It's magnificent. I got the full Wolford Brimley going on. I was going
for tombstone and I got Wilford Brimley. So ask not what your country can
do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mister Garbutshaw,
tear down this wall. Read my lips. It's the Ricor Shape podcast,
usually with Peter Robinson and Rob Long, but today I'm James Lola's talking
to John Gabriel and Charles A. C. W. Cook. Our guest
Raphael Mangolo is going to talk to us about crime, urban disorder and what
can we do well we can have ourselves a podcast. A robbery charge,
a burglary charge, it's that charge receiving stolen proper. Whatever we possibly can
apply to this situation, we're going to apply it. The DA and the
Justice Department of the courts need to make sure these people pay a price for
what they did. Welcome everybody. It's the Rigor Shape Podcast number six hundred
and sixty. James Lyle's here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, overcast, dank fall
day. Rob and Peter are off on various missions. We'll hear about them
later, unless, of course, they're classified and sitting in standing in doing
a woman's job, doing an excellent job are our friend John Gabriel and Charles
C. W. Cook. Gentlemen, welcome, Thank you for having me
slightly preempted. Whether or not I do an excellent job. I may not
do an excellent That's entirely possible. I'm being kind. I have decided to
avoid excellence for the next hour or so. All Right, now that we've
reset our expectations and everybody is adjusted accordingly, we proceed news Diane Feinstein,
and I wonder how many of the obituaries are going to say Feinstein, who
had a Chinese spy embedded in her organization for twenty years, etc. Etc.
Do you guys remember that fount that driver a driver, and the general
reaction to having any member of Chinese espionage embedded in her office and driving her
around listening to her phone calls for one of years was wow? Anyway,
that was it? That was it? That was it? That was it.
We were assured that nothing was passed along because apparently the Chinese plays such
a long game that they say, no, wait two decades before you finally
contact us and give us some information. So your thoughts on the passage.
She voted yesterday, by the way, in the Senate. Apparently they wheeled
her in and had her Rubbert Sampson or something. The term elder abuse is
being floated and round an awful lot. I went two minds on this.
I mean, one, my father was incredibly vital and smart up until the
age of ninety three, so I would have trusted him in the Senate.
But on the other hand, you admire the fact that people are able to
be productive in their golden years. But on the other hand, we're seeing
the effects of a gerontocracy with its ideas embedded in the great society, or
a few years afterwards, still hanging on this this aged withered Ramora on the
body of the American body politic, and you just are kind of glad to
see that it may not seem like the permanent rule of old people that it
does seem now. And I say that as an old person. I suppose
I think it's an issue we're going to have to deal with more and more
in the future, especially as medicine gets better and better people are living longer.
Having many types of cancer is no longer the death sentence it once was,
thank God. However, that exposes you to the other issues of the
mind when people grow older. Like you said, that's why I'm against term
limits or an age limit. Some people are very vital. My grandmother lived
to one hundred and one and she was feisty to the end. On the
other hand, my father who had passed away due to Alzheimer's and dementia,
he was otherwise completely healthy. And I think more and more that's something that
a lot of people in America aren't quite prepared for. More and more we're
going to have these people who are just hey, this person has a good
brand, they can get reelected, they have a last name that people in
this disc Rick, No, let's run him again. And how I don't
know. As for me, if I make it after a fabled career in
DC Senate, president whatever, and make it to seventy five, I will
be pining for a lake house and time with the grand kids and maybe sitting
on a dock and fishing. And how some of these people in Finstein's case,
sadly, I think she was being abused, much like Biden is today.
But you wonder how alluring power must be that these people will not just
take the lake house option. Because boy, the rest of us, I
think would Charles. One of the more interesting things being floated today on Twitter,
which I'll never call X. If I ever call it X, just
slap me, is that Gavin Newsom is going to appoint Kamala Harris as the
replacement Senator, thereby getting her out of the deep slot and allowing Newsom to
slide into the presidential campaign while he he's not for a couple of reasons,
namely, the twenty fifth Amendment requires a replacement Vice president to be agreed to
by both the House and the Senate. The House is run by Republicans,
the Senate is run by Joe Manchin, and there is no way that that
combination of power players is going to permit the Democrats to maneuver themselves into a
more attractive electoral position by getting rid of the millstone that is Kamala Harrison replacing
him as someone potentially better. And there's a second reason related to that,
which is that the Shenanigans that the Republicans would legitimately pull could actually lead to
Speaker McCarthy because to get to the point at which the House was asked to
acquiesce to Joe Biden's replacement, Kamala Harris would have to resign. She resigned
and then wasn't replaced, and then Biden died, which is not that remote
possibility, either now or in a second term, then the automatic, constitutionally
mandated replacement would be a Republican. So well, it's a funny idea,
but it's not going to happen. On the Dan Finstein question that you asked,
John, I think there's a good and a bad argument in favor of
people staying in politics too long. I've heard people say a variation of what
John did, which is, why wouldn't you just want the Lake House?
Yes, I would. I think with Diane Feinstein a lot of other politicians
though, this is what they like doing, right, so they're never going
to voluntarily do something else because this is their idea of fun. That being
the case, I'm not that sad for her in the sense that she died
doing what she loved. What I find distasteful about it and sad about it
is that she couldn't do it anymore. I mean, the videos of her
that we saw from the Senate were just terrifying. This was not Chuck Grassley,
who's almost that age, he's eighty nine, who sprightly goes to every
Iowa county when he runs for reelection, seems to run around cornfields for fun.
