On this week’s special episode, communications consultant Yael Bar Tur, police chief Art Acevedo, and Secret Service communications chief Anthony Guglielmi joined Rafael A. Mangual to discuss law enforcement in the time of the Internet.
Audio Transcript
Rafael Mangual: I'm really excited about this conversation. For those of you listening who don't know, my name is Rafael Mangual. I'm a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. I'm also head of research for our Policing and Public Safety Initiative. In another life, before I went to law school, I did communication strategy for another policy organization, where I was in charge of managing our social media presence. This is a really cool clashing of two worlds of mine. I'm really excited for the conversation. I'm going to set it up really quick before I introduce our other speakers. Then we'll just go right into the discussion, which I hope you all will find fruitful.
We live very much at the height of the information age, but in a lot of ways, we also live at the height of the misinformation age. Social media, I think has proven to be one of the most powerful tools for the dissemination of information. But it's also proven to be a real challenge for certain institutions to navigate, particularly because criticism of those institutions and the demonization of those institutions has been facilitated in a way that never existed before. We live in a country of nearly 340 million people, almost half of whom are walking around with cell phone cameras every single day. We're all really journalists in one way or another. What I think that's done is it's created the impression that statistically rare things happen all the time.
If you are able to get one video of a negative police-citizen interaction for every day of the year, that's 365 incidents, which statistically is not a lot if you are taking into account the fact that we have more than 300 million people in the country, more than 600,000 police officers and working across 18,000 police departments, making tens of millions of contacts a year. But it's really easy to create the impression that those kinds of negative interactions are much more common than they are. I think that's created a challenge that police departments have, up until recently, really been struggling to navigate. One of the things that I've been encouraged by is that more and more law enforcement agencies from the federal level down to the state local level have been taking the initiative to manage and own their own messages by having a presence on social media.
I wanted to have a conversation about what the opportunities and challenges are in this space. To join me in this conversation, we have three really fantastic guests, including Chief Art Acevedo who has served as a police chief of the Miami Police Department, the Austin Police Department, the Houston Police Department—one of the most accomplished police executives of our time. We've also got Anthony Guglielmi, who is currently managing communications for the Secret Service and served as the Chief of Communications in the Chicago Police Department. We also have Yael Bar Tur, who is a social media consultant to the stars. Just a really fantastic communications professional who, for six years, served as the Director of Social Media and Digital Strategy for the New York Police Department. I want to thank you all for joining me for this conversation I'm really excited to have you. I'll jump right into it with a question for Chief Acevedo. What do you see right now as the biggest opportunities or value-adds of having a social media presence as a police department? What are the gains to be had, why do this?
Chief Art Acevedo: Hey. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for having me on. It's an honor to be on with the two other guests. To me, I was an early adopter I guess of social media. I joined Twitter in April 2012. I think that, when you think about young people and you think about the flow of information, it's moving at a million miles a minute. If you're not paying attention, especially in a world of bots and disinformation and intentional disinformation by foreign governments that are trying to tear apart trust in this country between law enforcement and the communities and even the people in this country and the government, it's critical that we in law enforcement and in public service, regardless of which agency or which domain or government—it's critical for us to be pushing out information.
It's got to be timely, it's got to be quick. Most importantly, it's got to be transparent. I think it's a tool that, as an executive, I've used. If you look at my account, I've made mistakes, I sometimes get a little crazy on there. But at the end of the day, I really believe that transparency breeds trust, familiarity breeds trust, and information-sharing breeds trust. This is the reason that in, my departments, I've made it a priority, and I've made it a personal priority as an executive.
Rafael Mangual: I appreciate that. It sounds like the opportunity here is to own a message and be a source of information that maybe counters some of the misinformation out there. Anthony, I want to get a sense from you. Do you agree with that? Do you think there are other potential value-adds and opportunities, particularly from a departmental social media presence perspective? A lot of departments now have their own Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts. A lot of precincts have their own Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts. What do you see as the main value-add here?
Anthony Guglielmi: Absolutely. Thanks again for having me on. I couldn't say it better. I first started using social media in 2009. Baltimore PD, when I was running communications there, was I think the second police department ever to start pushing out real-time crime information on a social platform. The reason why is we wanted to find a way to better connect with the people that we serve. Social media has allowed us to take our message and our story and our brand direct-to-consumer, to those who are either in our communities or are very closely following our interests. It's a top of the funnel approach. That's usually led with people on the top, like Chief Acevedo who understand the importance of having a direct connection with the community, both in person and in virtual forums like this.
