Kamran: Hi, Welcome back to 'Let's Talk About Race', the podcast where we try and cut through the yelling that we see in mainstream media and have real in-depth discussion about race relations in this country. I'm joined here today by Emeritus Professor Phil Reichel, PhD at the University of Northern Colorado. Phil, thanks so much for being with us today.
Professor Reichel: You're quite welcome.
Kamran: So you have a number of titles before we get into talking about police. Do you mind giving us a quick synopsis on the various titles you've held as they relate to crime, policing and criminal justice?
Professor Reichel: Be happy to. My Ph.D. is in sociology from Kansas State University. I began my teaching career in the early 1970s after working at the Nebraska State Penitentiary for about a year, year and a half as a counselor. And since that time, my areas of interest have been focused around comparative criminal justice systems and corrections. And basically what that means is that I've developed an interest in how police, courts and corrections operate in other countries around the world.But within that broader category, I'm especially interested in the corrections aspect.
Professor Reichel: And I still present papers and actively involved in my organization's annual conferences, including many European conferences. In fact, I'm the NGO representative to the United Nations for the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
Kamran: Well, that's definitely a very full resume. I really appreciate someone with your expertise coming on the show. Policing right now is very much in the spotlight in American - beyond culture, really just society at large.
Kamran: So one of the things that I know we talked about and I'm sure a lot of our listeners are curious about, is as far as policing goes in America, what are its intentions? And kind of tracing it back to the inception of policing itself? There's been kind of a lot circulating recently about police starting actually as slave patrols in the South to return slaves to the masters when they had run away. So if you don't mind, could you kind of give us a brief history of how policing started in America? What was its charter, so to speak, and how that kind of developed?
Professor Reichel: Sure, I can try to do that. When I was first teaching back in the early 70s, as I mentioned, I taught it now at Augusta University in Augusta, Georgia. And because of my that was my first time living in the South. And I was kind of interested in the history of policing in the South, because the only thing that we ever read about in any of the literature and criminal justice and criminology was really about the history of policing in the north. And s one of the first bits of research that I did, was to look at the history of policing specifically in the South and even more specifically in South Carolina and Georgia, and came to learn more about the slave patrols and how they started.
Professor Reichel: And this is very different, as it turns out, because in the North, policing really was responding more to an urbanization problem. In the North there was public drunkenness and mass migration, immigration. There were riots and there were other negative consequences that develop out of urbanization. And finally, we have the modern police department in New York City in 1844 with all of the forerunners in northern cities being more linked to citizen watches and nightwatches.
Professor Reichel: Well in the South because urbanization wasn't really occurring in that fashionI was interested in how and why policing started in those colonies and then eventually the states. And it became obvious very, very quickly, just by reading the legislation, that the Southerners were much less concerned about urbanization, but very much concerned about slaves and the various acts: running away, criminal acts, riots, disturbances that these slaves were engaged in.
Professor Reichel: And that caught me a little bit off guard, back in the early 70s, because I had grown up kind of learning about slavery and knowing that it was bad and horrible, but also not fully appreciating how the slaves themselves were reacting and taking action on their own behalf against their bondage. And as I was reading more about this and reading about the various revolts and the criminal acts - or what were defined as criminal acts -- committed by the slaves against the owners and the owners property. I began understanding that this would be viewed by whites and not just white slave owners, whites in general as a dangerous class - that action needed to be taken against and that we needed to protect ourselves from. And so we started seeing slave patrol legislation developing throughout the southern states beginning in the early seventeen hundreds and what was then the Carolina colony and then moving throughout the southern states, then to the 18th century and even the early 19th century. And those slave patrol acts basically developed citizen patrols from what were then the state militias or the colonial militias even before that, requiring citizens to set up patrols to take action against slaves.
Kamran: So I want to ask along those lines, you made kind of an interesting comment. This is something that's been coming out recently with the "protests" versus "riots". And what's classified as a "dangerous class of people" And I think that right now, a lot of the sentiment that is being echoed is that black Americans are kind of seen by police and by a lot of white America as a dangerous class still. And police are not chartered with uniformly enforcing the law for everybody. It's not the public safety of everybody, but it's kind of police acting on behalf of the elites against what is considered this dangerous class, which many feel is still permeates to this day.
Kamran: Do you know, in your experience what you've researched as far as that, that being an undercurrent that kind of remains from slave patrol times?