This is a woman who was so attached to the one thing she liked
in life, which was politics, that she was being wheeled in to cast
votes that she couldn't understand. To me, that's the tragedy of this,
and that's where the older abuse comes in. They knew she wanted it,
They wanted to use her, so they did, and the rest of us
had to watch it and avert her eyes. Indeed, well, it's preparing
yourself for a weekend of pains to her, to her service and the revest
of it, and will be to see who the replacement is going to be,
which will be interesting. Indeed, onto the debates, Chris Christy called
Donald Trump, Donald Duck, and Steve Martin today on X said that actually,
I'm sorry on Twitter, I said today that no, Donald Duck was
a war veteran. Donald Duck was was faithful today. See Donald Duck took
great care of it, and he enlisted off a bunch of wonderful things about
Donald Duck and then say, and you, sir, are no Donald Duck.
Okay, thanks Steve, that's funny, but it's for the rest of
it. I'm not sure what Mark had left. People were talking about Vivic's
hair, which seemed to grow like a chia pet throughout the whole thing.
But Bergham did well. You know, I'm always rooting for the North Dakota
guys. He's solid man. Got some feistiness, a lot of talking over
everybody else, and mostly people complaining about the questions themselves, like why not
why not just hand this over to mother Jones in the nation, because you're
going to get the same sort of questions. What were your thoughts, winners,
losers? Charles? Am I winner or a loser in that array?
These choose your own adventure Charles, Yeah, I think that. As ever,
all Republican politics, and maybe even all politics takes place against the backdrop
of the one hundred and ninety foot golden Donald Trump that towers over everything,
and this is no different. I wish it were different, but I saw
nothing on that stage that changed the narrative or changed the headlines. And this
is why these late attempts to introduce new characters into the show probably our futile
as well. Oh, well, they've only the governor of Georgia were up
there, or the governor of Virginia were up there, or the governor of
Texas were up there. Well, really, why they're going to punch Donald
Trump in the face. It's not clear what it will take to change it.
Certainly nothing happened at the debate that did. I was equally appalled by
the questions that the lady from Univision asked. This is a bizarre moment in
our politics where people start sentences with as somebody who has certain immutable characteristics.
It would be really weird if I did that. If I would be But
if I were asked to moderate a debate and I just said as a tall
American, you know, or as a white person, I must ask as
if, as if, as if that is the way that presidents ought to
think. So, you know, from both the question aside and the answer
as side, I just didn't think it did much to change anything, which
is a problem. If you would like to see the Republican Party move on
from Donald Trump as a member of the beard having community, I think you
should have said, John, Yeah, I think what was frustrating to about
when they have a reporter asking questions in a Visione or Telemundo a Movise Networks
is when they decide, I'm only asking questions about yes, as Latin X
woman, as let's talk immigration for the fourth time tonight. It reminds me
of the typical Panels shows on cable news where they have three white men and
one black woman and they ask the white guys about the economy and healthcare and
foreign relations. Then they say, now let's get to race, and every
head just turns to this poor black woman, and I'm like, is that
all she's good for? She's probably an expert in all sorts of things,
and that's what it always feels like. Okay, let's serve this constituency here.
It's like I have the sneaking suspicion living in the Southwest, much like
Charles I'm sure in Florida, surrounded by Hispanic neighbors. They tend to be
interested in the exact same things I am. Well, not so much like
Byzantine Empire history, but why is my gas costing so much? Why is
my grocery bill so high? They care about things that human beings and Americans
care about, and it's just kind of frustrating to see because it's less pandering
than it is belittling. It seems, especially at this point, totally fair.
Yes, it's the end result of identity politics, or reduced down to
as Charles said, and the mutable characteristic, which is why I was interested
in the day of the debate. Actually I didn't watch the debate because I
went to a community forum in my neighborhood to see a debate of sorts TwixT
city councilperson and the one who wants to unseat her. And this was telling
no Republicans, nobody remotely conservative, because what's the point, There's no point
in running anybody in my district had somebody who was sort of kind of moderate
of the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, and then the opposition, the person who
wanted to unseat her was the Democratic Socialist Workers of America actual socialist, and
it was one of the more entertaining and embarrassing things I've ever seen. They
would ask the person who currently is on the city council, what you know,
what do we do about crime, what do we do about housing,
what do we do, et cetera. And she would come up with a
fairly detailed anadine boilerplate series of ideas that you know, some work, some
don't, and it essentially shows her ability to grasp the issue. They go
to the socialist and you get nothing but bullsheet tripe about how well, it's
ridiculous to even answer the question as long as the capitalist system exists right now,
because it exploits the workers, it takes their labor, we need to
replace it with power to the people and then read right. So, in
other words, she wouldn't answer any question because like, what's the point of
addressing this until we completely undo the capitalist system. So when you're hearing somebody
use capitalists and parasite and workers in factory floor and all the rest of it,
it's hilarious and I could not stop laughing in the back of the room.
I'm just I'm like, you can't be serious. And what's more,
she was an idiot. She couldn't finish her sentences. She would trail off.
She would just say the same thing and was absolutely trounced. So there
you have it. It's almost like this parody performance of our politics here in
Minneapolis. It's like, well, you can't really say we're crazy a lefty
because here's the crazy lefty and they don't get elected. No, it gets
elected as the person who says this asked about whether or not old people are
worried about getting, oh, I don't know, pushed out of their homes
by taxes. They own their taxes, but their homes outright, But the
taxes go up and up and they can't pay them, and they lose them.
They lose them, the state takes their house that they own. And
so she said, yeah, it is a concern. So one of the
things we're doing is we're starting a commission that's going to look at the programs
that we have in this city and see whether or not they're actually working.
Which is nice to hear, but you'd like to think that there was something
like that in place before, but no, apparently not. Something started,
something's funded, must be must be funded until the last Trump blows. But
we're supposed to believe, of course, that when they find something that isn't
working, they're going to take that money and apply directly to the reduction of
our taxes, which of course they will not. So having assured us that
she's concerned about these things, she's promptly pivoted on the issue. We really
care about climate change and the necessity of troubling the tax that we are paying
on our utilities in order to restart and barrel right through with our green initiatives
that will ensure equity in our underserved communities by converting their gas ranges to electrical
heat. So, in other words, if you're worry about taxes, don't
worry. We're actually looking at what we spend. Oh and by the way,
we're going to tax you three times as much as this so we can
perform this nonsense that Minneapolis will reduce its carbon by point zero zero zero one
percent, which was equal to one day's output of China's latest new factory.
