[00:57:39] Speaker A: I think it will. We will get there eventually, wherever, where you will have algorithms that are run by machines that will, that will, that will scrub every body worn camera recording for a series of cues and then collect those or pull those out, if you will, and say, here's the ones that the algorithm has flagged as potentially problematic, then a person can look at human beings should go look at them, or, and, and, or here's the social interaction cues that we can measure, that go on between people that produce good outcomes versus bad outcomes. And then how do we learn from those good outcomes? And then how do we train the next generation of police officers to replicate those instead of the bad man, it's.
[00:58:29] Speaker B: Such a different culture now. I mean, just all that stuff being recorded and analyzed and gone over. And it just seems like you're working in a call center trying to sell stuff, and they're refining your sales techniques almost. But you're doing, you know, life and death work out there. Sometimes it's righteous and it's necessary, but it just is a complete change around from, you know, going off and doing your own thing, knowing that, you know, I know great officers and I know really bad officers also. So I know why it's necessary, but it just seems.
It seems like just a different experience altogether with everything being analyzed, even. Even what should be just a one off stop, took care of an issue, somebody left the house, and no big deal. Now is going to get analyzed and come back around, which. Interesting. Very interesting.
[00:59:24] Speaker A: Did you hear about the shooting overnight in Dallas? The three police officers, one was killed.
[00:59:29] Speaker B: Yeah, one was killed in. Is sitting in the car still. Right.
[00:59:32] Speaker A: Um, so I was texting with. Text texting with, you know, if we've got, you know, we've been working so closely with Dallas for so long now that we're. We're obviously, we have this research, professional research partnership. But I'm, you know, we're now friends. Like I'm. And I have many personal friends in the Dallas police Department. Yeah. And so I was text messaging them about, you know, about the events of last night, and I got a text back from a major who worked closely with our team, with my team on the Dallas violent crime reduction team. He's since been reassigned now to a different role. But the point is, he texted me this morning and in this. In this text exchange, and he said, hey, I just wanted to, you know, you know, I've been reassigned, but I just wanted to. To thank you for the opportunity to work for the last two and a half years in this, basically a new paradigm. And, you know, I just want to tell you, it's opened my eyes to a completely different way of thinking about this job.
And, you know, it's been the best assignment of my career.
[01:00:40] Speaker B: Wow.
[01:00:41] Speaker A: And this is from a guy who's been on the job 20 years, you know, not some, like, you know.
[01:00:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:00:48] Speaker A: Starry eyed rookie, you know.
[01:00:49] Speaker B: Yeah. That's an amazing thing for you to hear, I'm sure. Well, it's going that way regardless. But, I mean, you're you're. You're controlling a lot of that.
[01:00:59] Speaker A: Well, what you know, and I tell you that story not to. Not to pat ourselves on the back, but just as an example of what you just said, like, the world is changing, you know, the world of police work is changing. How we use data and analytics to drive what we do is very much changing.
And even the old guard, even guys like that, if they have the right attitude, and he certainly does, are finding value in it.
[01:01:27] Speaker B: Right. You have to or leave because it's going that direction just to find the value in it. And that's another check mark for millennials, too, who are kind of used to that whole situation going on. Everything's digital and on video and everything else. That's, you know, people like me that grew up, you know, without email.
[01:01:44] Speaker A: Correct.
[01:01:45] Speaker B: Are, you know, shocked by some of this stuff, you know, so I think that's another plus. Well, I really appreciate your time. I know it's valuable, and it means a lot that you drove across town here, meet, and I just want to thank you for coming out here and spending time with me.
[01:01:58] Speaker A: It's my pleasure. I love to talk about this stuff.
It's always a pleasure. And, you know, especially, you know, with your background, I knew you would get it, so I appreciate you reaching out.
[01:02:11] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. We'll spread the word.
[01:02:12] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:02:13] Speaker B: All right, brother.
[01:02:13] Speaker A: I look forward to it.
[01:02:15] Speaker B: What's it take? What you gonna do? What you gonna do? Success around the sandbox the second great rules.
A confident thing to make you do make you do what they want, what.
[01:02:32] Speaker A: They want.
[01:02:36] Speaker B: A diplomatic baby, see it through don't let those figures take you off your game adjust a, let em lose just sit here in the front seat baby, ain't that sweet? Take a little honey from the money bee but don't pay the fool magical potion I'm missing piece at the end of the game a soul roll see the truth of soul motion never found a 63 like fire finding more shine a truth lies between blurry line if you gonna call on me now.