Rafael Mangual: Yael, I want to direct the same question to you, although in a slightly different way. You've actually been the one executing these strategies on probably the biggest stage in the law enforcement community, the NYPD. In terms of someone who actually has done this job, has it been your experience that these are indeed the value-adds? Are there things that you've seen as benefits that maybe you weren't expecting to see?
Yael Bar Tur: Hi. Absolutely. It's been incredibly beneficial. I think one of the things that we did pretty early on in the NYPD is decentralize the social media accounts, which was pretty ambitious at the time. Thankfully, Commissioner Bratton was very instrumental to leading the charge there. What we did is, we allowed people in their neighborhoods to speak directly to their cops and hear directly from their cops with idea being that, it's one thing to have a message coming from the police department that's more official or maybe talking about city level things, and it’s another thing to know what's going on on your block. That is very beneficial and has great feedback from both the cops and the community. But there are a lot of things that I think are really nice.
One of the things that I didn't expect, or really didn't see coming, because I had done some research about this beforehand, is the internal effects of it. I thought that was really interesting to see how social media was being used sometimes as a way to affect morale, which is a really tricky topic right now in policing. If you, through social media, can highlight your cops or give them a shout out, recognize their good work, and then you see that good work being amplified by the media, it definitely had an effect that I personally didn't see coming. It was really nice to be able to give police officers that stage to talk about themselves, which is something they really hadn't had before in many police departments.
Rafael Mangual: I want to stay with you for a second, as someone who has executed these strategies on behalf of the nation's largest police department. You said that Commissioner Bratton was very much open to this approach, which doesn't surprise me in the least. He is, in my humble opinion, a very innovative police executive and always has had that streak. But I suspect that police executives in general are a little risk-averse, maybe aren't as comfortable or well versed in other departments. Are there particular things that maybe some police executives don't fully appreciate from your perspective as an executor? Are there challenges that you think still need to be overcome in terms of getting departments on board?
Yael Bar Tur: There are a lot of challenges. I think there is a great willingness to participate now, which is great. I tell police chiefs when I talk to them, "You don't have to like this. It's okay. I'm not expecting you to go and be on Instagram in your personal life. I know I don't participate as much as maybe the average person either, but you do have to recognize that this is a tool. This is a tool for creating relationships with your community and strengthening relationships." More often than not, and this happened a lot at NYPD, too, is we'd have to tell people no. We'd have to say, "You shouldn't have your own social media account." There definitely is more of an inclination now to participate. Unfortunately, and I think this is true of a lot of public sector industries, not just policing, is that there's still a difficulty in using it correctly.
If you look at Boston after the Boston bombing, Boston PD was doing some great stuff on social media. But it was so unique. It was still, "Wow, the police is on social media." Those days are over. Now the expectation is not only that you be on social media, but that you'd be very good at it. That you be transparent, that you'd be engaging, that you put out good content. That's difficult for a lot of people because, for police executives, it’s necessarily something that they do on a day-to-day basis. It is still a challenge to try to use it effectively. But thankfully, I think a lot of police departments that I speak to, they recognize the importance of it. If they don't, I always ask them, "Have you had any protests in your community related to Minneapolis, related to George Floyd, related to something that happened very far away? If you do, if you had, which we know everybody had, that's because of social media. If you're not out there, then your story is being told by others."
Rafael Mangual: Anthony, I'm going to ask the same question of you. Is there something that you've seen throughout your career that law enforcement agencies haven't quite come to fully appreciate that you think that they should? If there was one thing that you need departments to get better at, to take full advantage of the benefits of the social media presence, what is it?
Anthony Guglielmi: I can say this now that I'm here. But I think the federal government can learn a lot from state and local police leaders. Speaking for the secret service, we have a global operation in protecting essentially the symbol of America and really the nation's preeminent agency for investigating all types of cybercrimes and financial systems. Yet, we were probably one of the latest agencies to jump on social media. When departments were doing this in the early to mid-2000s, I think the federal government has just been slow to catch up to state and local domestic policing. I think there's a lot of room to grow on, on the federal side in terms of the right way to use social media to better connect with communities, so that people feel like their federal government is working in their local neighborhood and local communities. That's certainly an area that I hope to grow here. We have a very robust social team and are planning to push out more positive content about what the secret service does each day.