Professor Reichel: Well, there are certainly some other research that holds to the well, actually, it's called the minority threat hypothesis. And the idea is that policing not just the United States, but policing around the world develops as a response to the perceived threat posed by minorities, whatever that particular minority might be in the United States or another country.
Professor Reichel: So, yes, I would say that there is a continuing argument that the the idea behind policing is one that developed as a social control mechanism and the people being controlled are typically the minority groups within a country. And the perception by the dominant members of that population in whatever country we're talking about, the perception that the minorities are a dangerous class, that they are going to be, that they are posing a threat,
Professor Reichel: So, yes, I think what you are describing is pretty consistent, especially in terms of, as I said, what is called the minority threat hypothesis.
Kamran: That's interesting especially because I know that I've been seeing — Canada is the one I'm most familiar with just because that's right, our neighbor to the north — But they seem to have very similar types of police violence against the indigenous population there. I hear a little bit of it with Australia and the Aboriginee population I have some relatives in France, I believe, right there right now, it's fairly anti-Muslim in nature. Can you think of any examples as far as situations that feel similar to what black Americans are experiencing this time, maybe on a global scale?
Professor Reichel: Yes, unfortunately, there are examples just all around the country and in Europe, you have the Turks in Austria. In Japan it's the Koreans. Latinos, African-Americans, Native Americans in United States. Indigenous people in both Australia and in Canada. And in fact, it is just happening all over the place. There's a report that comes out by the European Union, not annually, but periodically. And it's — I won't get the title quite right — but 'Minorities in the European Union'. And they've done a couple specifically on Blacks living in the European Union countries.
Professor Reichel: And one statistic that comes to mind is that in London, for example, a black person in London is four times more likely than a white person to have first used against them. In other countries of the European Union, members of the Roma ethnic group are especially heavily policed as the term is sometimes used in the European Union writings. The Roma ethnic groups, especially in Eastern Europe, but also in Central European countries, are very heavily responded to by police and police force. Again, what we're experiencing, the United States-- and this is no way to dismiss it or to say that it happens everywhere so it must be okay-- I'm simply arguing or suggesting that what we see happening in our country is unfortunately not always that unique. And this is a problem that police action, police force against any country, a minority group just is unfortunately, Very, very widespread.
Kamran: And it's interesting because there is you you studied comparative policing, right, which is looking at police as an institution and how it can be created and executed in various countries or any geography which I guess begs the question, do you think policing by nature is racist in countries that have any sort of disparity between different ethnicities and race?
Professor Reichel: I don't like the idea of picking out one particular social institution, like the policing as being racist, because it implies, at least to me, that other social institutions in a country aren't.
Professor Reichel: Yeah, you think about policing. We'll just take criminal justice, for example. Policing certainly plays a role, but so does prosecution. And so does sentencing. So do the juries, all aspects of the criminal justice system from reporting to the police dispatchers. I guess you could say that there are some interesting studies about how information that the police get from police dispatchers, what information the dispatcher himself or herself chooses to pass on to the police officer has a very, very big influence on how the police respond to the situation. So depending upon any implicit bias that the dispatcher might have, maybe he or she is providing information or not including important information when telling the police to go to this particular call and see this particular person. So you can start when you're talking about bias and prejudice and implicit racism. It really goes through all aspects of society, whether it's our school system or our religious institution, finances, everything. And that's, of course, where our policing, not just ours, but any country's policing comes from that country's society. And so to point a finger at the police and yell racist police or racist system may not be incorrect, but it certainly is only part of the picture.
Kamran: Do you have any examples? I know a lot of your work centers around corrections and something that I care a lot about. And there's been a lot of talking. There's been a lot of talk on policing. Is there anything that you noticed as far as in either sentencing or corrections that appears to be fairly biased or something that you would hope to highlight that needs change?
Professor Reichel: Some of the research done on the death penalty, And there's a reason to believe that prosecutors in those states that have the death penalty may be choosing to prosecute and charge a person with a capital crime based..Well, two ways: On the offender's race, but there's even more research in the last 20 years or so suggesting that charging with a capital crime based upon the race of the victim, so that if a person, regardless of whether you're white or black offender, for example, if your victim was white there, seems to be indication that there is a greater likelihood, at least in some jurisdictions, that you'll be charged with the death penalty, the death penalty be sought in your case.
