How Could Cook County’s Experience Apply to the New York City Jails

Errol Louis: I'm going to be speaking and we'll talk in this order with Gladys Carrion, former commissioner of the New York City Administration for Children's Services and a senior fellow at the Columbia Justice Lab. Zachary Carter is with us, former New York City Corporation counsel, former US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, chairman of the Board of the Legal Aid Society. He's had some other titles too that are going to come into play here. Michael Jacobson is here. He is the executive director of the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance and a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. He more importantly is the former commissioner of the City Departments of Correction and Probation.

And Stanley Richards is here, deputy CEO of the Fortune Society. Until recently, he was the first deputy commissioner of the Department of Correction and a former vice chair of the New York City Board of Correction. I count each of them as friends. I'm glad that they're here to join me. For those of you I have not met, my name's Errol Louis and I am the political anchor at Spectrum News New York 1, the local 24-hour news channel here. I also write a column for New York Magazine and have been talking about and reporting on these issues for a long, long time. Really glad to have all of you together. This will save me a little time since I would've tried to hunt you down one at a time. And Gladys, I want to start with you in part because as a former commissioner of the administration for Children's Services, they happen to handle juvenile detentions in New York City so that the Chicago experience in some ways is almost directly on point.

This is an almost forgotten chapter of New York's recent government history, but the State Office of Children and Family Services during your tenure actually ordered an independent monitor to be put in place to review agency operations, make recommendations for improvements. It came and went so quickly that we in the news media, I think, barely noticed it, but my understanding is that you welcome and helped shape and used it proactively to make sure that the monitor could "order" you to do some things that perhaps as administrator you wanted to do all along. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience?

Gladys Carrión: Sure. It was a little bit different from appointing an administrator as they did in Cook County, but what was really interesting was that it was the Department of Justice and the same fact pattern, the same conditions that existed in Cook County existed in the New York State juvenile justice system. When I became commissioner, I inherited a totally dysfunctional system that was causing a lot of harm to young people in a very large, expensive system and that was very resistant to change. I became the commissioner in 2007 and shortly thereafter, I received a letter from the United States Department of Justice saying that they were going to launch an investigation in four of the facilities around the conditions of confinement, around alleged sexual misconduct, lack of mental health supports in four facilities.

And prior to receiving that letter, when we walked in and I put my team together rather quickly, we had already diagnosed that those were the conditions and we were going to do a major transformation and we had the support at that time of the governor who was Spitzer. And it was a year later, or more than a year later, when there was a findings letter by the Department of Justice documenting in 37 pages the unconstitutional treatment, the violation of young people's constitutional rights because of the lack of services, the lack of mental health supports, the harm that was being caused to young people, the conditions within the facilities. They didn't find any sexual misconduct, but none of that was new.

I knew all of that. We had spent time evaluating and assessing and had launched already a reform agenda and already announced that we were going to close facilities and we actually launched the task force in September of 2008. The question was, "Did this administrator/receivership provide cover?" It provided cover for us to be able to make the changes, the deep transformational changes we had to bring. And Michael was a partner because at that time he was getting Vera and we brought in Vera to help us do the work. And so by the time that that finding letter was issued, the work was underway. And so we actually, with the attorney General's office, embraced it. I recommended to the governor not to challenge that. Nobody had been successful anyway in a lawsuit challenging a potential lawsuit from the Department of Justice and said, "Wait, let's embrace this. The system needs to change. We're doing it."

And there was a transition. We then had Governor Paterson who also embraced it. We launched the task force. The task force, in about a year, issued a blueprint for change and that really served as the basis for negotiation with the Department of Justice. It was aligning it so that it worked for us as a tool to help us move the transformation much quicker than I would've been able to do without that kind of support. And the task force also rallied people, very important people. It was chaired by the then President of John Jay, Jeremy Travis. And so there were people of gravitas, judges, young people that had been system involved, parents, attorneys for the defense. We had a wide range of people there who then became vested in making sure that this change happened. And so we did essentially what Cook was talking about in a much shorter period of time, and we got out of the consent decree.

We also picked the monitors jointly. We were able to negotiate and develop a very good working relationship and use that consent decree really as one more tool to help shape and drive change. And so I didn't see it as adversarial. My general counsel was an equal partner with the state attorney general's office in negotiating and shaping, and I think that there was credibility in the fact that we'd already launched and we're very clear about change had to happen, and in four to five years we were out. In fact, first three years, we were out in one facility. We were closing facilities. If you remember Errol, it was very controversial. I closed over 12 facilities at the state while we were doing that. Unfortunately, the union was never a partner, but despite that, we had developed the support, capital, people understanding that change was important and that we could do it in New York, and we did do it.

