[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome an old friend and very special guest, Ross Halperin.

He's the author of the new book, Bear Witness the Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land, a project he's focused on for the last many years, a detailed account of public safety, criminality, justice and injustice.

And, a truly mesmerizing one, the detail and the color and the texture of what you write, Ross, is extraordinary.

And it's gotten praise accordingly.

Thanks for joining me today.

Really great to be here with you.

I'm really excited for this.

Ross, tell us and our viewers about the genesis of this project.

Sure.

Yeah.

So I was working with a guy named David Kennedy who's a criminologist at John Jay.

But he's more than a criminologist.

He's really someone who knows how to go into some of the most violent neighborhoods in the US and drastically reduce the amount of gun violence there by working with police and prosecutors and the community.

And he's been very successful at doing that.

And back in the summer of 2017, he got really interested in the problem of impunity in the United States.

And, you know, this is something that might sort of surprise some of your listeners or viewers.

But, whereas in, you know, other wealthy democracies in Asia and Europe, well over 90% of murders are solved, in the United States, something like 50%, 60% are.

So the level of impunity is quite high.

And the solve rate for non-fatal shootings, which is the majority of shootings, is even more disturbing, disturbingly low.

So we were taking a look at that problem, doing a bunch of research, analyzing why that was, what can be done about it.

And the capstone of all of that was a summit that, Kennedy organized in New York.

And one of the people who actually video conference in from Honduras was Kurt Ver Beek, who ended up being the subject of my book, and he just described the work they had done in neighborhoods that were far more dangerous than even, you know, the South Side of Chicago, and how they had had a lot of success reducing impunity.

So I was really interested in the idea of the program that they had.

But I was also just fascinated in him as a person and like what he had done, what he was like, how he had gotten to Honduras.

And that was the spark that started this.

As you recount, he effectively became a kind of criminal justice reform missionary.

But, tell me about the efficacy, which is the derivation of this, did he, working alongside his partner in Honduras, to what extent were they, are they, has there been a continuity of problem solving here?

In a real and durable way?

Sure.

Yeah.

Let me first just give a little bit of background of, like, what the program is.

So people have that context, and then I'll circle back to the efficacy.

But basically Kurt and his, who's an American from the South Side of Chicago and his, partner, best friend, next door neighbor, Carlos Hernández, who's from rural Honduras, were these young men who completely devoted their lives to helping the poor.

And the first sort of radical, unusual, a little crazy thing that they do is they move with their wives and kids to Nueva Suyapa, which is one of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods in all of Honduras.

And they spend the first stretch of time there, you know, doing the normal things that people do in a charitable context education, health care, etc.

but they get to a point where they realize, look, that stuff is only going to have so much impact if there's a gang that is hurting people, killing people, extorting people because you can't prosper when that's going on and when there's total impunity for that, because the criminal justice system wasn't punishing those people adequately.

So they said, we are going to shift gears, and this is where the book starts to stopping crime, taking on crime directly.

And the way that they do that, I mean, there's other people in Honduras who get the same idea, but their solution is vigilantism, and that's actually quite prevalent.

And it's, you know, comes up over and over again in the book and people take up arms and go and kill criminals.

And they say, we don't like that either.

We don't think that's ethical.

We think that's wrong.

So we got to figure out something else and what they decide to do.

And this is the idea where, you know, you're interested in is something that I think is quite brilliant.

They say we are going to start solving homicides in our neighborhood.

And you know when we think about solving homicides, we usually say that's something that the government and only the government should do or can do.

But in reality, solving murders usually boils down to not ingenious deductions by detectives or the finding of some piece of hair or blood.

What it usually comes down to is witnesses.

So somebody knows what happened, and they're either willing to testify about that in court or not.

So they started, they hired a private eye, they hired a lawyer, and they started, on the one hand, tracking down and cultivating witnesses who in the past would not participate in these processes because they were scared of retribution and didn't trust the police and prosecutors.