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it's delicious fantastic. Make sure I got the pronunciation correct. Rafael Manguel Mangul
Magul coming out of three two one and now we Welcome to the podcast.
Rafael Manguel a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor to The Wonderful City
Journal, and a member of the Council on Criminal Justice. He's the author
of Criminal in Justice. Welcome Raphael, much for having me back. Well,
this week we had these wonderful videos. Everybody got to eat of the
looting and the looting, and the looting and the looting in Philadelphia Apple luuuu
lemon foot locker. It's only eighteen liquor stores in the rest of it.
I remember, No, Well, that's because we aren't there, because of
the deserts. I remember that happening here in Minneapolis in twenty twenty, and
it's terrifying. If it's anywhere close to your neighborhood, it's really terrifying.
If it is your neighborhood, What can you tell us about this Mayhem night
phenomenon? And it's no doubt intrinsic connection to the injustice that the people had
perceived. Yeah, well, you know the Mayhem phenomenons, these looting incidents,
these wilding episodes, they're they're not particularly new, but we do seem
to be seeing more of them, and we get a closer glimpse now with
social media, and one of the things that I think the public is finally
starting to understand is that there's an element to these things that's just fun for
the people who engage. The idea that we're all supposed to accept is that
this is a function of you know, deprivation and you know desperation. But
if you watch these videos and you listen to the commentary, and you see
the smiling faces and hear the laughter, it's just a thrill for them,
right The idea that everybody got to eat as you you know, run into
a Nike store and run out with sweatsuits. I mean, I don't know
how you see in something like that, but you know, it's it's clearly
not about need, you know, and it is in fact connected, I
think, to the broader direction that our criminal justice system has been taking throughout
the country. I mean, over the last you know, ten to twenty
years, we have seen a pretty market shift and how we do criminal justice
in this country and how we do policing, and that shift has been unidirectional.
Every single major policy initiative that's been enacted over the last decade has either
lowered the transaction costs of crime, or raise the transaction costs of enforcing the
law, right, I mean, whether you're talking about more federal interventions in
local policing, you know, things like consent decrees, you know, bans
on certain kinds of grappling techniques, you know, a more unfunded paperwork compliance
burdens, you know. And then on the criminal justice side, I mean
you've got the Progressive prosecutor movement, which by the way, Philadelphia has perhaps
ground zero four right where you have these elected officials who just say, well,
we're not going to prosecute these whole categories of crime, or even the
categories of crime where we're still going to prosecute. You know, your chances
of a jail sentence or a prison sentence are going to be reduced to near
zero. And you're going to see a huge spike in probation, huge spike
in diversions, spike in you know ACDs or germans on contemplation of dismissal,
which is basically like, you know, if you don't get into any trouble
for the next six months in your case will go away. You know,
all of this communicates something to people who in fact are paying attention and what
that communicates. It said, Hey, there are no longer any real consequences.
So is it any surprise that we see this? I don't think so,
Hira File. I have a question about why this is happening. So
I often describe myself as a criminal justice squish, But what I mean by
that is not that I want to see this sort of behavior, even that
I want short sentences or lenients. I just like the procedural elements. I
like trials, I like the exclusionary rule. I like a broad interpretation of
the Fifth Amendment, sixth Amendment, and so on. I don't understand why
it is that we have gone in this direction, especially given that there was
this enormous crackdown on the crime of the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties that worked,
that we could see worked, and now we seem to be doing everything
in the other direction. So my question is is this the product of over
confidence? Did we think that we had fixed crime and therefore could afford to
behave like this, or is there something else going on here? Is this
tied in, for example, to our obsession with identity politics and disparate impact.
I think it's much more of the ladder. I think what we're seeing
is a deep sense of discomfort with that successful history with respect to the crime
decline. Yeah, a very few people who are sort of honest brokers,
but you know, certainly on the left of this issue will deny that the
uptake and incarceration and the reinvestments in policing throughout the nineteen eighties and nineties helped
reduce crime. You know, they may argue about the degree to which that
was the case, but I think everyone who knows anything about this understands that
those things really did help in a substantial way. But what we see is,
I think a level of just uneasiness with what that look like. Right.
You see this sort of obsession with disparities in terms of arrests, in
terms of police use of force, in terms of incarceration. Right. We
often hear, for example, that a black man in the United States is
five times more likely than a white man to be in prison. We often
hear that they're more likely to be arrested, that they're even for the same
kinds of offenses, et cetera. You know, and it really just I
think miss is the forest for the trees. I mean, the kind of
overall case for the sort of decarceration and de policing that we've been seeing has
three parts, right, They're kind of three fundamental claims that undergird a lot
of the reform efforts that I was just describing early. The one is that
we have this kind of mass incarceration problem. We constantly hear these sort of
unfavorable international comparisons, Right, I think uss five percent of the world's population
twenty five percent of its prisoners. This is patently unjust. We're supposed to
take this as prima facia evidence, you know, that we incarceerate for more
than we should. And a lot of the way that people make that case
is by comparing us to other Western European democracies, not controlling for the fact
that we have in this country, unfortunately many many more pockets of serious crime.
Uh where you know it's crime that it's going to land you in prison
for a long time pretty much anywhere in the world that you commit it.
It's it's not necessarily that we're a more punitive society. And one of the
things I'd like to point out to people, and you should know this,
Charles, is that in the UK, the mandatory minimum sentence for illegal firearm
possession is five years in prison. You have to serve three and a half
years. There's a sort of truth and sentencing component here in the United States.