We reduced the footprint tremendously. Very few young people are being incarcerated at the state from New York City. I would say often we were exporting young people from New York City to really populate the state system. And so that led to other reforms close to home. We created the conditions for the changes moving forward and the next iteration of change. So lawsuits, we had monitors that were appointed by the federal court. We did the selection and partnership. They guided us. We worked together and it wasn't all roses. We had some bumps along the road, but we all had the same vision. It was a shared vision, same commitment to really reduce the harm, create more humane conditions, and reduce the number of young people coming into the system. So it worked for us.

EL: And Gladys, how much of this was, I guess, serendipity politically speaking? Meaning you were a relatively new administration when the Spitzer folks came in and so you couldn't logically be blamed for any of the conditions that needed to be changed. Did that play a role in it?

GC: It sure did. I mean, it really gave us the space to say, "This is what we found. We're not responsible for creating these conditions that existed a long time. There's resistance to change, but we're committed to change." And I have to say that I served under three governors and they were all committed to the change. All of them, Cuomo, Paterson, and Spitzer, all embraced this and realized that it was untenable to continue to treat young people like that. So the fact that I came on board and announced almost immediately that we were going to move forward to change, the fact that we had the governor support, we had champions in the legislature, and we leveraged all of that. We had tremendous community support, tremendous support from the advocates who were partners, from the judges. It was really a shared vision and a shared effort. It certainly wasn't just myself and a team, and you have to learn how to share power in order to create better outcomes for young people.

EL: You mentioned that the unions were not partners, at least to your satisfaction. Did their contracts get superseded, suspended, set aside in any way? Or was this just a matter of them criticizing things that they couldn't stop?

GC: No, we didn't change any contract. It was a matter of them criticizing and trying to use their political leverage to really stop the changes we were making and we required changes in job descriptions. We did a lot of really identifying what were the skillset that we wanted just like Cook County described, and we did it through attrition, we did it closing facilities, bringing in experts, and the union attempted to stop those, but the governor supported us and we were able to make the kinds of changes that were necessary.

EL: Okay. Zach Carter, let me bring you into this. In addition to the other titles that I've mentioned, you've served as a magistrate judge in the federal system. You've been a criminal court judge. You've sort of seen this from every conceivable angle, including what the court will have to do in the event of a receivership, how they would supervise this entire process. What's your sense of whether or not New York would benefit from a receivership of the jail system and what might be some of the challenges that you would be looking for if that were to happen?

Zachary Carter: Sure. I think that in looking at how the monitorship has performed over the last several years, I think that it's hard not to come to the conclusion that Rikers would benefit from the appointment of a receiver because only a receiver can suspend laws and regulations and contracts, including the collective bargaining agreement, that interfere with the implementation of the consent decree in correcting the things that the court determined were in need of correction, particularly with respect to reducing violence at Rikers. That being said, the value of a receivership is sometimes focusing the mind of people who have been dragging their feet in the past because the threat of imposing a monitor's power and of suspending things like the collective bargaining agreement could inspire sensible people to cooperate where they have not in the past, particularly union leadership. And potent as a receivership might be, it still cannot be viewed as a panacea because if you look at the monitor's most recent report in March, he describes a level of dysfunction in multiple aspects of the operation of Rikers that cannot necessarily be solved overnight by even a potent receivership.

EL: I interviewed the president of the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association, the main union there. He seemed confident that even in the event of a receivership, the basic collective bargaining agreement will not automatically be suspended. My question is how does that process work and if somewhere down the road there were a receivership and control was returned to the city, does the collective bargain agreement suddenly spring back to life?

ZC: I think that to the extent that a receivership was actually established to be effective and to the extent that the suspension of certain aspects of the collective bargaining agreement, particularly with respect to staffing issues, to the extent that those proved to be effective, I think it would behoove the city to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement that baked into it those suspensions that were ordained by the receiver during the pendency of the receivership.

EL: Can they order the city to do that or to attempt that? Would there be litigation if the union did not agree to that?