And on the other side, they basically did an intelligence gathering operation about this gang.

What are their real names?

Where do they live?

Who are the leaders?

Where are they going to be at Thursday at 6:30 p.m.

so we can go bring the cops to that place to make an arrest?

And they had remarkable success.

I mean they got, according to their own data, I think, upwards of 100 people arrested and 70 convicted in that neighborhood.

it appeared to be very effective.

The neighborhood is still not a safe place, and there's still gang activity there, but it's definitely way better than it was before.

And then to get to your original question, sorry for the long tangent.

Around the early 2010's, they said we want to try to prove if this model works in other neighborhoods.

So at that point they expanded to, I don't know, five other barrios in Honduras, some into Gusi Galpo, which the capital, some in San Pedro Sula, which at the time was the city with the highest homicide rate on Earth.

And there were independent researchers from the State University of Rio de Janeiro who looked at it, you know, is this replicable?

Is it going to work?

And the metric that they looked at was the average number of homicides per month.

And in most of those neighborhoods, there was a very quick and rapid decline in the average number of homicides per month because the gang members began to get arrested.

And, you know, we're talking in some cases, 75%, 67% declines in these places.

And, they did a control study just to make sure there weren't other factors that could have caused that.

And even after controlling and looking at other similar neighborhoods, the results were quite impressive.

So that's what we know about the replicability so far.

So, for our viewers, this is like if neighborhood watch met the CIA on some level.

I mean, when you read your book, you'll see that.

And I want to ask you about the feasibility of that model in developed and developing nations.

But first, how sustainable has the progress been in the places where it was replicated?

Is Honduras as a country a safer place now?

Yeah.

I don't want to overstate.

I mean, these are still poor and dangerous communities with gang activity.

But there have been these improvements, and I think something worth mentioning is like they're essentially were, like, pinch hitting for police and prosecutors, right?

Like going to these neighborhoods.

We're going to do their work for them if they're not going to do it.

And they had a lot of success, but they reach a point where it's just really in 2011 where they're like, at this point, Honduras has the highest homicide rate in the world.

It's probably the country with the most narco trafficking activity in a pound for pound basis in the world.

MS-13 and Barrio 18 have taken over pretty much every barrio.

And they were like, we don't have the capacity to solve this problem for the entire country by doing just this program.

So what they do is really become political actors and they say instead of replicating police and prosecutors, we're going to reform the police force and we're going to reform the public ministry, which is their attorney generals office, basically.

And while that may sound like sort of like academic and administrative in reality, taking on those institutions which were so corrupt, so broken, so under-resourced was probably even more dangerous than taking on gangs.

And, you know, over the course of many years, they have a lot of success in that realm as well.

And they get the attorney general fired.

They, help get the security minister fired, and their main goal at the beginning of that process is to purge the police force, which, you know, is arguably the most criminally active police force in the world.

And they set out to do that.

No one else has been able to do that in the past, and they ultimately get it done.

They fire.

I think, you know, something like two thirds of the preexisting force replace it with new officers.

And, you know, over the course of that period of them being involved in national politics and reforming those institutions, the homicide rate came down quite a bit.

Now, I don't want to suggest that that was merely because of their efforts.

I think they definitely contributed.

But, yeah, I think they definitely contributed to that -in some way.

-Right It's some way that I can't quite quantify.

Right.

Take us through those negotiations and the diplomacy, with the powers that were, and of course, if you have, criminality governing police dictates, you not only have the gangs, you have the police that are gangsters propping up the gangs.

They did break through to some extent, was that at all in alliance with the public sphere, the president, or, have they been and have they always will they remain persona non grata, with the political class?

Talk to us about those relationships.

Yeah.

I mean, you're now getting to what I think makes the story really interesting.

You know, there's the accomplishments and the successes and the bravery.

But on the flip side, there's the compromises of what you have to do in order to get things done in a place like Honduras and we talked about, okay, they gain the political power to help fire the attorney general and to help purge the police.