That's a that's an offense that's regularly met with probation. I mean,
you see people on the street all the time that have you know, bettergular
inprobation or parole for for firearms offenses where you know, we're lucky if they
served sixty days, you know. So it's not that we're more punitive,
and it's not that we over incarce rate. I mean, you know,
one of the questions that I'd like to ask people, I think that the
true test of whether we have an over incarceration problem is to ask can we
safely decarceorate to the leve that we would need to achieve parity with the other
democracies that were unfavorably compared to To do that, we'd have to release about
seventy percent of the people in stay prisons. Well, poo's in stay prison.
I mean, you know, somewhere around two thirds of the prison population
in this country at the state level, which is where about nine out of
every ten prisoners are held are there primarily for a violent or weapons related felony,
and that's just the that can't be. I've been let to believe that
seventy percent of them are all extras from the wire who were spot holding a
small bag of drugs. That's exactly right. I mean, this is the
lie that was sold to the US and so many people bought it hook line
and sinker, and it really is frustrated because it's very easily debunkable. You
can go into the data, you can go into the statistics, and what
they tell you again is that the vast majority of people in prison today are
there primarily for violent or weapons related offenses. Even the ones that are there
primarily for a drug offense or some other kind of non violent property offense,
they all have extensive criminal histories, which often include violence, which explain why
they're in prison for those non violent convictions. If you look at the typical
criminal history of someone in a state prison in the United States today, you're
going to find someone between ten and twelve prior arrests in five and six prior
convictions. That does not comport with the story that we've all been told.
This idea that we systematically deny second chances in the years we have second chance
month in this country, right, that is the story. And so when
I ask peoples go through the prison population and tell me who's been denied a
second chance, most of these people have been given multiple bite at the apple,
and every time we give them a bite at the apple, we're essentially
rolling the dice. And we're rolling the dice with the lives of the people
who live in the places where these individuals are going to spend their time when
they're not incarcerated, and that is in a very small pocket of this country,
right, The vast majority of crime is very, very hyper concentrated,
which kind of takes me to the second plank, or the kind of the
last plank of this three part argument. The second part is that you know,
we have this mass incarceration problem, but also this police violence problem,
which you know, I think is drastically overstated. You know, yes,
do our police imperfect, Yes, do they act maliciously, of course,
But when you contextualize our use of force numbers in the context of the fact
that we have somewhere around six hundred thousand officers making ten million plus arrest a
year, a thousand deaths, the vast majority of which involve armed suspects who
are violently resisting. Is not particularly surprising or egregious, right It doesn't reveal,
you know, some out of control police force of trigger happy monsters.
But the really the third plank is what I think has given this movement the
momentum that it still enjoys today despite the crime spike, and that is that
both the mass incarceration and police violence problems fall disproportionately on the shoulders of low
income minority communities. And that's true to an extent because you do see these
disparities in enforcement. What I try to get people to understand is that those
disparities have to be viewed in their proper context. You can't just look at
the enforcement side of the ledger. There is another side that you know,
Enforcement is not the only output of the criminal justice system, even though that's
what we all pay attention to, right is, as Charles kind of alluded
to earlier, there were crime declines that were attributable to the build up of
policing and incarceration. We now know who benefited from those crime declines, and
we know who will benefit from the crime declines of the future, because we
know how crime concentrates, and it concentrates primarily in precisely the areas that the
reformers say that they want to help. Right, So, in New York
City, every single year, like clockwork, a minimum of ninety five percent
of shooting victims are either black or Hispanic, almost all of them are male.
If that kind of disparity existed in any other aspect of American life,
I mean, there would be marches in the street. I mean, imagine
if ninety five percent of COVID deaths were black and Hispanic males. I mean,
imagine what the policy response to that would have been. And yet there's
essentially silence when it comes to it. And what I want people to understand
is that, you know, there is an incongruity between the argument that we're
all supposed to buy, right, this idea that the criminal justice system is
racist because it disproportionately arrests in prisons and uses for against black and brown men
for the most part, that there's an incongruty between that and the reality that
when the criminal justice system achieves its state and ends, which is keeping crime
under control, it disproportionately benefits those very same communities, and so you're forced
to answer this weird question, which is like, why would this system that
we're supposed to believe is designed and operated, you know, to oppress these
communities so disproportionately benefit those varied communities, right, right? I mean,
the truly racist cop just doesn't care. Right, They throw their hands up
and they say, let them kill each other. The person that's proactive,
right, that chases the arms suspect through the dark galley, they're the ones
that are actually the anti racist actors in this situation. They're the ones subordinating
their safety in order to make an arrest that is not going to benefit the
vast majority of white America. You used a candy term there. We're gonna
have to ring a bell five point to merit there. I have ninety seven
questions and adenda, but John wants to say something, so all for me,
I want to say, Well, John strokes his Wilfred Brimley like beard,
and actually it's more of a captain. It's more of a captain Smith
of the Titanic thing. I think, oh, thank you, thank you.
That bodes well for my near future. This John Gabriel Raphael, and
thanks again for being on. One thing that seems ineffective to fix this,
at least from a political angle, is you see the GOP debate the other
night, and you will hear ProForma we got to back the guys in blue,
but it seems like the message coming from them isn't going to be as
effective as people going on strike in Oakland, voters turning out the district attorney
there because he was so soft on crime. Are we seeing more and more
community activists in these locations that are suffering from this nonsense? Like you say,
people complain about over incarceration and ethnic disparities in those institutions, but those
are the victims to those other disparities exist in victims. It's obviously going to
be an issue of the people who are most vulnerable or the most likely to
be harmed in these situations. What are you seeing in cities with just communities
everyday folks rising up and saying this is insane, I've had enough because Fokland
and San Francisco are hardly hardcore right wing nut job electorates there. Yeah,
no, that's exactly right. I do think would happen with the DA in
San Francisco was somewhat anomalous. And here's why. For the most part,
violence, which is really what a lot of people are particularly worried about when
they talk about the crime spike, is very, very hyper concentrated geographically.