ZC: I think that the receiver would have the authority to suspend whatever provisions of the collective bargaining agreement interfered with compliance with the requirements of the consent decree and it wouldn't require any further court action. I mean, one of the disadvantages of the monitorship is that the monitor has to run to the court every time there's an act of intentional non-compliance, whereas the receiver holds those powers personally. Now, can the union sue? I mean, anybody can sue. I think it's likely they would be unsuccessful, but lawsuits sometimes buy time and can be obstructionists in and of themselves so that it could present an issue, but not an insurmountable issue.

EL: On that question of time, how might a receivership be structured? If it's inevitable, say, for the New York City Department of Corrections, how should it be structured do you think, to avoid it continuing indefinitely or more than a decade, on and on to the future?

ZC: I guess first and foremost for me, if the receivership is actually going to set up the city for long-term success, then the goal of the receiver should be that after a period of time of Rikers performing the way it should under the receivership, there should be a transition to the city running the facility at the same level of quality that hopefully it operated under the receivership. And so in order to prepare Rikers to function independently, it seems to me that you want to preserve in the current commissioner the ultimate authority to actually run the institution with the receiver being an effective backstop. Frankly, for me, receiver frankly succeeds more to the role of a mayor than the role of the commissioner because... There probably has not been a mayor in the modern history of the Department of Corrections that has provided the kind of support that a commissioner needs when they're in a confrontation with the union.

This is a union town, and that's mostly, I would say, for the good. I mean, I've represented unions. I'm all for having organized labor so that you can improve the quality of life of workers, but in a municipal union, sometimes that zeal to improve quality of life can ignore that there's a duty to the public to run the facility in a humane and constitutional, lawful way, and that sometimes there needs to be a countervailing force. And ordinarily, you would hope that countervailing force would be a mayor that in inappropriate circumstances would tell the union, "this commissioner is my guy or a woman, and he or she is the last word on policy issues regarding the Department of Corrections and lose my telephone number. Work out whatever the issue you have that you have with the commissioner with the commissioner." And the receiver can step into that role, and to the extent that the union is not cooperative, can suspend whatever parts of the collective bargaining agreement that cripple the commissioner's ability to manage the manage his or her staff.

EL: Okay. Let me bring Michael Jacobson into this. I remember you telling me once, Michael, that when you were correction commissioner... And I think it was true for your successor, I interviewed them as well. You said you didn't expect to hear from the mayor, you didn't want to hear from the mayor, you didn't want to hear from the deputy mayor, and if you did, it was only because there was a problem. So in light of that... We've long since passed that point. But if this is inevitable or certainly an active question, how do we get through this? I mean, I know you've done some analysis of your own, of what the staffing issues are and what are the technical requirements of trying to get the institution back on track. Do we need a receiver to step in and to do what most mayors politically have either been reluctant to do or politically unable to do?

Michael Jacobson: Yeah, I mean, my own sense is I think we do and it's not just that mayors are reluctant. As a essentially lifelong government person, I'm also reluctant to say that city should invite in a receiver. I believe in home rule. That's how I've operated my whole life. So I totally understand the reluctance politically and substantively. I just think in this case, I mean, at least for me, the reason... There were a couple of reasons I sort of came to this. One is if you step back and look at some sort of historical context... As you mentioned, when I got to corrections in '96, that was the pinnacle of the system for violence.

It was just an incredibly violent system, much more than in the following two and a half decades, although not true anymore. I think the week I became the commissioner, the cover story on the cover page of New York Magazine was, "Rikers Ready to Blow." I mean, it was an incredibly overcrowded back then, violent, system. And if you look at the last 25 years, from '96 to '98 or '99, the violence actually hugely decreased by about 80% over that three year period. And then for a significant period, I'm just looking at the stats here, from fiscal '02 to fiscal '10, so for almost a decade, the violence in '96 was at a rate of 59 stabbings and slashings per thousand and stabbings and slashings are the bellwether measure of violence for any incarcerated institution. So it went from 59 per thousand, and for years and years it was down to between two and three per thousand. And then starting in about 2010 or 2011, it started this slow, but inexorable increase backup to where now in the last year, violence, the stabbings and slashings per thousand is actually significantly higher than in 96. I mean, that was unthinkable. It was 59 per thousand back then. And it went from, as I said, two and three, then up to 10, then to, 20 to 50, and for the last year it's been closure to 80. So partly it's just this over a decade of going the wrong way. I mean not just in violence, stuffing, all the things that are well known, so that's one. This is not something that's happened overnight. This is not a knock against the mayor or commissioner.

