- The police response to insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6th and killed a police officer contrasts sharply with recent examples of police violence against black people.

A new investigative report from NPR reveals troubling patterns in fatal police shootings of unarmed black people, including a glaring lack of accountability that keeps violent officers on the streets.

Police officers have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed black men and women nationwide since 2015.

In an NPR investigation, at least 75% of the officers were white and nearly 60% of the shootings occurred in the south.

The rate of fatal police shooting of unarmed black people in the US is more than three times as high as it is among white people.

And the total number of black indigenous people of color killed in police shootings hasn't budged over the past five years, prompting the researchers to describe the figures as a public health emergency.

Often we complain about the problems of police interactions with minorities, and do not provide solutions.

The introduction of bodycams by the police has assisted in bringing some level of accountability, but the problem continues to persist.

Hello, I'm Phillip Davis, the host of Courageous Conversation.

My guest today is James Samuel, the founder and CEO of Pluribus and the creator of the ANJEL Tech app.

He's developed an app that allows users to immediately begin live streaming and transmitting footage to their family members when they are in any type of dangerous situation.

The app appeals to the African-American community because of what has been happening across the nation concerning police brutality.

Don't go anywhere.

We'll be right back with James Samuel.

Well, James, I'm so glad that you were able to take the time out of your busy schedule to be on the show with me today, so excited about your technology and the things that you're doing, so I really want to jump right in.

You know, we're just coming through Dr Martin Luther King's Birthday and Black History Month.

What does it mean to you to be a pioneer in the tech industry and being able to do the type of work that you're doing with your company?

- Well, Pastor Davis, first, thank you for the opportunity to be here.

I'm grateful and I feel privileged to just have this conversation with you and your audience today.

I do want to say right up front so I can level set, make sure everyone knows the person they're talking to today.

The most important thing you're going to know about me and hear from me today is that I'm a follower of Christ and Jesus is my savior and I'm a child of God.

And that is my foundation.

That is my rock.

That's my everything.

And so everything that you hear today hopefully will be representative of that.

But that's my basis, my foundation.

- That's wonderful.

That's wonderful.

Excellent.

Me too.

- Amen, brother.

So yeah, why?

And what we're doing here is so critical, especially like you said just right after the Martin Luther King holiday and his birthday celebration here in January 2002.

When you look at, and look, I'm not putting myself or my team in the same company as Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Rev Dr, right?

But the parallels and the work that he started and the things that he led us to do as a nation and as a world are still needing to be done, right?

I mean, he got us a great start and he showed us a great way.

But the work's not over and even in his last days, you know, his last book, Where Do We Go From Here?

really talked about the work that still needs to be done and the accountability that is still needed and the change that is still needed and the transformation that we're still going through as a nation and as a people, as humanity.

So, yeah, we're just a part of that process.

We're part of that long moral arc of history that he talked about, Dr King talked about, bending towards justice.

- Towards justice, yes.

- Yeah.

And so we're a part of that long moral arc and we're doing our part to bend it towards justice.

- Yeah, yeah.

And I guess, you know, when you think about the need for the type of technology that you were able to develop, does it concern you that there is still a need for apps like ANJEL in society today?

- Yes.

Yes, it's very concerning, and it's very disconcerting, right?

The fact that we need to have a technology that live streams, you know, public and personal incidents to your loved ones, personal security is at an all time high.

You gave some stats in your lead-in about, you know, the statistics around police brutality and the shooting of unarmed black Americans.

But public issues of violence are just about an all time high, at least in modern history, in recent times.

I just read something today in the Times that talked about the murder rate in the United States is as high as it's been since, like 1996.

- Wow.

- Yeah, it's just, it is.

It's very concerning.

I'm a father, I'm a husband and the future in the world that we leave to our children, I'm leaving to my children, I want to make sure it's better than the one that I'm inhabiting.

And so as a father and as a technologist, I'm doing my part, you know, and this is a father's heart.

I'm obliged to leave the world a better place with the right tools to myself and my sons that make it better for us.

- You know, that's wonderful.

And that comes from a place of love, right?

Because that's the greatest commandment of all that the Lord leaves us.