The vast majority of Americans just you know, they can go about their daily
lives without really having to come into contact with criminal violence. I mean,
you know, just by way of illustration, here in New York City,
every single year since at least twenty ten, somewhere around three and a half
percent of our street segments, which would be kind of corner to corner two
sidewalks, see about fifty percent of all the violent crime. One percent of
the street segmentcy about twenty five percent of all the violent crime. So you
know, if you're living on the Upper West Side or you know, Upper
East Side, chances are you can kind of avoid that for the most part.
What happened in San Francisco, though, was the disorder problem was so
widespread that it was at the doorsteps of the politically active and well to do
the people who actually helped drive outcomes. And that's not something that I think
you're going to see replicated in every city across America. Although that's certainly not,
despite the best efforts of a lot of jurisdictions like Philadelphia, DC,
New York, you know, in terms of the policies that they're enacting to
try and get there. So I do think that, you know, what
we saw with Chessi Budine getting ousted is probably not going to happen very much
or very often. And I think part of that is because for the most
part, these DA races are are still pretty low Salien selections often held in
off year contests, and they are still characterized by very low turnout. I
mean, Larry Krasner won reelection despite presiding over a massive violent crime spike and
something like, you know, seventeen to twenty percent of eligible voters turned out
in that Democratic primary. So I do think that we're still a ways away
from kind of seeing the sort of wave that we would need to see to
really get this thing under control. But I do think that, you know,
one of the benefits of social media is that the voices in the community
that have always been there by the way are finally starting to get heard,
and they're becoming more aggressive, and they're they're making use of these tools at
their disposal with more regularity, and I think some of the movement that we're
seeing in places like Oakland is very encouraging. We just need more of it,
and we need I think the broader public to kind of have the courage
to have the tough conversations that are ultimately going to find their way to the
waste question. Yeah, it's very similar effect, I believe, to school
choice where hands were forced. Let's say, whether it's DC Milwaukee here in
my state of Arizona, the most powerful advocates for these things. So the
people were saying, our public schools are really suffering, and I'm glad you
have the nice Tony suburb that you're in and you can contribute to the booster
club and the kids can have, you know, the finest stadium they want
every five years. But yeah, hopefully the people will speak up about this
or you get El Salvador, I mean, do you offil sometimes wonder whether
or not. I mean, I think this is too big a country for
that solution. That a lot of people look to El Salvador, which was
run by criminals, and say, bully for that guy. He comes to
the president and decides to get crack down and does it just hoovers everybody off
the streets and puts them into awful jails. And now that at the point
where people are saying, you know, this is a little bit too far,
because you can drop a dime on anybody and get them taken off the
street, and people are settling scores that way. But on the other hand,
people seem to be relieved that they no longer have to cower in their
houses and that they can actually sleep outdoors in a hammock without having to worry
about the fire gunfire. And like I said, America is too big a
country for this to happen. And I think but on a local level,
you think, well, it's either going to be the state crack the government
cracks down, which seems unlikely because they are intellectually and ideologically predicated on a
whole series of assumptions that say, we can't do that because it's wrong,
or the citizens are going to do something about it, which is what people
are always going to say. Oh, look at this TikTok video, Look
at this YouTube thing here I found where somebody stepped up and stopped the shoplift,
or the tide is turning, But it isn't really it's not enough of
it, and there's not enough people to do that, so we are all
then either on our own and or reliant on government. I mean, which
way do you see eventually that this is going to shake out? Do you
fear that there's going to put it this way? Do you fear let me
actually come up with the questions. You're just rambling my gums with a statement.
Do you fear vigilanteism? You know, Charles Bronson style nineteen seventies,
Bernie gets the rest of it having a resurgence, and if it did,
what do you think the reaction to that would be. It's a fear of
mind, for sure. I don't think it's particularly likely. It's one of
the reasons why I like the idea of having a government that is tasked with
providing for public order, because the alternative is that there will always be policing.
Right the questions who's going to do it and how well are they going
to do it? I don't want to live in the world in which you
know, uh, the kind of situation you saw what Bernie gets becomes an
everyday occurrence. I don't want to live in a world in which you know
every clerk decides to take a baseball back to everyone who gives them a funny
look, uh, you know, in a seven to eleven. Despite how
you know good, some of those videos may have made people feel, you
know, when when they when they feel like thieves are are getting their way,
are getting what they deserve. So I just don't think we're going to
get there, nor do I think we're going to go the El Salvador route,
right in part because we have a constitution in this country, we have
laws, we have u procedural protections which I value, you know, as
just Charles and as I think everyone else you know on this, and you
know that the question becomes is can we learn something from El Salvador? And
I think we can, and that is that, you know, we're relearning
the lesson of incapacitation. Right when you take criminal actors off the street,
they are incapacitated from victimizing society. They cannot do harm outside of those walls.
That was the lesson of the nineteen nineties that we seem to have forgotten,
and that's always going to be the primary benefit of responding to crime incarceration.