Molina seems like a sharp, intelligent guy who obviously wrote, I think, a good plan to submit to the court, but it's a structural issue because not only do you have to fix all the things we're talking about, the extreme levels of violence, the conditions, the sanitary conditions, the medical conditions, all the metrics that we all know, but the other thing that's going on in the backdrop is two other things have to happen over the next few years. All those numbers have to come down and get reversed. But also, the current city plan is we're closing Rikers in five or six years and moving into these smaller jails. So in order for that to happen, one is the current population has to be cut roughly in half, but two, by the time you move into those facilities, you have to move in with a completely different workforce than you have now. When Stanley and I were both on the Litman commission that recommended closing, and we thought about the future, we wanted these much smaller places at the house, fewer incarcerated people, but have a system based on human dignity.

And in order to do that, that involves huge recruitment issues, training issues, rethinking what the role of correction officers are, what do they do, what are their requirements. The best systems in the world train their folks for two years before they ever get into an incarcerated facility. We have to get there. So in addition to talking about all the present issues, which are huge, and I think Zach mentioned the March report by the Monitor, which was, I mean, just brutal in its imagery of what the place is like. So it's not only that you have to fix that, but you have to reimagine what corrections is going to look like in New York City, and we can't walk into those new facilities with the same organizational mindset that we have now. And that alone is just a huge amount of tough ongoing culture change, organizational change work. So when you look at both, to me, the sort of history, the recent disturbing trends, the population levels having to go down, redoing essentially the staff and discipline and supervisory nature of the place, to me, the structure of a receiver just makes sense.

And the last thing I'll say on this is, I mean, everyone says obviously this is going to take years, but the average lifespan for a commissioner is probably two to three years, and this is going to take well beyond two to three years. You have to have some continuity. You have to have someone who knows what they're doing, who has some political juice, who has the ability to work with government and the unions. So it's just hard to get around thinking that that is not the way to go, given everything that has to be done over the next seven or eight years here.

EL: Michael, I don't remember seeing, certainly not in the last report from the Federal Monitor, any even indirect reference to the plan which was approved by the city council and is the operating sort of a future of corrections to close Rikers Island and replace it with those borough-based facilities you referenced. Could this be an opportunity to... I mean, we'll ask Zach whether or not it's legally feasible, but could this be an opportunity to maybe enshrine some of those principles and move them forward in the context of a receivership?

MJ: Well, I'm assuming, maybe naively, I'm assuming that's the direction we're going in. The process continues. The designs are out, these places are starting to get built, so I'm assuming one way or another that's going to happen. As you say, you may increase the likelihood of it happening with a receiver, but I'm assuming either way, receiver or no receiver, that is the direction the city is going. The money has been allocated, the plans have been made. But as I said before, that can't happen until a number of other things happen and not the least of which is getting your population down significantly. And one more piece about that, and Jeremy Travis and Mike Rempel just wrote an editorial in the Daily News about this. When you look at Rikers, and Stanley knows this incredibly well, having just been there, a third of the people at Rikers are now there for a year or more, and a third of them are there for two years or more, and hundreds of them are there for three years or more.

I mean, that is just outrageous at so many levels. It's an abrogation of a fundamental principle of the American justice system, which is the speedy disposition of justice. It's being treated like a prison now, not a jail. People should only be there until their cases are disposed. And no case, no case, I don't care what the case is, should ever take three years or two years to dispose. And the reason that's so important is that is how you start thinking about getting the population down because no one should be there for that amount of time. But two, there's a direct relationship with people being in that place for one year, two year, three years and levels of violence. You can't keep folks in a system like that for two years and three years and not expect to have huge levels of violence, so it's all of a piece. It's not just that it's related to closing Rikers, as you said, it's related to the fundamental conditions of Rikers. But I'm assuming that that is going to happen and the city needs to do whatever it has to do to get that done.

EL: Okay. Let me bring Stanley into this. You have the perspective of somebody who, as first deputy, was running the place. On the Board of Correction, you were a monitor of the place, and long ago in the past, you were actually incarcerated at Rikers as well, so you've seen this from lots of different sides. What is your sense of whether or not the... Well, what would you say to a receivership if you were still there and they said, "Hey, we're going to have an outside federal receivership come in," based on what you heard about Chicago in particular, what would you want that person to take into account? What good could they do, do you think?

