Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. I have some callers waiting at James and Tony.
I will get you guys. Also, the phone number is
also the WBT text line driven by Liberty Buick GMC,
so you can text there. Last hour, we were going
over the new initiative and the resuscitation of an old
initiative to basically enforce law. Yeah in center city Charlotte,
they're going to be putting more cops on the streets
and they are actually going to strictly in force laws
that are sort of like public nuisance laws, you know,
that are on the books. But apparently we have inadvertently
given too much grace and not that this was an
intentional decision for the last five or six years or
anything like that, but now we're going to course correct.
I welcome the course correction, but I also would like
to see some people offer some apologies for advocating the
policies that led us to this place where, for example,
the Uptown murder count is now two hundred percent higher
than it was last year. And maybe you could offer
an apology to the victims' families or the victims in
all of the other violent crimes that have occurred in
the center city that have spiked over the last year
because of the court system. And by the way, I
like you people are saying this on the text line.
It's not new to me because I've been saying it
to you for the last month and a half, which
is the police are making arrests. The problem is the
court system. The problem is the guidelines that the judges
have issued for the bail and the magistrates who are
following those guidelines and letting people out. I also found
out today from Cedar posts he does a blog. He's
been a longtime Charlotte blogger, and he pointed out that
apparently the Mecklimberg County inmate records get wiped after two years,
So if you're trying to find out if somebody's got
a rap sheet that goes back a decade, you can't.
I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Gary
not my fault McFadden would do that as sheriff. Probably
it happened before his time. He had nothing to do
with it at all. Maybe it's a server space issue,
you know, it's just a it's a memory capacity deal
on the tech side. Maybe. But it also makes it
difficult to know, if you're a citizen or a journalist,
whether somebody who has been arrested, you know, forty times
over the last five years, has actually been arrested that
many times over five years if you're if you're you know,
artificially wiping the records. So it's only the most recent
two years. Is that that grace that we've inadvertently given.
All right, let's go over to the phones here and
chat with James. Hello, James, welcome to the program.
Speaker 2: Hey, you were reading a listing of basically what are
nuisance laws? Yes, okay, Now, I worked for the sheriff
for a number of years and if people got arrested
on those almost every time, and this includes our frequent
flyers and our uh well for lack of a better term,
our our drunks and winos, uh, you know, the panhandlers
and the rest of the crowd. They would get arrested,
they wouldn't get out because they couldn't, you know, they
couldn't make a five dollar bond, a litt alone, a
five hundred dollars bond. And then they go in front
of a judge. Within twenty four or forty eight hours,
he give them time serving, maybe back out on the street. Yeah,
that's been going on for as long as I can remember.
Speaker 1: Right, But they're off the street for twenty four hours.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then they turn around and do exactly the
same thing all over again. Yeah, so nobody, nobody ever
puts them in jail for any other length of time.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, but they're off the at least they're off
the street. So again, this is a two This is
a two faceted problem. Right, You've got the arrests, and
then you have the judicial system. And if you have
and so if you're trying to if you're trying to
create a safer environment for law abiding citizens in Uptown
and you have a broken court system, that's not that's
not putting people away, right, that they're not doing their job.
Then yeah, you're relying on police to make the arrests.
And at least then you're gonna you're gonna take them
off the street for a certain amount of time. And yeah,
they're frequent fires, they're gonna they're gonna be publicly disorderly,
they're gonna be publicly intoxicated. They're gonna do it again. Yeah,
and then you come up and send them back over
to the jail, and yes, they're gonna stay there for
a couple hours, maybe a day, and yes they're gonna
be back out on the street, and yes they're going
to reoffend. But until the court system shapes up, I
don't know any other thing to do here.
Speaker 2: Well, the judges, for as long as I can remember,
in the twenty sixth Judicial District, which is Mecklenburg County,
they public nuisance laws. They don't do anything with the
people except let them back out. And even if the
guy ends up going over to mental health because he's
you know, as the one gentleman that I was listening
to said about the lackos that you see down down,
usually he's back out on the street. Within twenty four
to forty eight hours, right, because they determine he's not
a danger to himself or the public, and he's back
out on the street, and of course, at worst, mental
health puts him on an outpatient treatment but outpatient treatment
systems don't function. The guy doesn't take his meds when
he's back out on the street, so he ends up
dealing with the police again. And now that revolving doors starts, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I do not disagree with you at all,
but I don't are you saying that's an argument not
to put more police out there patrolling.
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, the Charlotte Police Department has got
a major issue with not enough officers. And from the
time they apply until the time that they get out
of the academy is something like eighteen months. So just
to get and most one of the big problems with
the City of Charlotte is people don't want to go
to work for the City Charlotte. Yeah, because they don't
want to work for the city council and the mayor.