Professor Reichel: If your victim was instead a minority group member, specifically a black person, for example, there is less likelihood that death penalty will be sought.
Professor Reichel: So I think it does show that there are still problems even as you go further along the system and getting into the sentencing stage and even the trial stage.
Kamran: And so just to recap and make sure I understand correctly, you're saying that if you have a black defendant accused of killing a white person, there is a higher likelihood that the death would be thought as opposed to the black defendant who killed another black person?
Professor Reichel: Correct. And even beyond that, if you had a white person who killed a white person, that would increase the likelihood of the death penalty being sought, than if a white person killed a black person.
Kamran: And I want to go back. I recently had a conversation with six police officers outside of a protest in New York. And it's really interesting to me, I was trying to get their perspective and obviously facing a little of initial hostility, but they did actually engage with me and we talked for about an hour. I said, "Do you feel that if you're being charged with protecting and serving and the people, the citizens that pay taxes don't feel protected or served — Do you feel like you're doing your job poorly?"
Kamran: And not one of them said yes. And the attitude that they seemed to have said that we're here to uphold the law and we're here to preserve order. And so anybody that is disturbing order is someone that we are going to act against. It seemed like they had a very nebulous idea of what order was and who order was for And it felt very hostile in that sense.
Kamran: So I ask you, what do you think the police view their function as? What is the specific charter for police in America?
Professor Reichel: Well, that brings up, I guess, two kinds of issues. One of which is when we talk about police in America. We aren't talking about a single entity. We have more than 18,000 different law enforcement agencies, most of them at the city and county level throughout the country. That's very, very unusual around the world. Switzerland and Mexico are about the only other two countries in the world that have what's called a decentralized policing system like that. Most everywhere else there is great much greater unification or centralization of policing. So we would talk about the idea that there is a mandate for American policing. We are forgetting that police respond to city level politicians. Some – county sheriffs – will go with the county politicians. There are state level police. There's federal police. And at each of those levels, you're going to have different kinds of standards that the police are to abide by.
Professor Reichel: So depending upon....Let's just take city level police. One city's police chief and city council might be very supportive of the idea of community policing. And the members of the police officers are hired based upon that police chiefs and that city council's perspective as to how policing should operate in their city. Three cities away maybe even in the same state, you might have a very different police chief and a very different city council who believe that it's most important for the police to engage in control mechanisms and to clean up the streets and to engage in broken windows, policing opportunities.
Professor Reichel: I I don't want to not answer your question, but I think that the question is phrased in such a way that it's making an assumption about police throughout the United States as having some kind of common or central mandate that they're responding to. And I don't think that we can look at it that way. I think it's much more city, county, state perspective and how the philosophy of city councils, county commissioners, state governors, all of those kind of things might influence how policing is carried out.
Kamran: I think right now the conversation for a lot of people has actually been how to change things and who to hold accountable. It also brings me to my next point, which is not necessarily strictly about race, but it's something that's been coming up a lot in the Black Lives Matter protest, which is changing police and defunding police has become a big topic. You having worked on crime prevention at a fairly high level...the U.N., I don't know if there is a higher body internationally to speak about that kind of thing. I'm curious if you could share any examples you've come across that have been effective reforms and if you think that any of those are applicable to what we can do in America.
Professor Reichel: Well, there are several. And I'd be happy to go over a few of those.
Professor Reichel: I do want to reiterate that if you want to make bring about change and make adjustments to what we are currently doing, especially in the United States, it's going to be very, very difficult to talk about national change.
Professor Reichel: It's even going to be a little bit difficult to talk about statewide change, because then you're going to have cities and counties who have some independent jurisdictions that would have to be brought into this as well.
Professor Reichel: It's important to keep in mind that these really can't be or at least it would be very, very difficult for them to be national suggestions just because of the way that policing in the U.S. is set up.
Professor Reichel: Now, having said that, there were some suggestions made... President Obama set up a commission during his second term, if I recall correctly, that involved some aspects of police reform. But one of them was a suggestion that in Great Britain, for example, they have an inspector general who oversees all of the police in Great Britain, England and Wales. And in doing so, they assure that throughout England and Wales, that country, that the police standards are being followed and that if they don't if they see a particular agency that they need to call on the carpet, if you will, then the inspector general in Great Britain can do this.