Stanley Richards: Well, I think Chicago really laid it out. There are institutional barriers that really prevent the transformation, the cultural transformation and the operational transformation of the New York City Department of Corrections. And I think our starting point is that this isn't about a failure of leadership on Commissioner Molina or failure of leadership from the mayor. This isn't a problem that they created. But we have institutional barriers that prevent the safe and humane operation of Rikers, and here's where we're at. We have a runway right now to fix and fundamentally change the kinds of barriers that are in the way right now before we get to the borough-based jails, because here's what none of us want. We don't want five borough-based Rikers Islands, and if we don't do the fundamental changes that we need to do, that's what we'll have. And here's what I mean by the fundamental changes. Some of the directives, Department of Corrections has over 200 directives that lay out the operating principle about how officers should operate and how the department should operate.

Some of those directives go back to 1996 that have not been reviewed and updated. And so when we talk about fundamentally changing and what a receiver can do, and this is what Teresa talked about, about changing some of the rules around collective bargaining, around changing some of the rules about job descriptions and the way that officers do the work, about recruiting people who are really appropriate for it, about assigning posts, not based on seniority, but based on skill and competency and passion. And that's the kind of change that we need to do. So whether receivership is the fastest vehicle to do it, and I'm saying fast not in terms of it's going to happen in a year. We've heard it took seven years in Chicago, in Cook County. What I'm saying is that the fastest way to overcome the barriers, the procurement barriers, the hiring barriers, the operating barriers, we need to fundamentally change it, and the time to do that is right now. Lives are at stake, both officers and incarcerated people.

EL: And Stanley, when it comes to staffing issues, a lot has been made about people having to work triples and posts not being manned and so forth. But there's this other issue. It only comes up once in a while and we don't usually focus on it, at least not in the media, which is the ability to hire from outside the system. My understanding is that up to a surprisingly senior level, you have to choose from within the department, which among other things, enshrines the existing culture so that it makes it harder to change it. What would you alter there?

SR: I think I would alter, and we've seen bits of this in the plan that Molina put in. So what his plan, what he's saying he's going to do is hire these senior commissioners to oversee operations, administration, custody management. Those operations are usually handled on the uniformed side, and the uniformed side is where you need to come up through the ranks in order to be in those roles. The other thing he's doing, he said he's going to have wardens report directly to him. That is a significant change. Wardens normally report to the chief of department, so he's making some changes, but he's making changes that will allow the structure and to begin to do some of the things that he wants to do, but the receiver could fundamentally change.

Right now you need to be an ADW, assistant deputy warden, and you need to have three of the operational experiences in order to be a warden. So you need to be an ADW of administration. You need to be an ADW of operations, you need to be an ADW of security before you can become a deputy warden and a warden. So the receiver could fundamentally change those kinds of things and bring somebody in from the outside that's not coming up through the ranks to be able to take on those jobs. And this is the opportunity for us to do that. It really is.

EL: Well, it's interesting. The very premise of a receiver is that you don't necessarily have to have come up through the ranks in order to run the entire system. So the logic of what the existing system is challenged by the mere appointment of a receiver. And Zach, let me ask you this. If there were a changes being suggested or negotiated at the start of a receivership that were intended to help further this larger planning mission of shutting down the central jail and replacing it with borough based facilities, clearly the court would have to approve it. Does that go beyond what a receiver normally... In other words, are receiverships narrowly tailored to address a specific harm or could some of these larger goals explicitly be put into the conditions of the receivership?

ZC: I think the larger goals can fit within a receivership because the defendant in the underlying lawsuit is not Rikers Island. The defendant is the New York City Department of Corrections and affects inmates under the control of the Department of Corrections wherever they are situated. So an explicit reference to the plan to close Rikers might be helpful because it would require the receiver and the court, and frankly all the parties to think about what it means to reform a physical facility that everybody knows is proposed for closing in a relatively short period of time. One of the challenges for the commissioner, even with assistance of a receiver, is how do you motivate a staff to improve or even maintain facilities that are destined for closure? And so there has to be a lot of thought in the plan about how you accomplish that, how you improve the physical plant in a way that is sufficient to make it a humane and habitable facility, but understanding that the facility itself is temporary.

But getting to the point that Stanley made so well a few minutes ago, a lot of what would have to be in that plan of transition is trying to change culture in a way that you don't transfer Rikers to five separate facilities in the boroughs. I mean, ironically, I used to think about this frankly when I was a corporation council toward the end and was more hopeful than I am now in terms of quick systemic changes. I mean, the ideal really should be to upgrade the operation of Rikers sufficiently so that five years from now, people would be scratching their heads and saying, "Remind me again of why we are closing this place?"