And as a black father, I'm sure you've had to have the talk with your children.

And for those from the European community, they may not understand why it's important to have the talk as it relates to interaction with police.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

And was this a part of the impetus for developing the app as it relates to the safety of your children and other children, you know, in the United States and worldwide?

Potentially.

- Yeah, I mean, the talk is a thing, right?

I mean, it is a thing in the black community, especially because you think about all the rules, right?

The rules that have been imposed upon us in this setting, in this experiment called America, right?

This experiment in democracy, which is actually a representative republic, but that's a whole other conversation.

- Right.

- Right.

Yeah.

But yeah, the talk is to pass on the institutional knowledge and the knowledge that we've gained in our lifetimes to our children to make sure that they understand the rule-set and the protocols of their existence in, as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, the skin in which they were born.

Their black bodies, right?

That's how Mr Coates places it.

And it's a stark way to talk about it.

But when you read his book Between The World And Me, you really understand that yeah, people aren't responding to you.

They're responding to your black body.

Right?

And that is just...

It's kind of crazy to even think about it that way.

But that's kind of the framework and the paradigm we have to come towards this existence in.

- Right.

- But passing that on to our children is, responsibility is a parent's take, you know, and at what point do you tell them is really the question, right?

At what point do you begin to make them aware of the response that their body, that their skin is going to engender in others?

And how young do you tell them that?

My kids are young.

Right now they're soon to be eight and six, they're seven and five right now.

But what we find is research has shown that children start to understand these differences between themselves and their peers in preschool, at three years of age, before they learn their ABCs, They're learning what's different and they're beginning to get different treatment from their teachers as early as three years old as well.

And so as your kids go into preschool and pre-K and kindergarten, first grade second grade, they already know, they're already seeing signs.

They're already receiving treatment.

And I can't even begin to tell you, just even a recent incident we had with my son in his school, you know, he's a second grader.

We've had to talk to him and talk to his school about, you know, we can't have that.

This is completely unacceptable.

We're dealing with that as parents, you know, kids in school, right?

But, yeah, that talk is real.

And so we created the technology in ANJEL Tech to go along with that talk because it's one thing to talk, it's another thing to act.

And so the talk is important to have so they have that knowledge set.

But it's also important that we put tools in their hands that go along with that talk so that we can know where they are, we can know what's happening, we can have a record of it, we can be alerted to it, we can come to them and/or send help, and we can have that securely stored in the cloud so that we can make sure accountability happens in that moment and certainly every moment thereafter.

- Yeah, that's amazing.

You know, I remember my father having the talk with me.

He sat me down.

We lived in a place called Willingboro, New Jersey in South Jersey.

And he said, "Let me tell you something, son."

He said, "You're a black man now."

And I remember him having it at 12 when I was getting ready to get my driver's license and my permit, he said, "And here's a couple of things that you will and will not do "if you get pulled over by the police."

And I'd say, "Well, Dad..." You know, I had white friends and black friends and my white friends always dealt with the police much different than I had the capacity to do.

I came home and told them one day what my white friend did and he said, "What did the police officer say to you?"

And I said the police officer treated me bad, and the guy who was breaking the law, he ended up getting off and, you know, they did nothing to him, but they pulled me out.

They stood me by the car.

You know, they asked me for ID.

And you know, he began to share with me the differences in how those interactions can go.

And thank God, we were able to walk away and everybody was OK, but that stayed with me emotionally.

And it made me to realize that we do live in a world where there are two sets of rules for people.

So, so you give... Well, first of all, let me ask you, can you tell us about ANJEL Tech, exactly what it does and why it's valuable right now?

- Yes, I can.

- OK. - And I will.

So ANJEL Tech, ANJEL Tech is your own personal body camera, right?

I have it on my phone here.

And you know, it's an app that you can get from the iOS store and Google Play Store.

You click on it.

It opens right up.

It opens right up to your camera.

And so it's fast, right?

And so now what I do is I'm going to actually hit start stream.

Right.

The lighting is kind of messing with my app here, let's do that again.

All right, so hit start stream... - Right.

- It opens right up to me.

OK?

It has a siren on it, just in case you need to alert people that something's going on with you, right?

- Right.