Rafael Mangual: Chief Acevedo, I think you're probably one of the more savvy police executives when it comes to social media presence. You've built an incredibly large following. I think you've proven yourself to be a reliable source of information and also someone who's regularly active, which I think is a huge part of being effective on social media. When I was doing this back in the day, my big pet peeve was that you needed to have content coming out on a regular basis. If you weren't tweeting regularly, you just weren't going to be able to build out a following. My question to you is, is this something that you see the next generation of police executives building into their portfolios? Or do you see a generational gap between willingness and skill when it comes to social media engagement? What would you tell the next generation of police executives with respect to how they should go about managing their brands online?
Chief Art Acevedo: Look. I think that not enough of them are . . . There's 18,000 police departments, give or take. Many are using it effectively, but there's still a lot of folks that are hesitant to use it, especially police chiefs, because the most replaceable person in a police department, especially in this environment, is the police chief. They're falling like flies. I think it really makes a lot of folks pause out of fear that they're going to make a mistake and maybe lose their jobs. But I believe that our number one responsibility is to build trust. As the head of an organization, as the most visible person and the policymaker, the more that the public gets to hear from you, see you, see what you're up to, and hopefully you're effective at it, the greater the trust you build.
That's good for the police officers, men and women that you're leading, and the community. I've used it as a chief, and I've taken a lot of criticism. People think, "This guy's a hound." What they don't get, is that what a better way . . . For example, Hurricane Harvey, when we're telling people to stay home. I started using Periscope when it existed, actually putting out information live. Our 911 system was completely backed up, 10,000 calls were pending, and people couldn't get through, but as a result of what we were doing, people started actually using Twitter to communicate that they were trapped, to ask for help. I in turn would send that to my headquarters and then they would dispatch people.
The more you use it, I don't see how you can be successful and achieve your full potential as an organization, unless the department head and the organization itself are on social media. The other thing I think is, really important, the fact that it has to be a 24-hour operation. All of my departments, what was happening is that we have these real-time crime centers, yet they weren't pushing out information. That was their job, so we made sure we got them training, so that when the helicopters were flying overhead in the neighborhood at 3 o'clock in the morning— Anna Sabana in Austin created #whatthehelicopter. The good thing about that is not only to tell people, give them information about what was going on, but it also showed the value of air operations in terms of public safety. It's a huge win, and I'm hoping that it'll continue to grow as we move forward.
Rafael Mangual: It seems to me like one of the challenges in terms of navigating a social media presence as a police department is managing the reality that you're going to use one platform, but you're going to need to communicate to different constituencies. We've heard a little bit about how we can use social media to build trust with communities. I want to talk more about that in a little bit, but one of your other constituencies is the rank and file. I talk to a lot of beat cops as part of the work that I do in my journalism. They are very, very aware as to the messages that departments are putting out on social media.
Sometimes it's really heartening for them to see the department "have their back." Other times I've heard that, "Man, I wish the PD would get out in front of us of this, or would protect us or defend us in some way." Yael, has that been your experience? To what degree is it a challenge to balance a social media account as not only a source of information for the broader public, but also a way to connect with and stay engaged with local cops?
Yael Bar Tur: It's a really tough balance because sometimes the messages don't align exactly as you would like them to. We always, at the NYPD, tried to make sure that the broader New York community was our first audience, but never lose sight of the cops because the cops are looking at that too. They're getting information from it. Sometimes, just being a large bureaucratic organization, they might sometimes get things on social media before they've received them from their supervisors. It was definitely a tough line to walk, but I think when we saw it happening, we started to pay more attention to it and make sure that orders went down to police officers before they were announced on social media. Just to make sure that officers knew that they weren't expected to learn about things with the public, that things are communicated to them directly from their supervisors.
Rafael Mangual: Anthony, I want to get your sense as well because you worked in a department that was embroiled in public outrage after a critical incident with Laquan McDonald. A lot of police officers I talked to in the CPD were consistently communicating, in the months and years that followed, that they just felt like the department had become really cautious and that it didn't always have their back. It seemed to me like they were really starving for, I guess affection is one word you could use there, from the department. A way to reiterate, in a public way, that they weren't the problem. Is that something that you were aware of in your management of these kinds of incidents? Does it remain a challenge? What would your advice be to other departments who are dealing with the same thing?