Speaker 1: Now I get it, but I'm trying to find a
solution with the circumstances we are in. And so given
the reality of where we are, they're saying they're going
to put more cops in Uptown and in South End.
They're going to beef up police presence.
Speaker 2: And I say, good, yeah, except they're taking them away
from someplace else.
Speaker 1: They say, they're not.
Speaker 2: Where are they going to get the bodies because they
don't have them.
Speaker 1: That's well, I mean, that's you saying that. They say.
They say they're not drawing these officers out of other areas. Now,
maybe that turns out to be a lie, but that's
what they have said.
Speaker 2: Okay. Well, to be perfectly frank and honest with you,
I do from looking at it from the years that
I worked and the people that I know in both
in the agencies, I don't think you're being told the truth.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's possible. That's possible, but I don't know that
to be I don't know it either way. So, James,
I appreciate the call. Again, I'm not saying this is
the fix. I've never said that. In fact, I keep
saying the problem is the court system. I keep saying that.
So I don't understand, like why, And I'm not saying
this about James, but like there are people on the
text line that are saying, like, it's not the cops
it's the court system. Like I know, I've been saying that.
I've been saying that to you for like two months,
so longer than that, actually, So I agree. That is
a separate part of the criminal justice system though, right,
that's the court system. The first thing is law enforcement.
So I'm okay with not more than okay. I support
them going after these public nuisance crimes, cracking down on
this quality of life stuff. You got people that live uptown,
they have they pay their taxes, they're law abiding. They
should not have to be walking over er you know,
people lying on the sidewalk in front of their door,
defecating on their front steps, like that should not be acceptable, right,
And the first step there is enforcing the law, which
means you got to have a cop interact with that person.
And so I'm okay, like I support I support the
Crown initiative and the E do the entertainment district thing. Yeah,
put more cops out there. It will act as a
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have a message on the Twitter machine from RUSS. Additional
policing and enforcement is a great first step, but as
you said, it's judicial and mental health reform that'll make
the biggest impact. I read somewhere years ago that something
like close to thirty percent of all violent crimes were
committed by people who were out on bail, ankle monitors,
early release, etc. I've also heard from some officers that
depending on where they patrol, they can spend up to
a third of their time on just a handful of
real offenders. Right, So one of the things I would do.
I still do it on occasion, but when I was
a reporter, I would do this a lot. And I
would ask if I'm interviewing somebody about a policy that
they're proposing or something, I would ask them to walk
me through it, like lay it out for me, walk
me through, like how this actually works in real life,
you know. So if we take it as a given
that the courts being completely controlled by Democrats infected with
this you know, this suicidal empathy impulse and this this
mind virus where like they can't hold people accountable and
they're going to let everybody out, right, So assume that
that is not changing what can be done to try
to minimize harm for citizens in Charlotte. And I think that, yeah,
putting more cops into the center city where crime has
been spiking over the last that you make more arrests. Oh,
but they're gonna get out, Yes, I know, I agree
that is going to happen. They're going to then just
get released right back out, and then they're going to
get arrested again, and then they're gonna get released and
then arrested and released and arrested and released. I get it,
I agree, But in the time that they are spending
interacting with that law enforcement officer, then being put into
the cruiser, taken to the jail, processed, and then before
they get released, however long that is, they are no
longer out on the street. So rather than being on
the street twenty four hours in a day, they may
only be on the street for eighteen hours. That's end improvement,
you know. Look, I'm trying to take a win anywhere
I can get it, Okay, I'm like, if we can
get six hours of rest, but six hours of relief
a day from the repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat offenders, get
them off the street for a couple of hours, that's
better than not off the street at all, you know.
Regarding the diversion of the officers, this was covered, I
told you. According to CMPD, Major Jene Limb told Queen
City News, policing in other areas will not be negatively
affected when we set a recruit class. We disseminate the
graduating class not just in the Central Division, but across
all thirteen. So there's really I would push back against
that to say that we spread that love if you
will across our patrol division. Again, that may not occur.
That could be a lie. I don't know, I have
no evidence of it. All I'm saying is, this is
what the police department is telling us, is that they're
not going to be moving officers from other districts into
Uptown in order to create this Crown initiative. I'm not
saying I believe it. I'm not saying I don't believe it.
I'm just telling you that's what they said, and hopefully
they're not lying. Right, all right, let me jump over
and get Lisa on the program. Hello Lisa, Hello, mister Kroner.
Speaker 3: I had a couple of points. I agree with you
about having more police presence downtown being a good thing.