- So I hit start stream.

And now you see, I had a notification from the app, and I'm also going to get a text.

There's my text notification as well.

And I also got an email, so there's three different ways that we're just notified that I started the live stream.

It says live right up here at the top.

- Right, right.

- And so my family is now watching this live stream... - That's amazing.

- ..of me talking to you.

I'm going to point the camera just so you can kind of see, right, both of us.

And so my mother or my father - actually, my father just went on to Heaven.

- Sorry.

- My mother and my sister and my wife...

I appreciate that.

My brother and all are all now able to see that I am here in the lobby of my office building.

In fact, I just got a text from... Let's see, that is from my wife.

Says, "Hey, daddy, I see you."

- I love it.

I love it.

- Because we have kids, right?

Because we have kids, you know, she calls me Daddy, I call her Mommy.

- Right.

- So she is now watching this live stream.

- That's amazing.

- So she knows exactly where I am.

She has a little iris, I'll show you on the map, that shows her my exact location and provides her a route from where she is to where I am.

I just got another text.

That is my brother.

And he says... - "See you bro!"

- "See you bro," right?

That's my brother, Keith.

- I love it.

I love it.

- And so my family is now joined.

And, you know, I'm trying to remember, I don't tell them when I'm going to do these things.

They just have their phones in their hands.

they get notified like, and they're like, "OK, I see you."

I'm like always pitching and always talking and it'll be OK. - Yeah.

- But they watch it, they know where I am.

They have a record of this.

And so I'm going to stop this stream, and this works all over the world.

I did this... Just stop down here, and this now is securely stored in the cloud.

So when I go to my video library and they're in the cloud, so now in three two one, this is going to pop in from the cloud.

And there they go.

Thumbnails are... And so you can see they just come in from the cloud, where they're stored, and when I replay this, the video's there.

- Well, let me let me just stop you for a minute, man.

This is amazing to me, and I was so blown away when I read, when I began to read about the technology.

So I'm stopped by the police and I'm on a rural road or I'm someplace, I literally can alert my family.

I'm thinking about Sandra Bland, right?

And all that happened with her and how she ended up dead in a jail cell and the people didn't know where she was.

But this really resolves that issue.

The police have their bodycams, but many times when you want that bodycam footage, you've got to wait two years to get it, right, or specifically if something happens.

And we've just seen that, you know, in a couple of cases.

But you're saying this is an immediate thing.

It puts everybody on notice, what's happening and how that interaction is going.

This is great for parents, spouses, you know, children to be able to make sure that your children are safe.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Let's talk about Sandra Bland and that Prairie View, Texas, stop that she had there, but this library that you see now, the ANJEL Tech videos.

- Yeah.

- My family, as my viewers, they all have this exact same library on their phone.

They can watch this and replay - at the bottom right there's three little dots there and you can see the options you get are... - Share, location and download.

Yeah.

- Share, location, download.

So I'm going to click on the download - boom.

You see the screen spin there?

- Yeah.

- So that file was just downloaded out of that cloud library to my cellphone and my wife and my brother who just watched this, and even my mother who has this stream, who may not have seen it, can go to their... Can go do the exact same thing I just did.

I'll go over to my photo library.

There's my library.

Right, so refresh that.

And I'm going to show you that this video is actually in my library.

Make sure I downloaded that.

- I love that.

I mean, James, this is ground-breaking, my friend, so talk a little bit about... You gave five reasons why people can be pulled over.

And you also gave safety points.

Can you talk about why that was important?

Because this ANJEL Tech now provides just so much opportunity to ensure a level of safety that we didn't have before.

So can you talk a little bit about that?

- Sure.

I'll show you this video.

Took a second to come out of the cloud there.

- So there is the video, it's now on my iPhone.

So this is playing from my iPhone.

You can see the little scroll at the bottom.

Shows you the iPhone.

Turn the volume up so you can hear it.

- My family is now... - So this is now in my iPhone video library.

It's not in the app any more.

- Yeah.

So pause there, right?

And then let me show you the location piece really quickly and then I'll answer your question.

- Yeah.

- You may have to restate it.

I just want to make sure your audience really understands what's happening here.

So this is the location.