But how did they do that?

The answer is they allied with the person who was initially the president of Congress and later became president of the country.

His name is Juan Orlando Hernández.

That might be a name that some of your listeners are familiar with.

And, you know, from the beginning he's sort of this very refined guy, nice clothes, nice talker, but very clearly like a political thug, for lack of a better word.

You know, when the Supreme Court gets in his way, he deposes the Supreme Court justices when he needs to violate the separation of powers, he will.

But, he's giving them the power to do the things that they want to do and think are good for Honduras.

So they want to be approaching politics and this sphere in a nonpartizan way.

But since he's the one in power, and since he's the one who's giving them the keys to do all of these things, they become more and more associated with him in the public eye.

And this is a problem because he becomes more and more of a problematic character over time.

He runs an election for re-election when that's basically against the Constitution.

And he's currently now sitting in an American prison where he has a life sentence for narco trafficking.

So, that was the trade off they made.

And that's what it took to gain political power.

And, you know, he was in the Conservative Party and pretty much people on the left in Honduras, now have a real problem with this charity because they were seen as associated with this figure.

And what have been the successive, history there of, political power and, what's evolved or devolved since then?

Yeah.

So the, left wing party won the election in 2021.

And, you know, at this point, the charity had become extremely powerful, extremely large.

They have a team of people who are analyzing the health ministry, the education ministry, and unearthing corruption and bad things.

But what makes this charity a little bit unique was they don't want to just unearth problems, they want to fix them too.

And in the past they would expose these horrible acts of corruption, but then they would work with the government.

Even if the government is tainted and messed up to actually fix the problems.

But since the new administration took over, they're like, we don't want to work with this charity anymore, they're our enemy.

So the charity still releases reports, still exposes corruption, bad behavior, but they don't really have the ability to work with bureaucrats and ministers to solve the problems, to some extent they do, but certainly not to the extent, that they did before.

But they're still a very important institution in the country, very visible one.

And the current president, who was the first lady, right?

Now she's the president.

What has been the reaction to this work of these most recent administrations?

Her husband's and, now hers.

Are they in, partnership with the type of, public safety programing that you describe, to continue to solve murders?

Do they appreciate the success of the two individuals you chronicle in the book?

Certainly not publicly.

I mean, like, take the police purge, which is something that pretty much everyone in Honduras wanted to see happen for a very long time.

Like just rid the police force of the problematic criminal people.

And the charity that I write about basically got that done.

But they got it done by essentially, I don't want to say cozying up, but by working with this president that the left didn't want them to work with.

So now that the new administration took over, they are critical of the purge and they poke a lot of holes in it.

And there are fair criticisms of what they did, which I do detail in the book.

But all in all, I don't think, they see the benefits of it, or have stated, or appreciated it.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think the, charity has continued to criticize the administration.

This administration did a state of exception which allowed them to sort of suspend different civil rights, in the name of reducing crime.

And the charity has criticized some of those actions.

And any time the charity does criticize this administration, there's huge blowback.

So you go on Twitter or the news and some minister or politician is going to be accusing them of terrible things.

So you're my old friend, and I've had to ask you, based on what I've read, were you there in a bulletproof vest at times?

I mean, you put yourself in danger reporting on this.

You know, I know you admire the people who are the vigilante detectives, if you want to call them that, or good Samaritan, neighborhood watchers.

But you put your hide in jeopardy going out there.

What measures did you take to protect yourself?

Well, I mean, I was staying, the community I write about is called Nueva Suyapa.

And I made the decision to live there when I was in Honduras, which was great because it allowed me to get to know the neighborhood.

And a lot of the color that I think you responded to in the book really came from just being there quite a lot.

You know, I didn't really feel unsafe in the neighborhood.

There's, a sense to which it's sectors in the neighborhood.

And I kind of knew where I was allowed to go and where I wasn't.