The good news for us is that we don't have to do what El
Salvador has done. We don't have to be dragnet and sweeping with how our
response on this. We have the ability in this country to use data to
pinpoint our enforcement resources to identify the relatively tiny share of our population that's responsible
for the most serious crimes and the biggest chunk of those crimes. I mean,
you know, the problem. Analyzes that have been done on things like
homicide and gun violence consistently show that somewhere around zero point one to zero point
five percent of a city's population is responsible for more than half of the gun
violence in those places. Right, it's not as difficult as we might think
it is is to identify who those people are. Right, They tend to
have significant criminal histories, They tend to be involved in gangs. When we
come into contact with these individuals through criminal enforcement, it's really just on us,
through the system to hold them accountable and actually incapacitate them for a meaningful
period of time, which is one of the reasons why. You know,
one thing that I do think is a possibility is you know, a kind
of resurgence of these habitual offender sentencing enhancements, things like you know, modified
versions of three strikes where it's like we're going to draw a line in the
sand with respect to repeated criminal offend and we're going to say beyond this point,
no more. Right, we did it once it contributed, we can
do it again. We can do it in a way that's responsive to the
critiques of those earlier initiatives, right where you can kind of build in incentives
to desist from from crime. So you know, maybe if you go five
years without a new arrest, you know, you lose a point towards your
ultimate strike count or something like that. We can be more intelligent and civil
about how we do this. But the further this problem goes down the road,
the less sophisticated the response I think is going to be, and it's
going to become more of a backlash. That's what I don't want to see.
I think the hope is that every time the pendulum kind of swings past
the point of equilibrium, it doesn't have to go as far as it did
the last time before it starts coming back. And I think we're still at
a point where we can reapply the lessons that we learned early enough that we
don't have to let things deteriorate to the point that they were in the nineteen
eighties and nineties. Nor do we have to be as draconian as we were
in the two thousands. I know what Charles wants to get in here,
but I want to say one thing, and I think that in many senses,
it is worse than it was in the eighties and the nineties. You
had a lot of street level crime in the eighties and nineties. We all
remember what New York was like. We all remember the taxi driver era,
we all remember the bad subway got it Well we have today, however,
thanks to the lenient prosecutors and the legislatures saying that, well, you know,
stealing nine ninety nine bucks from something isn't really shoplifting. Stealing it's not
that important. You steal a thousand dollars, we're gonna come down and you're
like a bag of hammers. Maybe okay, like maybe a bag of Posta
or something. But you can steal up the ninety nine bucks and we're good.
Consequently, you have a combination of organized crime link rings that go into
Walgreens and Cbs and Duane Reads and just put everything in trash bags. And
you also have individuals who say, you know, there's no consequences for me
this, Why would I want to be a fool and pay for it and
just walk in and take stuff and walk out again. This level of complete
and utter breakdown of the compact between the store and the clients is new.
We haven't seen this kind of mass, casual unaddressed theft ever. I don't
think am I wrong? This is this is the new wrinkle, and this
is one of the things that astonishes people about the new form that urban decay
has taken. This is something that we didn't have to deal with in the
eighties and the nineties. I was there. Well, I think a lot
of it has to do with what the expected responses. In the eighties and
nineties. The expectation was that if you were caught even stealing, you were
going to be penalized in the serious way. That has changed, and so
I do think we're starting to really get a clearer picture of just how thin
the line is between order and disorder, and that line has gotten thinner because
the sort of frontline keepers of order, the police, are just absolutely decimated
in terms of numbers. I mean, one of the least appreciated phenomenon that
we're seeing that has characterized the last really ten years almost is the recruitment of
attention crisis that is hitting big city departments across the country, where departments cannot
recruit enough officers. That I mean, where they are budgeted for more slots
than they have filled, right that people are retiring at significantly higher rates.
They're resigning at higher rates. They're leaving big city departments for their suburban counterparts,
where the perception is is that hey, I'll get paid just as well,
if not better, and my chances of being involved in a viral incident
significantly lower because it's a very quaint and quiet place with almost new crime.
Then five years down the road, the only guys got applying are the drugs
from clock were goring exactly, which you know. So over time, which
you end up seeing is that the sort of delta between the meeting and cop
and the meeting and PERP starts to shrink. That's not a world I want
to live in either, But that's the world that we're going to get if
we continue to demonize the profession and disincentivize good people from taking that job.
I mean, it's going to become the kind of the kind of career path
where only people without options take it, and it reverts back to what it
was in the nineteen sixties and seventies, which just just you know, a
blue collar city job to take up your time. It wasn't really the kind
of profession where motivated people were doing it because they really truly cared. And
then we're willing to jump through hoops to do it. Even the departments that
are able to kind of backfill these positions at a rate of one hundred percent,
you gotta remember they're backfilling with officers that have almost no experience. So
there's a brain drain issue, right. You're losing people with connections on the
street, you're losing people with knowledge, with investigatory experience, and you're replacing
them with rookies who still have a lot to learn, and or are people
who benefited from the lowering of standards that were irrelicant the fact that you know,
these departments were having trouble recruiting in the first place, so you know,
ironically, what the reformers are going to get is actually more of the
thing that they don't like, which you know, if I were more cynical
than I am. You know, I might suggest that that's by design,
right, the idea being that you want to sort of starve the system you
don't like of the resources that it needs to be effective, so that you
can point to the ineffectiveness as reason to dismantle it. Further, I have
a final question, what are the time scales here? Two years ago,
in a different arena, economics, I was essentially down on my knees begging
the President and the Congress not to spend more money, because I know from
having read some history that once you start inflation it is really hard to stop.
And the response, of course, was, look, don't worry about
it. We haven't had inflation for a long time, we have cheap money,
interest rates, alow, it's going to be fine. And now we're
not in a fine place. And I think underpinning some of the denial you
see in the press and that the apathy you see in the public is this
sense that well, if it gets bad, we'll just find better prosecutors and
we'll just change the laws and we'll go back to what we're doing and all
this will go away. Is that true? Or does this take a long
time to fix? It's going to take a lot longer to fix than it
takes a destroy. I mean the analogy I like to use here it is
like getting into shape, right. I mean, you know you can work
out every day, eat well, and it maybe you get the body that
you want in a year, and you have to maintain that effort. You
know, if you want to keep that body indefinitely. Two three months into
a pandemic where you donut sitting in the house, the gym's closed, you
know, there goes your six pack, right, I mean you can undo
that progress a lot quicker than you can build it, right. I mean,
you know, the Twin Towers came down in a few hours, it
took years to build. Right. That That I think is a rule that
holds across context, and I don't think the criminal justiceystem is any different.