Anthony Guglielmi: Rafael, for too long, the police officers in Chicago were finding out what's happening in their department by Twitter or watching the 6 o’clock news, because the last people that we told were the officers that worked there, that were doing the work. Probably one of my biggest professional regrets is not building an internal communications function much earlier in my career. We did that in Chicago. We ended up building a whole office dedicated exclusively to informing our workforce about issues that they might hear about in the news, and arm them to be ambassadors for part of the problem. Now that's not going to solve every malcontent, but it certainly allowed us to form a connection with those that work for us, because they truly are our greatest assets, the men and women that do the job every day.
Rafael Mangual: I want to talk a little bit about critical incidents, because this, I think, has been the source of a lot of angst directed at police departments around the country. I do think there've been some missed opportunities for police departments to get out in front of incidents and be more nimble and quick in communicating really important contextualizing details about police-involved shootings, for example. I'm starting to see departments do this a lot more now where, in the wake of a police shooting, they'll announce that the incident happened. They'll give whatever details they can, but when possible, they'll also include, for example, a picture of the gun that was recovered at the scene so that it becomes clear like, "Hey, this wasn't an unarmed person who wasn't resisting." They are relatively quick, although I think they could be quicker sometimes, to release body camera footage. One of the other things that I've seen is that a lot of departments are now narrating body camera footage in a way that highlights some of the really important details that the public may not catch in just a straight watch-through.
Chief Acevedo, I want to go to you first. To what degree do you think it's been useful to have social media as a tool to manage the police department's response in the wake of a critical incident. Are there things that you think have worked particularly well or things that you would like to see departments try more often?
Chief Art Acevedo: I think that what's happened over the years is a lot of times folks that want to create mistrust and tear down the relationship will post a snippet of a critical incident or some of the cop-watch type of folks. Some of them are legitimately wanting to just simply show the full picture, while others will only show the police reaction or the outcome of the police critical incident but they'll never show what led up to it though. They won't provide the context. They'll just show angles that makes it look like the cops did something wrong. By actually being able to put out your own information, your own photos, your own videos that actually bring and provide the context, you're able to quickly push back on that false narrative. Because if you don't frame the truth, and you don't frame your message based on the evidence and based on the truth, and you allow that false narrative to take off, good luck. Once it grows feet, good luck trying to put that pace back in the tube. For us, it's been really, really important, I think. Really, really critical to put out information.
Unfortunately, even to this day, too often, we're not putting out information. Recently there was a shooting in Michigan where there was a big debate about whether they should release the officer's name. I talked to the police executive. I said, "Look, the name's going to get out, whether you put it out or not. By not putting it out in a timely manner, that's just making the public lose a little trust in your organization. But the key to, before you put it out, is making sure that the officer knows, that we do a quick risk assessment, that we put some directed patrols in their home and that their social media, whether it's theirs or their families, have the right security measures. So none of them get blindsided. Information has to be put out, you have to frame it yourself because if you don't, again, there's a lot of efforts to try to put out misinformation."
Rafael Mangual: Anthony, I want to go to you next because in the city of Chicago last year, there was an incident in which there was a police-involved shooting and somehow a message got out on social media that it was an unarmed child that was shot and killed, and that turned out to be completely false. But by the time the truth got out, so much public outrage had spread over social media that you saw the downtown area get swamped, and stores were ransacked. There was just a ton of property destruction along the Mag Mile. Was that a learning, teaching moment? What, if anything, would you add to the chief's remarks there?
Anthony Guglielmi: I had an identical situation happen to me in Chicago. We had a young man tragically take his own life, after being pursued by police, with a gun. By the time the officers got to this young man, it was too late. He had already succumbed to his injuries. But the community heard gunshots and they saw police chasing him moments before, and immediately on social media, it was put out that the Chicago police had killed a young man. It was aggravated by the fact that one of the people on social media was a large community influencer in the South Side of Chicago. I'll leave the names out. It turned viral within seconds. Probably 30 minutes before the public information office was even notified that we had an incident, it was blowing up all over social media.
A huge learning lesson for us as public information officers to listen. Don't just go on there to post what you want to post to help your story, but listen to what people are saying on these platforms, especially in a situation like that. Do everything you can to correct the narrative. I think, going back full circle to what you started with, that's why police departments put out pictures of weapons. That's why they're putting out as much information that's accurate as possible during a critical incident, because we want to show transparency and we want to also show that there's some trust in us to figure out what the facts are.