I mean, for one thing, somebody who's going to choose
to lay around downtown has got a problem with some
type an attitude that's not acceptable. So I mean that's
one reason to have more police. But I also want
to add that I don't know if this effects that
or not. But I was a volunteer in the big
jail downtown. This has been like ten or twelve years
ago in the Chaplain's office, and I learned at that
point that they had they were overbooked. In other words,
there were people that were sleeping on the floor at
that point. We may need we may need more jail space.
And then there's the mental health issue. I worked at
this hospital in Raleigh when I was a student and
after that, and these hospitals have been closed down. Dix
is no longer there. Those people beginning about the mid
nineteen seventies were turned out onto the streets, and now
they've got a small one in Charlotte. But I mean,
even having it here may impact the fact that we
have more mental health people around, but they largely were
put out onto the streets. Then I want to add
that there's some services that are downtown, like crisis assistance.
There's a bus transit center where people might be, you know,
come downtown they otherwise wouldn't.
Speaker 2: That doesn't say they.
Speaker 3: Should be laying around on the park benches or whatever.
And then affordable housing is another issue, because they've torn
down a lot of the cheaper in housing and replaced
it with condominiums across the city. And I think this
contributes to I don't know how you get a handle
on all those different issues. You might increase the jail
spice for one thing, and the police.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, there are It's a multifaceted problem. It's going
to take a lot of different initiatives to get at it,
no doubt about Yeah, no doubt about it. In fact,
I have a piece here from the New York Times
about the closing of the institutions. I'm going to get
to that after the news. At least I appreciate the call.
Thank you, all right, take care. Yeah. The headline on
the article is how release of mental patience began. It
is from the New York Times, October thirtieth, nineteen eighty four.
So when I was a kid, my grandpa died with Alzheimer's,
and before he died, my mom and my dad took
care of him as he got worse. Forty years ago,
there were no treatments and not much support for caregivers
and family. But things are different today because of the
work of so many people, including the Alzheimer's Association of
Western Carolina. It's a great organization with awesome people with
huge hearts. I've been a supporter for twenty five years.
This cause means a lot to me. I participate in
the annual Walk to end Alzheimer's and I'm leading a
Charlotte team again this year and it's called once again
Pete's Pack. You can sign up and you can join
the team and walk with us. It's on October eighteenth,
that truest field. Sign up at alz dot org slash
Walk and then you can search for my team name
Pete's Pack. There's also a link at thepetepod dot com.
There's also a link in the description of this podcast. Also,
I'll be am seeing the Gastonia Walk on October eleventh,
and so you can make a team and join that
one too, or make a donation and help me hit
my goal of five thousand dollars. If you do, I
really appreciate it. There are a bunch of other walks
all over the Carolinas. You can go to alz dot
org slash walk for all the dates and locations. We're
closer than ever to stopping Alzheimer's. Can you help us
get there? Will you walk with me for a different future?
For families for more time for treatments. This is why
we New York Times headline how release of mental patients began.
It's a piece by Richard Lyons from nineteen eighty four.
The policy that led to the release of most of
the nation's mentally ill patients from the hospital to the
community is now widely regarded as a major policy failure.
Sweeping critiques of the policy, notably the recent report of
the American Psychiatric Association, have spread the blame everywhere, faulting politicians,
civil libertarian lawyers as well as psychiatrists, but who specifically
played some of the more important roles in the formation
of this ill fated policy. What motivated these influential people
and what lessons are to be learned. The detailed picture
has emerged from a series of interviews into review of
public records, research reports, and institutional recommendations. The picture is
one of cost conscious policymakers who were quick to bos
optimistic projections that were in some instances buttressed by misinformation
and by a willingness to suspend skepticism. I am struck
just at the way this story is written and how
we have devolved as a society. Like you would not
read this kind of writing in the New York Times nowadays.
Just like the words like buttressed, you know, they just
wouldn't use that word anymore. Many of the psychiatrists involved
as practitioners and policymakers in the nineteen fifties and sixties
said in the interviews that heavy responsibility lay on a
sometimes neglected aspect of the problem, the over reliance on drugs.
Drugs bad, Okay. The record show that the politicians were
dogged by the image and financial problems posed by the
state hospitals, and that the scientific and medical establishment sold
Congress and the state legislatures a quick fix for a
complicated problem that was bought site unseen. Right. So it's
a fascinating article. It's very very lengthy. I'm not going
to give you obviously, I'm going to read the whole
thing here, just giving you the highlights. But this idea
that the psychiatric world was like, we got these new drugs,
and these new drugs can do wonders. Just give these
people the pills, give them the drugs, and then we
can close down all the institutions. Those things are inhumane.