So yeah, if the idea is that we can continue to experiment and continue
down this road, and if things truly truly get bad, we can always
just reverse course and it'll be fine. No, you know there's going to
be a lag between the policy response and the benefits that it produces. You
know, these things are not immediate, just as there was a lag I
think between the policy shifts that got us to this place and the sort of
you know situation that we have now with crime. I mean lots of people
pointed to New York City for years saying well, look, stops and frists
are down x percent, and arrests are down x percent and incarceration is down
x percent and the sky has fallen. It's like, well, give it
a minute, right, I mean, Momentum is a thing. Inertia is
a thing, and it exists in various ways, and so sometimes it's going
to take time. And that's why I think you need sophisticated people who are
imposition of decision making power that are not going to succumb to the narrative of
the day, because that kind of fast response to you know, you know,
kind of sticking your finger in the wind and seeing which way it's blowing
is that's that's not how you should do policy, because the reality is is
that you know, the decisions you make today may have consequences years down the
road. Wait a minute, you're advocating for politicians to take the long term
approach to force swear short term sugar games and think about what works best for
the society in a structural, long term fashion and work towards that. That's
what you're asked, that's what you're asking about politicians today. Well you can
find more of that pie in the sky, castles in the air, idealism,
a City Journal, and in rafael book as well. He'd right,
He's right, you know, and shucks, we didn't even get to the
myth of non violent crime, which means we'll have to have you on again,
and we hope this time we'll have you on again after there hasn't been
some big crime thing that we need to talk about, but just to talk
discursively and at length about the idea, or you folk listening could just go
find the work yourself and read it and be smarter for it. Rafael,
thanks so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you
all appreciate it. Thanks Rafael. And we have to remember that we're up
against the people who who have the Fox Butterworth approach. You'll remember the Fox
Butterworth approach. Fox Butterworth wrote a famous piece in the New York Times which
I believed had the headlines crime is done, prisons are full, yet crime
is down, or perhaps the other way around, saying you don't how does
this We don't have so much crime anymore, but yet our prisons are absolutely
full. What's What's what strange thing is going on here is if you couldn't
see the connection between the two of them. Yes, indeed, but what
are you going to do? I mean, there are people you hate this.
I'm not one of those who say, you know what, it's all
it's all Cloward Piven, it's all w ef it's all intentional, it's all
a plot to bring things down. Because that presupposes that these people at these
levels of government are smart and I don't particular anything it's smart and capable and
all powerful. And I don't think that's the case at all. I think
they're guided by lazy, unexamined sort of ideology that just lets them wave away
things and feel good about themselves and know that political gains will be will be
had. But you have to wonder though the idea somehow that well, John,
for example, you were going to ask him another question before we left,
while I like my thoughts, and that was going to be what because
I know you had another one, why don't you ask us? And then
we'll pretend that we know what we're talking about. Yeah, I just think
it's it's kind of been touched on a little bit before, but the entire
problem of what I'm concerned about. Yes, we have this crime going on
now, but more and more you're seeing people fight back on their own.
Look, if no one else is going to stop this, I will.
I live in an open carry state, there is no need for any kind
of restrictions on carrying. Thankfully, the vast majority at least of owners here
and those who carry very responsible, very well trained. It's kind of a
cultural thing with Arizona. It's always been very open in arms policy. However,
what I'm concerned about is people are just going to take into their own
hands, and the people trying to stop the crime will be killed or harmed,
or bystanders will be Someone will eventually enforce the basic common sense rules here,
and if police don't do it, someone else will. And frankly,
I'd rather have a highly trained police force intervening in these things than some guy
like me. It's not like somebody's going to run in and shoot. It's
like, oh wait a minute, I was in the Marines. Yes I'm
seventy now, but I'm going to stop this rapscallion right here. A lot
of people are going to get hurt because this cannot continue and people have kind
of had enough. And that's kind of my concern is that, you know,
they're always after a fact, there's always unintended consequences. And we mentioned
the Bernie gets but a lot of it too is just a grouchy old man.
And admittedly I am one jumping in to stop a bad situation and more
people getting hurt. Yeah, Charles, do you think I mean this is
what I think about two. I mean, there's there's just the extraordinary quantity
of FAO f a fo tweets on x or x's on tweets on Twitter,
people who just love to play all the clips of the craw of the crook
getting what's what's due to him. Half of them are Brazilian off duty policeman
who are shooting all over the place, and they always seem to be off
duty Brazilian policeman. But when you look at this and you see, okay,
it's great that somebody defended that guy defended, you know, intervened,
that the guy with the big cowboy had the sunglasses did shoot the Robert's great
that that person did actually use a firearm, correctly, it still is not
a society that is well, it's a society in the in the process of
dissolution. I mean, because a you don't want those people who are going
to be doing those things out there. You want them to be put away.