Rafael Mangual: Yael, I want to go to you. What would you say if you had to list them out, what are the best practices for a department dealing with the aftermath of a critical incident? How important is speed in terms of the response? What pieces of content have the biggest effect, are the most important in terms of managing the public reaction? I'll open it to you.
Yael Bar Tur: Speed is very, very important. When I talk about crisis communications, I like to divide it into before, during, and after. There's a lot you can do to prepare before. Anthony alluded to it a little bit, but monitoring even small tricks, like we you would have drafts in our cell phones of potential critical incident tweets. Monitoring, making sure you're aware of the situation. Then during a crisis, as you said, speed is very, very important. We'd always have a rule that there has to be a second set of eyes that goes out on every tweet, because as much as speed is important, crisis and stress is also the time when people usually tend to make mistakes because it can be very stressful.
Then just more bigger picture thing, I think it's important to remember during these incidents that your job is not necessarily to get likes or to get people to like you, or to even turn a situation around. Your job is to give out the information and to frame it in a way that's very easy to consume. I see sometimes police departments might have an excellent message or a really important thing to say, but they'll put it out on Twitter in the form of a press release attachment. Or they'll post maybe a really long video that people will have a hard time watching. Not only do you now need to put out that information, you also need to make it very, very easy to consume. If it's putting it in a Twitter thread or if it's creating titles for your video so people can watch it without sound, the stakes are very high right now. As people are scrolling through information, they're going to gravitate towards what's easy for them to consume. You can't just put out your good messaging, you have to actually make sure that it fits well into the platform you're doing it, if it's Twitter or if it's an Instagram story.
Rafael Mangual: My late colleague, George Kelling, one of the things he always reiterated to me, and in his work, and in his public speaking engagements was the idea that police departments derived their legitimacy from the communities that they serve. I do think that effective social media communication by police departments is a really important way to build trust with their community, to engage with their community, and to keep their community informed. But of course, social media platforms give you access to a much broader constituency than, say, is just in your community. Even within your community, there may only be a slice of people who are actually on social media. To what degree is it a challenge for police departments to sift through messages and feedback that maybe don't reflect the concerns of their community? Is that a challenge in terms of managing presence—I'm going to direct this to Anthony first—to curate the message that you're putting out in a way that accounts for the fact that it's going to be heard by everyone around the world.
Anthony Guglielmi: That's certainly a challenge, especially when you're dealing with an organization like Chicago, which is the second-largest police department in the country, is you get a lot of people that are just interested in Chicago from all over the world. Siphoning through who actually cares about these issues can be quite the task. I still think it's worthwhile for a dedicated person on staff to, as much as possible, listen and monitor social feeds. To the question of reaching your local audience. There is a tool, there are tools that can go directly to people that live in your communities. Nextdoor is a big example. The last police department I was in, Fairfax County, Virginia, Nextdoor was one of our most powerful tools to get information direct-to-consumer. It has such a high engagement rate in that particular locality that every neighborhood was integrated into the Nextdoor platform, which was integrated into county government. We had a variety of social media tools from Twitter, Facebook, Nextdoor, you name it. We were able to reach a variety of audiences. I looked at it as, each platform is a different tool for me to reach a different audience.
Rafael Mangual: I see that we've got a pretty sizable audience and I want to open things up to questions in a little bit. For those of you listening who have something you'd like to ask one on the panelists, just request to speak and I'll try and bring you guys up one by one. I want to ask a couple other questions. Chief Acevedo, one of the other burgeoning social media platforms that we're seeing is not just a communications platform, but one where citizens can actually report crime and disorder. I'm thinking here of the Citizen app. At least here in New York City, almost everyone I know in my neighborhood is using the app, either to just get a sense of what safety's like in the neighborhood, but also to report things that they see. Do you see this as something that departments should be monitoring to inform their deployments? How useful is it to keep an eye on an app like that versus waiting for, say, the monthly police community precinct meeting to get a sense of what the public's concerns are?
Anthony Guglielmi: I think the police department in the 21st century has to monitor the entire cyberspace, the entire social media space. You have to monitor it for information and for open-source information. When your community is taking the time to actually engage and to sign up for these platforms or get on these platforms, be able to communicate with you. If you make it a one-way communication, you're missing a boat. You should monitor it. You should engage with whatever platform it is. You should utilize that information and look for patterns, to look for themes and to look for concerns that may be legitimate, that may inform you in terms of your policing strategies, deployment strategies, and your priorities. Whether it's Nextdoor, which by the way, I was very proud that in Austin and Houston, we really were able to expand the heck out of the number of the neighborhoods using Nextdoor.