EL: Yeah. Well, an interesting metric, a very hopeful one. And so Gladys, back when the question was posed for OCFS, did it come from the political side or was it you and the commissioner, or was it the commissioners and the staff side who went to the political people and said, "Hey, we've got an opportunity here. Let's embrace the receivership."

GC: We didn't have a receivership. We had the consent decree-

EL: I'm sorry, the consent decree, yes.

GC: ... [inaudible 01:49:41]. So interesting enough, there was a convergence, and I remember coming in and having a meeting almost immediately because when you start, everybody wants to meet with you, with the advocates threatening lawsuits and threatening action. And I remember legislator reaching out to me to say, "You've inherited a terrible agency," and when I did my assessment quickly, I came to the same conclusion. So I think that there was enough knowledge and passion and concern about what was happening. A young person had died a year before the transition to a new administration, so there was this interest in some type of change. I don't think anybody envisioned the transformation that it was going to be. We were undoing, really and blowing up a system that just was totally dysfunction and was a source of tremendous harm. I don't think anybody envisioned that, but certainly everybody, there was enough legislative support, particularly on the democratic side, certainly from the governor and certainly from the community and the judges to say, "We've got to do something different. This is not working."

EL: And you said earlier on that the advocates were a key source of support. Did that take convincing or did they see the same possibilities that you saw right away?

GC: No, they didn't need any convincing. I think that it helped a lot that I came from the advocacy community so that there was an alignment, and I knew lots of people. And I want to make one correction. My staff weighed in and sent me a little note saying that we closed 21 facilities, not 12. I wanted to correct that.

EL: Good for you. So it can be done. Michael, the political stars may be lining up here. It's a new administration. They can't plausibly claim to have caused in the first a hundred days or whatever or up to 150 days, conditions that have been building for decades. But there's a resistance, and it strikes me as similar to what you described as your initial reluctance to surrender power to somebody else. The whole point of local government is to run local government. What would you say to your successor and to the current mayor about that and why they might want to rethink that?

MJ: I totally get the resistance at every level, even emotionally, and especially in this case, he is a new mayor. It's a new commissioner. As Stanley said, they didn't create this problem. They completely inherited it. I completely get the sense that, "Give us a chance to fix it." And first of all, they're going to have a chance in any case because there's no rule to a receiver coming in a week. I mean, this is a process, so obviously they're going to have an opportunity to do some stuff. But if you can step back and you're just thinking about not just incarcerated folks who are in these facilities, but the people who work there, the advantages of a receiver, to me... Not politically, I'm not a pol, other people can weigh in on the politics of this, but substantively just weighs on the side of having a receiver.

And again, I say that and a number of people have said it. It's not a panacea. You certainly need the right person. I mean, the receiver, him or herself has a huge amount of power and authority. You have to pick the right person, and I said it doesn't have to be a correctional expert, but it has to be someone who can change big systems, who can work with the city council, the mayor, the unions, so that's a hard thing to get, but you have to get it. But I think in the end, when you weigh, when you look at the history, when you look at the last 10 or 15 years in comparison to the past 30 years, when you look at all the problems we have, and when you look at, as a number of people have said, and us moving into these facilities in a few years with a completely different staff, with a different organizational mindset, that is just, to me, it's the path that can help you get there more than just, "Let us try this."

I completely understand that response, but if you're just looking at all the structural factors and where we have to go and the decisions that have to be made, it's hard to weigh in against that, and obviously the unions will be against this. The ironic thing is that the biggest labor issue for the officers and the staff is the conditions, is violence. That's their labor issue. I mean, I'm sure they all want more money and benefits, but really their issue is conditions. And I think it's in their self-interest to go down a path where the conditions can improve as quickly as possible because they have very hard jobs or complicated jobs, and the city has a responsibility to make sure they're not just that they're safe, but they have meaningful dignified jobs, and to me, this is the path to get there. So I think it actually meets what's in their institutional and personal self-interest as well.

EL: Okay. That brings us to the end of our time. I really want to thank all of the panelists for a great discussion, and I can't wait to see what Vital City does with this. I hope you're going to archive it and make sure we can go back and review some of these words of wisdom and help educate the rest of the city about some of the issues we discussed here today. Let me send it back to you, Liz.