So as they're watching my stream, there's a map and it shows the icon of where I am.

- Uh-huh.

- Right?

And it...

When you click on that iris, it then also provides you a route from wherever you are to wherever the streamer is and gives you directions.

- This is great technology.

- So all that just...

Thank you.

That just all happened real time.

You saw me open the app.

You saw me stream, use the siren.

You saw my brother and my wife say, "Hey, I see you."

You saw the video library.

You saw the download happen in real time.

You saw the location happen.

You saw the notification sequence happen.

All that just happened in the last two minutes.

While we just did that in real time and I can do it again and again, I could do this for you.

- Yeah.

- So yeah, it's ground-breaking.

It's revolutionary technology, and we're so happy to be able to provide it to the world.

And please restate your question because I wanted to finish that.

- Listen, there's a thousand questions going through my mind.

I feel like we're in the living room and you're just walking me through it also.

So, you know, this is Courageous Conversations, but you actually give five reasons why people can be pulled over.

So one of the challenges for us many times is we're pulled over and sometimes it's an unnecessary stop for a traffic light.

Or, you know, they're saying that your tags are expired.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

- Yeah, there's a great book I'd encourage everyone to read.

It's called Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell.

- OK. - OK. And I love Malcolm Gladwell.

You know, he did Outliers and Tipping Point.

He's a great author, just a wonderful person.

I hope to meet him someday.

But when you read his book Talking To Strangers, and interestingly, since you brought it up, Talking To Strangers starts and ends with Sandra Bland's story.

- Wow.

- And it's sort of, if you get it on Audible, I do a lot of my reading through Audible these days, so go out and get it in Audible.

It's called Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell, and you can hear Sandra Bland talking, and she had her own podcast called I think Sandy Speaks or something like that, where she would talk about these interactions that she ended up actually perishing from very similar subject, that she podcasted about.

- Yes.

- You know, police brutality and social justice and things like that.

But Gladwell takes her voice.

You get to hear her talking, you get to hear the interactions, you get to hear the interview with the officer who stopped her and how he was disciplined and what happened or not.

- Right, right.

- And you get to hear the whole thing and then the middle of the book really walks you through sort of a history of policing, but also the history of trust, something called trust default theory, and what it takes for us to actually get to a point of distrust.

It's a fascinating book.

I really encourage everyone to read it.

But when you read this, he talks about, and we talk about it some in our technology, that you can be pulled over by police officers and they are trained and taught today to stop people on the account of suspicion, to be just naturally suspicious and to try to find, so when they walk to the passenger side of your car and they're looking at your air fresheners or they're looking at the number of keys that are in the switch, they're looking at what's on the contents of the floor, your floorboards of the car.

They're making an assessment, as they're trying to get you to talk, and just looking over and they're trying to see, should I be suspicious right now?

Should I find a reason to pull this person out of the car or not?

And if they see something that makes them suspicious, they're going to suspend their own trust default theory, and they're going to pull you out your car because they're going to think there may be something more here, even though you may have done nothing wrong.

- Right.

- And so they've been trained to be overly suspicious.

And it's... That's the way policing is done these days, unfortunately.

- Right, right.

And you know, the thing about it is, you know, there are good police officers.

There's a lot of good police officers and many at times, I just saw a report where Miami police officer stepped in to stop their partner from using excessive force.

And then the officer ends up choking the officer who was trying to do the, you know, to step in and provide that level of support.

It's just that, you know, not all officers are bad, but unfortunately we don't know which ones are bad and which ones are good.

And then you have, you know, them who don't know whether, you know, we're going to be creating or committing a crime or anything like that.

You know, so under the Pluribus Inc. umbrella, there's ANJEL Tech as well as Safe Eyeguard.

Tell us about each entity and what, what made you turn each one into a product?

- Yeah, SAIFguard.

It's pronounced safeguard.

There's A-I, right?

It's just, it's a COVID app that helps commanders and leaders understand how Covid may be affecting their workforce, where they are in relation to one another and to make sure they're making smart decisions about how to use their force for its mission.

And we developed it in response to COVID, and it's for National Guard and other types of corporations to want to understand the virus propagation in their workforce and to be able to make smart decisions, and it's a dashboard and whatnot.