And so I didn't feel unsafe day to day.

But I think the thing that does get a little bit sketchy when you're doing this type of reporting in a place like Honduras, is the people who know about gangs, assassinations, corruption are the people who are either involved in it or maybe tangentially involved in it, or used to be.

So you can get this initial burst of information from my subjects, from the newspapers, from the court records.

But like if you sometimes if you really want to know the truth of what happened, you have to reach out to that, for lack of a better word, underworld.

And you're taking a risk when you do that because you're meeting with someone who might be involved in a criminal activity or by asking them questions.

You're revealing what it is you're interested in, and they could report that back to some of the dangerous people that I didn't want to know I was there.

So I think those were the scarier moments sometimes when I may be overstretched a little bit and met up with someone, and then after the fact was kind of like, eh, maybe that was a mistake.

But honestly, I spent a lot of time down there and on a day to day basis taking the bus, you know, walking around.

I didn't feel, unsafe.

In other words, you weren't held at gunpoint or kidnaped.

And I ask you that in earnestness, you know, how much of it was like Training Day, the Denzel Washington film?

I mean, I think at the beginning, maybe it had that kind of, like, ride along element where I would ride in with, like, some of the charities, like private eyes through, like, super dangerous neighborhoods, and they would say, yeah, you can't go outside or, you know, that guy over there is a dangerous gang member.

So maybe at the way beginning it felt like that, but once I, like, just started living in the day to day, working, go into an office, hitting people up.

I kind of stopped worrying about that.

And I will say, like, you know, I obviously identified myself as a journalist to anyone I interviewed, but, especially in the neighborhood where I was, I probably wanted like, strangers who just saw me walking around to assume I was like a missionary, or some kind of charitable worker in town, because those types of people do pass through these neighborhoods.

So two final questions, and I want to give you ample time with each, the first.

What did this teach you about human nature?

Our capacity for good and our capacity for evil as human beings.

Yeah.

I mean, I think part of what drew me to this story is a setting like Nueva Suyapa, which is poor violence and lawless at a level that would, you know, be astonishing to anyone in the United States, truly.

And so it's just very extreme environments where people are, have to get by.

And it's interesting to see what people do.

You know, like, the good news is the vast majority of people there are totally honorable and don't get involved in crime or bad things, but some people do.

And then you get to see, okay, when there's crime happening in your neighborhood, who's going to step up and do something about it?

And like in that neighborhood and in other similar ones you have, there's people who say, you know what?

We're going to stop this.

We're going to fight back.

We're going to become vigilantes.

And, it's fascinating to see who does that, what inspires them to do it when they feel pushed to the wall enough to get guns, hunt down gang members.

And I think that there's different flavors of it, right?

Like in my book, there's two vigilante groups which pop up pretty quickly, and one is, I think, way more sympathetic.

They're kind of, their backs are against the wall.

Some of their relatives were attacked in truly heinous fashion, and they're not wanting to kill gang members, they're wanting to protect.

Then there's another type of vigilante who his father was attacked, and he I don't want to say snaps, but he just starts killing these kids and he's not only killing just the worst of the worst kids, he's killing the marginal gang members.

And it's pretty clear that he likes killing them.

There's a flair to what he does.

There's a gusto to it.

So, um... I want to get time for this other final question, my friend.

-Oh, okay.

I didn't get to say -You can answer it... I didn't get to say the positive.

But yeah, go ahead.

Answer as you wish.

Answer as you wish.

The applicability to the US.

We have a president, not so long ago re-elected.

Who talks about this country as if it is rife with the kind of activity, that you report on in the book.

Often it's attributed to undocumented illegal citizens, gang members from outside of the US.

Obviously it is interwoven in the fiber of the country and dealing of drugs with citizens too.

But my question is, what can we learn about improving public safety?

Given that the problem that the president talks about, at least in his mind, and I think the public's mind increasingly emanates from the drug trade, underpinning the finances of a lot of these gang operations.