If you're not on it, you really are missing the boat. There could be a nugget there that you desperately should have learned about. If you miss it, and it blows up on you, and it comes out that you had access to it but you didn't bother looking for it, I think there's some consequences. Information is not just about what you're putting out. It's what you're receiving, where you're receiving it. Wherever you can receive data and information and intelligence, you should be monitoring it. I think it's very key.
Rafael Mangual: I see we've got a couple of questions from the audience. One last one for each of the panelists, and then we'll get to those. In 10 seconds each, what are your biggest social media wins and fails over your career? We'll start with you, Yael.
Yael Bar Tur: Oh, wow. Just like that, in 10 seconds. I'll pick two wins. I think the decentralization of the social media accounts has been really, really helpful and is still a helpful tool. As well as what we did on a citywide level, which is an attempt to humanize the NYPD. Even if that means using a different voice or just showing stories of officers that go beyond the officer saving somebody or the officer being a hero, but showing their human side. Those are the two biggest wins. Biggest fail, there are of course many. There are funny ones. There are not so funny ones. We started a role of a digital communication officer in every precinct. I really would've liked to seen that grow into something more than a part-time assigned duty. I would've liked to see a role in the precinct where there was an officer dedicated to community outreach in a digital way. If it means emails, newsletters, connecting with the community, running the social media, of course. I think that's probably the next step when it comes to modern police-community relations.
Rafael Mangual: Anthony?
Anthony Guglielmi: I think I have two big personal wins with social media. Like Yael said, to me it was never about getting the largest audience size. Just where I happened to work were large American cities and certainly with their fair share of challenges and violent crime. The best win for me was when we would put out a critical incident, a shooting or a violent crime, immediately getting community intelligence back, whether it be a description of a car, or they saw somebody that matched a description, people were actually responding back to the police department in private messages to try to give information. That was my biggest sense of validation because we were actually connecting with those that we serve.
The second biggest benefit for me on social media, again back in Baltimore, we were one of the first to use it as an engagement tool. There was an active shooter situation at John's Hopkins Hospital. I think this was in 2010. As these things go, there was a bit of a miscommunication into how the suspect in that incident ended up being neutralized. He actually killed himself. It came out across the police scanners as the offender has been neutralized. That was conveyed to me as though the police killed him. I went out in front of a bank of news cameras and told the public that we had killed this individual for an active shooter at Johns Hopkins. Turned out moments later that they corrected that and it was a suicide. I actually used Twitter to correct that narrative seconds after it was said. For the most part, news media ended up following the updated information. It actually saved me in a point where information was moving too quickly.
I think my biggest failure, one of my biggest failures was just the adoption of it. I wish that I had adopted it earlier in my career. Even though I was pretty early from when it came out, it would've just revolutionized... it has revolutionized the profession and it allowed departments to connect directly with individuals. I just wish I had that much more time to build it into our strategic communications.
Rafael Mangual: Chief, last word before we go to audience questions.
Chief Art Acevedo: For me, I think the biggest win for us personally, for me personally, was Hurricane Harvey and how we were able to actually use social media as an extension of our 911 call center. We were actually able to get people help. Had we not built that kind of trust and that kind of transparency in that tool before that huge, historical event, people would not have seen it as something they can use to get help. I think the biggest loss for me is a couple times, maybe not a couple times. Responding too quickly to an issue and maybe not having been as thoughtful as I should have been, and not really falling into and supporting having individual units and growing the different individual unit accounts. I think that was shortsighted on my part because the fact that they wanted to do it shows that they got it, and they probably needed to be doing it. I think I was little hesitant and too slow in getting it expanded, like was just suggested a few minutes ago.
Rafael Mangual: Thank you all again for the really fantastic remarks. For those of you who maybe joined the conversation a little late and want to catch it all in its complete form, this will be repurposed as a City Journal podcast that'll be available in the days to come. If you don't subscribe to the 10 Blocks podcast by City Journal, please do so. I hope you'll stay engaged with the Manhattan Institute here on Twitter and everywhere else. We will be having more of these in the future. We are really glad that you all joined us and look forward to doing this again soon. Bye everyone.
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