So we've developed that.

ANJEL Tech was also...

So it's interesting.

We developed one app in response to a viral pandemic, COVID, and we developed the other app in response to a social pandemic.

- Sure.

- Racial injustice, right?

Both of those technologies came out in the spring and summer of 2020.

ANJEL Tech was developed in response to what happened to George Floyd, and it's a part of our larger umbrella of technology as a company.

- Yeah, yeah.

It was tragic what happened to George Floyd.

I called it a public lynching, and the reality was, you know, this show literally was birthed out of what happened to George Floyd.

And just being able to have conversations and highlight individuals like yourselves, to really change the narrative because the narrative that has been put out intentionally on minorities, African-Americans, you know, has not been the most positive.

And the work that you're doing is just tremendous.

You're using top of the line technology to create next level products and services.

You know, what led you to lead this path or to walk down this path of technology?

- Well, I have over 30 years of federal service.

Dr Davis, I've been at this national security profession for a long time, as an engineer, as a pilot, as an executive member of the Department of Defense.

So I've led teams all over the world, the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan and the United States and transportation and network analysis.

And so I have arguably a very unique and world-class set of experiences and education and knowledge.

And so when you take that and turn it towards personal security, you get things like Pluribus and ANJEL Tech.

- Wonderful.

You know, oftentimes in the world of STEM, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, black and brown people have had to learn to fend for themselves, right, due to the lack of diversity and then also lack of resources.

How were you able to get ANJEL Tech funded?

Do you have partnerships?

And just how were you able?

You already said you got 30 years of experience in this space, but you know, talk a little bit about your partnerships and how you're able to get funding to get ANJEL Tech up and running.

- Yeah, it's great to be a tech entrepreneur and being a tech entrepreneur of color does come with some specific challenges that are documented, for example Venture capital usually has historically only been provided to 1% of people of color.

And if you're a black female founder, it's even more dire.

- Yeah.

- And so, yeah, we have a fantastic set of friends and family, right, who believe in us.

- The village, yeah.

- Yeah, the village that was funding us, and it's giving us that that fuel to move.

We've developed several different technologies.

We have some traction in our ANJEL Tech offering on the public side.

But we also have a corporate side and we're in the middle of some contract negotiations now, and you'll hear more about that as we roll this out.

It's called ANJELS On Campus, and it does everything ANJEL Tech, I just shows you ANJEL Tech does, but it also can bring into the stream the police dispatch office at a college or university and allow them to be recipients of that stream as well.

And while the user, there's one extra button on ANJELS On Campus that when you start to stream, you can then choose to bring in your college campus police dispatch office into your stream, provide them all the same information as well, and your viewers, more importantly, can do the same thing.

So if your parents are watching, your roommate's watching and you have an incident on your campus and you're using ANJELS On Campus, you start to stream and your roommate now knows, hey, this is going on with Jack or Jill or whatever.

And then you're like, hey, wait a second, I need to alert my college dispatch office.

You can do it, or your roommate can go, Hey, I'm bringing the Department of Public Safety into this stream because I'm concerned about your safety and you're running or you can't.

And so they press the button on the viewer's side, it sends that same notification sequence to the college campus dispatch office, and they then can come to your location using the same application.

And so we're marketing that as well to HBCUs, but also predominantly majority institutions, because it works on college campuses as a replacement to the antiquated blue light system.

- You know, I knew we weren't going to have enough time, brother.

But I am so ecstatic to be able to have this conversation with you and I.

You know, what comes to my mind is the thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives you're going to save by the work that you do, by the inspiration of our Lord to be able to take the skills that you have and really make a difference in the world.

I am excited to meet you and to see the work that you're doing and know that it's going to continue to impact lives, man.

I want to thank you for taking the time to be with us on Courageous Conversations and to our viewing audience, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to view, and I pray that you are blessed, and that you get ANJEL Tech and that you support this wonderful effort that this man and his team are putting forward.

So on behalf of everyone here at PBS, I'd like to thank you for tuning in.

May God bless you and keep you.

Keep being courageous and we'll see you right here on the next Courageous Conversations.