Professor Reichel: And there are some suggestions that not at the national level, but at least at the state level, maybe we need to have inspector generals or some term that would be appropriate like that. And that inspector general at the state level of police would have some influence or some say about how the city police departments throughout the state and the county sheriff's departments and the state police as well. What kind of training they have? What kind of responsibilities they have? I think that's something that would be well worth looking at.
Kamran: So I've seen a couple of independent commissions being set up in the U.S. and I think the general critique of them is that it's still kind of the police enforcing the police. It's still kind of an insiders club. And it's not strictly just police officers, but as far as what you're talking about, further down the line, the D.A. the judges... The entire criminal justice system seems to feel like it's one side that tends to work within itself and not want to prosecute its own. And so I think that's kind of the big critique I've heard of any sort of commission or any sort of investigation, other places that it has to be done by someone that is very much external to policing as a system. Do you think there's credence to that critique?
Professor Reichel: Very much so. Yea I'm also familiar with more the — at the local level. City police commissions operate at the local level, and I know exactly what you're talking about because those individuals who end up on those commissions are oftentimes interested in applying for those commissions because of various interests that they might have, but the commissions are oftentimes appointed by politicians, by city council members, by the governor, and all of those political aspects are going to obviously have a role in these kinds of people that are put on the commission.
Professor Reichel: I don't think that that very real problem is always a good reason to dismiss the idea. I'm not suggesting you were dismissing it, but I think there might still be because it has worked in other countries. There might be some reason to at least give attention to that as an option.
Kamran: And I want to take it one step further. Even right now, you hear defunding the police that has become a big rallying cry. And I've had a number of conversations with people. And I think the general viewpoint tends to be you cannot reform something that was broken from its inception, which is, again, part of why I've been interested in the history of police.
Kamran: I think there's definitely a lot of interesting points as far as if you were to give the same attention to harm reductive preventative social work — For instance, if you were to help appoint staff and resources towards homelessness, you would reduce a lot of police work related to that. If you were to treat drug and opioid crisis as something as a public health issue that wasn't criminalized, you, you'd reduce the tremendous amount of the police caseload. And the idea of having everything treated on a criminal basis rather than on a social basis, I think is the main component there.
Kamran: The critics of that will say, well, of course, we need police. We can't just get rid of police. That's how we have safety, police enforce safety. There tends to be this big emotional divide as far as do police bring about safety or are they actually bring about more harm by criminalizing, what should not be treated as criminal people or acts. So having actually spoken to the United Nations as far as crime prevention. you think there's a way to reduce police budgeting and still keep society safe? And then further, have you seen a model if we were to do that, that you would recommend trying to replicate.
Professor Reichel: I'm a big fan of training and education. Not surprising, I suppose, given my career. But I think that we can learn from some of the European countries where police training, for example, takes a much different form than it does in the United States.
Professor Reichel: In the United States, a police officer might get... I think the average is around four or five months of training. In much of Europe and Asia as well, people who become police officers —it wouldn't be unusual for them to go to a police college, for example. Much like getting a bachelor's degree is done here. The police in many European countries go to a a university or to a college that is specifically for policing. That's their chosen occupation. And so they'll take three or four years and get the equivalent of a bachelor's degree before they become a full fledged police officer They're being trained in Europe on issues of race relations, community relations. They learn about law. They take basic law classes. Maybe in your first year of law school, they are. Becoming prepared to be police in a very different manner than what police officers are here.
Professor Reichel: And I think that makes a big difference. I think when you take a 20 year old and put them through four months of training—much of which is going to be in the shooting range and learning about the specific laws they're supposed to enforce—and learning very little about working with mental health issues, working with the community and community relations. We just aren't training and educating our police in the same way that police in other countries are being trained and educated. And I think we can improve on that.
Kamran: Definitely. I want to press a little bit more. You talked a lot about the impact of training, and I don't think anyone would argue that more training is bad. But I think that, again, the people who are saying defund is that there's only there's still a limit, even if you were to train police officers the right way, just the tasks that we give police are by nature criminal. Police are enforcing laws and trying to enforce laws and criminalizing people as a result of that is not the way to go about harm reduction or even necessarily crime prevention. It's kind of like a punitive after the fact. So I'm still trying to see if there is some value to the idea of shrinking police departments entirely, both in size of the number of officers as well as the scope of things they're tasked with and reappropriating some of that money towards personnel that could be used again towards helping drug usage, homelessness. A lot of the things that police traditionally criminalize that you could argue are social or public health issues. Do you think there is value to that argument?