You want you want to have them dissuaded from doing things because they know
that process that capture and prosecution is nearby certain and incarceration. It's not a
good sign. I mean, occasionally, yeah, you like to see the
good guy with a gun save somebody, but it's not. It's dozens and
dozens and dozens of videos flowing through your little glowing electronic device every day telling
you of the citizens doing things that it does not speak well for a society
and its strengths, and the reason go on, yes and no, yes
and no. Well that's a kind of nuanced, sort of wishy washy approach
that I would It's all right, so yes and no, I mean,
go on, go on. Well, I think that the response that you're
describing, the FAFO response, the sharing of videos, it's actually a sign
of health in much the same way it doesn't bother me. I'm not I'm
not I'm not proude. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. What I'm saying
is that I think that the in a similar vein the rise in vigilante movies
in the nineteen seventies and eighties, putting a dirty harry on a pedestal or
healthy instincts, providing that the means by which that instinct is channeled is cronic
justice reform and not the establishment of vigilante militias. So I I suppose we
all agree on this. I'm not at all bothered by this feeling of righteous
indignation that manifested self in John Wick movies or what you are. I just
don't want people to confuse that for real life. I say this not to
argue with you, James or John, but because I do see some of
the same people who are the architects of this progressive prosecution disaster looking down on
those who write FAFO on Twitter and say, oh, no, you shouldn't
think that. Well, actually, no, you've got to choose one.
You've got to choose one. If you don't want people to lionize Bernie gets,
then put police on subway. You can't not do all of the things
that people expect from the government and then say to them, and also,
you're not allowed to fantasize about doing it yourself. That's just a completely unsustainable
position. I know it's not your position, but that actually is the logical
endpoint of some of the people who say defa the police and end in constoration.
I mean, there are unfortunately they're relatively influential with an elite culture,
if not the country at large. There are people out there who write essays
in the nation saying we should have no prisons, we should have no courts,
we should have no laws in effect, because these are all tools of
imperialism or of capitalists. And that's what I was getting into when I say
that there's no cloud Piven, there's no grand strategy and the rest of it.
They're not that smart, they're not that capable. What they are is
holding to a whole bunch of ideas that is grounded in root causism. That
the idea that well, you can't really punish people for these things because it's
a reflection of certain realities in this country and its country is founding and it's
very narrow, and that until those things are addressed and structurally reformed, and
structurally, root and branch, everything's taken out. You can't do anything you
ought not to do something. You can, but you shouldn't because the real
problem is America without whoever in many case you want to spell it and so,
and I mean, that's an idea they've held unmolested in their heads since
they were seventeen eighteen, you know, hit and taking the first hit out
the bond, and they regarded this as the sign of an intellectual, enlightened
person, you know, a nice, wonderful trans national hand holding kumbaye person
who would guide us all to the to the Davos paradise around the corner.
But unfortunately it's nonsense. It's absolute nonsense. And you're you're right. So
what you mentioned the John Wick movies, which are you know, gratuitous and
blood stirring and all the rest of it. But when you go back to
Clint Eastwood, and you go back to Charles Bronson, and you go back
to all those seventies urban fantasies, they were movies, and they were not
very good movies. I mean, I took a look at Death Wish the
other day. I started watching it. It's just awful. Do you remember
who one of the criminals is who comes in and terrorizes the family of Charles
Brons. Yeah, I know Charles Bronson, who's an architect, by the
way, And only in nineteen seventy one, ever could somebody with those lapels
and that mustache be an architect instead of a Camel's cigarette spokesman or a porn
star. Okay, so John knows this one. We'll see if Charles does
one of the Because these movies always have the punks that you just want to
see get it, because they just they're they're just awful. They used to
be the beat daddio guys in the in the late fifties and sixties, like
hey man, and they'd be taunting and all the rest of it. You
just wanted them dead. And it was the seventies punks, the switchblading,
you know, creepy prvy types who were just there to take you women folk.
Who was the bad rapist in Death Wish? Criminal Jeff Arge, criminal,
Jeff goldbl He was a thug. I'm glad he was not typecast in
that way. He was very hesitant thug, but herbane sophisticated. But yes,
he was speaking of herbane and sophisticated right, speaking of her and sophisticated
less. Before we go, Cherld, how do you feel about the restoration
of the dress code in the Senate that we no longer have to be we
have to have schlump chic. I'm all in favor of a dress code in
the Senate because I think that clothes are a classic time and place issue.
I am not somebody who spends most of my day's dress to the nines.
I live on the beach, and I dress accordingly. But I wouldn't wear
the clothes that I wear to the beach to a funeral. And I wouldn't
wear them if I were in the military, and I don't think I should
wear them in the US Senate either, or if I were President of the
United States. And the other observation I have at this, which is not
mine, is yuvol Evins, but I'm stealing it, is that this is
a classic example of somebody who has gone into an institution that is much bigger
than him, that predates him by hundreds of years. And instead of saying,
well, I wished to become a part of this, therefore I will
be a part of it, has said my wants and needs a superior and
this institution must change for no obvious reason. It's not as if, and
I know this will sound a little bit chellish, but it's not as if
John Fetterman can suddenly process audio properly if he puts on a hoodie. And
there is no good reason for this at all. It's pure want. So
I think it's excellent that the Senate has pushed back. It's given me a
little bit of faith actually in the system to say no. Excellent John,
your last thoughts on the matter. You're wearing a seeing senator grew from He
just reminds you of grew from me. With his legs are holding up a
lot of They are the real heroes here, John Futterman's legs holding up that
frame. But it's not about fashion. It's it's about respect, respect for
the institution, as Charles says, respect for other people. I had the
experience of being at one of these crazy fantasy pools at a resort with my
kids, and I hadn't been to a place like that in quite a while,
and I'm looking around and I remember muttering to my wife, people really
need to wear more clothes. It wasn't like anything they were wearing with scandalous.
It's just like, I don't need that kind of gentlemen of my age
wearing silver speedos. Maybe reel it back in a little bit, show difference
to the organization, show respect to your colleagues and the people you are at
least claiming to serve. I agree, but at a resort, you know,
it is a place where it's hot and there's water. And frankly,
if you can carry it off when you're sixty two, more power to you.
And I say that, and I'm going to quit now before anybody demands
some sort of photographic proof, which I would have to provide. And we
all know how the yellow tank top went. This podcast brought to you by
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That's it. Maybe Peter and Rob will be back next week. If not,
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