What can we do about it?

Practically speaking, the other show that people might watch is, the Wrong Side of the Tracks, it's on Netflix, if you've seen Training Day, I bet you've seen both.

Anyhow, yeah, what is the applicability of this to the US?

Yeah.

I don't think the crime problem here is really about immigrants or these, like, complicated narco trafficking cartels from other countries.

I think it's way more mundane than that.

It's crime in cities, and a lot of it is beef.

Some of it is sort of gang related.

But, the good news is, I think there's an important message in this story, and it's that even in these super violent and communities with a lot of impunity and low homicide solve rates, which in fact is a big problem in the United States, like that problem might be more solvable than it seems.

And I think in places like the South Side of Chicago, it's the exact same as it is in Nueva Suyapa.

It's a problem of witnesses not wanting to participate in criminal proceedings because they're scared and because they don't trust the police.

So I think that if someone can figure out how to bridge that gap, because what I was going to say before is that the positive side of this human nature question, people will step up and incredible ways to testify against gang members, dangerous people when they're approached in the right way.

And I believe that that could happen in the United States as well.

And I'm not sure if the answer is this particular program, but I do believe that the answer is, as I said before, bridging the gap between witnesses and law enforcement somehow.

And you incentivize that truthful testimony, of course, we see rewards for, people's due diligence.

See something, say something.

Is this about better funding neighborhood watch groups?

How would this be implemented in a successful way?

Yeah.

I don't think it's a matter of rewarding people, incentivizing witnesses with money.

I mean, this program did not do that.

I know that Crime Stoppers in LA, over its long history has paid out very, very, very few rewards.

I think the funding problem is more about detectives and investigative capacity of these departments.

There's been a big shift over the past several decades from retroactive investigations of gun violence to patrol and other things like that, and I would personally advocate for that shifting back.

And I think more detectives, with more resources, clearly makes a difference, even before you start thinking about nifty programs like this one.

Do you have a sense of what percent of unsolved crimes in the US are related to to gang activity?

I don't, but like from all the books I've read and brilliant people I've spoken to, like, even if sort of there's gangs involved, like it's rarely about some strategic gang thing and it's usually about beefs and personal problems.

And someone talk to someone's girlfriend, or someone was disrespectful.

From what I've learned and read and understood, that is the source of most violence in this country.

Hmm.

So vendettas, vindictiveness, vendettas.

Personal problems, yeah.

But, it could very well be in the context of gangs and people who love guns, and they're sort of trying to be macho in a lot of ways.

But, yeah, my understanding is that that's the predominant problem.

In the course of getting out there engaging with people about your book, what's been the most interesting feedback you've gotten so far?

Yeah, I think it's, I think people are really interested in the reporting process and like, sort of how you end up getting all the information for a story like this.

And I think, yeah, people are really responding to this question of, could this work in the South Side of Chicago?

So, not to repeat what I said before, but I think people understand that question, and I think it's a very provocative one.

And I think that seems to be what, you know, what a lot of people have been responding to and asking me questions about.

Are there particular places you're excited to take the book on tour?

Chicago, among them, where you're hoping to interact with policymakers in a way that could be instructive?

Yeah.

I mean, I'm actually going to be in a couple weeks, going to, sort of summit organized by the Niskanen Center, which is a bipartisan think tank in Washington DC, which has really taken up this mantle of trying to get, federal funding for what I'm talking about for local departments, state departments, to try to solve this impunity problem.

So I'm really excited to get to talk about the book in front of that audience of experts, academics, policymakers, and see how they respond.

And then I'm going to be doing an event in LA, which, you know, it's where I live, and it's going to be at my local bookshop.

So that should be really, really special on as well.

Ross, congratulations on Bear Witness: the Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land.

Check it out on your local bookseller, Amazon, anywhere you want to read.

Thank you for sharing this story and your audacious pursuit, with our viewers today.

This is great.

Thank you so much for having me.

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