Professor Reichel: Other countries are having the same kind of problems that we are. We kind of started off our conversation, or at least early on in our conversation, we were talking about how sub-Saharan African folks living in the European Union, are subjected to discrimination and racism. So policing has this kind of problem everywhere. And I don't think that the Europeans or Asians or anybody else has come up with the best answer.
Professor Reichel: But I don't know of any place where, first of all, that's police free Every country that I know of has a police force. Some of them use that police force differently than others. Getting to your point, in some cases, the police aren't responsible for or at least the first call for mental health issues. In some places, the police are not always used to handle homeless issues, for example, or responding to calls where the issue seems to be one related, not so much to a crime being committed but to a social problem existing. So I think there is certainly room to look at who has responsibility for what and to look at policing in the United States as maybe needing to respond to fewer types of instances. And I'm not sure that the police would necessarily mind that.
Professor Reichel: I know that when I was more actively teaching, I would ask my students who had plans to become police officers, raise of hands, how many of you would like to be a police officer some day and say, thirty hands go up. I say, well, how many of you would like to work with individuals who have mental health issues and no hands go up. But we end up those 30 people who said, I want to be a police officer, as I tried to explain to them once they get hired. That's exactly the kind of issues that they're going to be asked to work with. And in a sense, they aren't even signing up for this. So I agree completely that policing in the United States and I would even say other countries are oftentimes responsible for expected to be responsible for such a great variety of social ills that it's in many ways very unfair.
Professor Reichel: Now is the way to respond to that by cutting their funding, or repositioning is a better word i think of it, their funds? I say, yeah. I think that's certainly worth a try to change things around, shake things up a little bit and say you are not going to be our first port of call for many of these issues.
Kamran: One question that actually just came to me because I didn't realize that you had spoken with many individuals that went on to become police. But right now, to me, it feels like there's just been a total breakdown between civilians and police as far as understanding one another's perspective. Police that I've seen I've read about and I've talked to seem to feel that no one appreciates what they do. People seem to feel like the police don't understand at all what we're going through.. Well, what black Americans specifically are going through Do you have any theories on why there seems to be such a communication breakdown between civilians and police?
Professor Reichel: I would agree that there is that great grand breakdown and even just my former students that I'm now Facebook friends with or in the community, that I will see occasionally. They don't feel appreciated
Professor Reichel: I used to have guest speakers come into my classes I would have police officers come in.
Professor Reichel: And I always remember one police chief who happened to be female and also happened to be one of my former students. And she would always talk to my students, my police officers to be and explain how important from her perspective it was to maintain contact with non-police officers. She was married to a police officer. Most of his friends before they got married were police officers. And she basically said, when I got married, I told him "We were going to make sure that we hang out with people who aren't involved in law enforcement."
Professor Reichel: And she was trying to tell my students, I think successfully so, how important it was for police, at least for her to have contacts away from policing. And I think the point she was making, at least what I took from it, is that she understood that police are rather insulated. It's very, very difficult for other people for us to understand what the job of policing is. One of my other guest speakers used to always say, "We all know military officers. We all know school principals. We all know pastors and ministers and priests". And my guest speaker was saying "Police also know all those people. But we tend to know the worst part of them. We tend to know about the priest who misbehaves, about the school principal who is having to investigate for drugs or other kinds of illegal activities. And when you think about constantly seeing the worst of presumably good people or of all people. I mean, it's got to be very, very difficult situation to come in. So I think police officers are talking about not being appreciated, not being understood. I think it's those kind of things that they are trying to express.
Kamran: It's interesting you brought up kind of the type of individuals that might be attracted to the job as the toll on the job can have on them - both seem like relevant factors. But one thing I've always thought it's not the highest paying position. I've always wondered if that might be part of the problem.
Kamran: If you have to do something, it's very difficult and potentially life threatening for a lower salary. If you have a lot of better options, I don't know if you're going to want to do that, and I'm not try to be critical or mean to anyone there. But to me, it just seems like a logical solution for that situation.
