Former Dallas Police Chief David Brown is publishing a book, Called To Rise, detailing his 33-year-career in law enforcement and suggesting directions for the next generation of policing. In an interview with The Crime Report, Chief Brown discusses criminal justice reform:

“I understand how people may not get it initially, including people who are policy makers. I [came] into the profession without a full range of knowledge and experience on what the shortcomings of traditional policing does to the community. I fully understand, for example, Attorney General Jeff Sessions wanting to revert (to tough sentencing guidelines). He doesn’t have that experience, so it just seems like the way to fight crime is to just lock people up. We know through research and experience that we weren’t any safer when we are in a “lock them up, tough-on-crime culture.” But human nature sometimes drives us to make decisions not based on facts. People generally sense that if you put a bad guy in jail, they’ll be safer, when that is absolutely not the case.

You have to find a way to peel back the layers, and find root causes, and mitigate the root causes where they occur, whether that’s mental illness, drug addiction, job training, opportunities in the community, or economic development. You have to find those root causes to have a really clean sense of what would make us safer, what impacts these communities. We criminalize poverty, we criminalize mental illness, we criminalize drug addiction, and those are treatable things that we can resolve with policy. Handcuffs are not the solution.”