Kamran: But I think the flip side of that that other people have brought up is if you look at teachers, right? Who tend to be another example of people who are kind of consistently underpaid. You'd be very shocked to see the type of people that we expect in policing end up as teachers and teachers tend to have very difficult job dealing with students can be emotionally erratic. People have brought up the example of nurses or EMT who aren't necessarily paid as much as they should be, who have to deal with similar kind of patients with mental problems, violent patients.
Kamran: And I think the police lose a lot of leeway when I think people bring up those examples, because it's like if a nurse were to restrain someone in a chokehold, so much so that they died, that would be kind of like horrific, that be all over the news. There wouldn't be a justification of that. And they have a similarly stressful job. So what is it about police that kind of gives them that ability to excuse themselves? I don't know if that's as much of a question, as much as an observation, but it seems to me that the outline for the case that you outlined as far as what the toll that it might take mentally or I don't think is entirely absent from other jobs that don't see the same kind of violence against civilians. Do you think that's a fair point?
Professor Reichel: I do. That's a very fair and relevant point. I think that first of all, let me clarify that there used to be actually the research that was done on police authoritarianism, the idea that a certain kind of personality type is attracted to police work and that personality type is an authoritarian type. And that research has been, if not outright dismissed. It certainly isn't anything that people are looking at much more as being a way to understand police departments. Instead, it seems that the the job of policing, the training that is engaged in, to the extent that there becomes a certain type of individual or a certain type of police officer is not the result of that person having a particular personality as much as it is the kind of job that they are involved in.
Professor Reichel: And I also want to point out that many of my own students, as an example, who would do internships before they graduate and police work, for example, and some of them would say even just one semester that I spent doing right alongside or working in the police department. This really isn't what I thought I was going to be getting into.
Professor Reichel: And I don't want to do this. And so they would change their major and go into something else. But we've also had, interestingly, students taking a class in criminal justice and deciding know, I think I might do an internship as well. And my my major was social work or one case was a music major. And they found that they really enjoyed particular aspects of policing. They enjoyed going into the community. They enjoyed interacting with members of the community and helping people and helping victims and understanding that these people who had been hurt and harmed and these people need assistance as well. Sometimes police officers can do that. So I guess the point I'm trying to make is that I've had people who might be coming from a very, for lack of a better word, social work kind of perspective. And deciding the police work is something that they would be interested in doing.
Kamran: I think that's about all the time we have today, I really appreciate your time, your expertise. One thing I try to do with guests, this being a podcast that is really centered around a conversation being called let's talk about race, I see, in my opinion, kind of a breakdown of civil discourse. I'm really hoping to try and get people to talk to one another, get outside of their bubble to try to get facts in their discussion. You being an academic, someone, obviously, I think that cares a lot about, as you said, teaching facts. What is what are the conversations you would like to see people have? What are the things you would like to educate themselves on?
Professor Reichel: I think there are opportunities to interact with police officers especially ones at various stages in their career. I think it's important if, as you're pointing out, you can get them to talk....It's not always easily done. But police, are — I'm not trying to be an apologist at all — but I know that there are police officers who are very, very upset with how they see other police behaving. Unfortunately, they might not always believe that they have an opportunity to speak out or to do interviews and those kinds of things. But I know that there are many police who who wish that things were different. But if those opportunities ever present, your listeners to take advantage of it, to meet with police. If there are places in your local community where you are able to get involved with law enforcement decisions, Do so. Whether it's at the voting booth and listening to what your — police chiefs are usually appointed— but your district attorneys are oftentimes elected. Listen to what your district attorneys have to say about their interaction with police and what they're doing with prosecution Ask the questions of the politicians. How would you respond to these situations?
Professor Reichel: Most schools around the country, including both junior colleges or two year, four year colleges, have criminal justice programs. Think about maybe signing up for one of those classes just as a citizen wanting to find out more about law enforcement. And in that class, in all likelihood, are going to be some law enforcement personnel. There are opportunities out there and some of them are formal. Many of them are informal. And I think taking advantage of those opportunities when they arise can be good for both the police officer and for the regular citizen.
Kamran: That's something that I'm trying to do personally, I think that would be beneficial on both sides bridging the divide between us and them police and civilian. I'm definitely pro it on both sides. But Professor Reichel, I really appreciate your time. Really appreciate your expertise. And hopefully we can see some change happen.
Professor Reichel: I agree. And you're very much welcome.