Did you see Jack Nicholson and one flow over the
cuckoo's nest, and we can't have that, you know. Doctor
Robert Felix, who was then director of the National Institute
of Mental Health, a major figure in the shift to
community centers, says, now, upon reflection, quote, many of those
patients who left the state hospitals never should have done so.
We psychiatrists saw too much of the old snake pit,
saw too many people who shouldn't have been there, and
we over reacted. The result is not what we intended,
and perhaps we didn't ask the questions that should have
been asked when developing a new concept. But psychiatrists are
human too, and we tried our hardest. Trust the experts,
they say, right. Doctor John Talbot, president of the American
Psychiatric Association, quote, the psychiatrists involved in the policy making
at that time certainly oversold community treatment, and our credibility
today is probably damaged because of it. He said. The
policies were quote based partly on wishful thinking, partly on
the enormousness of the problem and the lack of a
silver bullet to resolve it. The original policy changes were
backed at the time by scores of national professional and
philanthropic organizations, as well as several hundred people prominent in medicine, academia,
and politics. The belief then was widespread that the same
scientific researchers who had conjured up antibiotics and vaccines during
the outburst of medical discovery in the fifties and sixties
had also developed penicillins to cure psychoses and thus revolutionize
the treatment of the mentally ill. And also, so you
have that going on, but at the same time you
have growing economic and political liability faced by state lawmakers.
There was a ton of tax revenue being used to
support state mental hospitals, and the institutions themselves were increasingly
thought of as snake pits or facilities that few people
even wanted. There was a thing called the Joint Commission
on Mental Illness and Health. This was an independent body
that was set up by Congress in nineteen fifty five.
One of the vice president of this commission, doctor M.
Brewster Smith from the University of California, a psychologist, said,
extravagant claims were made for the benefits of shifting from
state hospitals to community clinics. See so you also have
this ability of the law state lawmakers to offload the
costs onto the local jurisdictions with these community centers, community
health because they're facing you know, any time there was
any kind of abuse that occurred at a mental institution,
you had the negative publicity, right, you had the bad
pr and then you have the media running to the
lawmakers saying, what are you going to do about it?
You know, something needs to be done, we need new laws, which,
by the way, media does that in no small part
because if they can get laws changed, they win awards.
Reporters win awards. It's true. Okay, you identify a problem
that's out there, usually after some terrible case, you then agitate,
you hold people accountable. You go to politicians, you stick
a microphone in their face and you say, what are
you going to do about this? The politician, recognizing that
this is an opportunity for them to score some points
while doing some damage control, they will then introduce some
sort of a bill. We're going to crack down on this.
We're going to offer this kind of program, this service
to address this problem, whatever, maybe cut some ribbons with
the ridiculously oversized scissors or something. And then the media,
whoever was that, you know, was leading the charge on
this initiative, on the coverage. They will then submit that
coverage to their industry awards makers and they will win
awards for it, and then that puffs up there, resume
and they can move on to a bigger market. That's
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let me jump over and chat with Joe. Hello, Joe,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Hey Pete, thank you, Thank Macall. Sure, just kind a
point I wanted to bring up. I hear filials and
Josh Stein bring up this really subject about mental health,
all the mental health of the of these career criminal thugs.
Speaker 2: My question is, what.
Speaker 4: About the mental health of the victims' families and the
victims themselves. Where's the help coming from the state and
the city For like the elderly gentleman, the veteran that
was nearly beaten to death on the city bus.
Speaker 1: Left paralyzed, Yeah, he was left paralyzed from the neck
down exactly exactly.
Speaker 4: So is there any help being offered by by Josh
and by to to the families of these victims? Uh?
And and and then I heard again today that there
was a man that was abusing animals. He's put in
jail with no bonds, but yet we have career criminals
that are just basically given a get out of jail
free card. I'm just not understanding how how things are
being run.
Speaker 1: Well, it's uh, yeah, I mean the abuse of animals
usually is a uh I mean that fits the profile
of a future serial killer, you know, depending on the
level of the.
Speaker 4: Books, he should be in jail.
Speaker 1: Agree with that, but yeah, it does. It does speak
to the prioritization of victims in our system. It's sort
of like this guy, this leftist streamer guy named Hassan Piker,
who apparently like he does these seven eight hour long
streams every single day, and in the background, he's got
his dog that's just sitting on this little elevated bed
and the dog doesn't move for seven or eight hours.
And we finally found out this week how he does
that is he has a shock caller, and he shocks
the dog anytime it tries to get off that platform.
And this caused the outrage. Right, the guy had been
calling for the murder and violence against conservatives. That nobody
cared about that, But now people are upset because he
shocked the dog. Right. That's that's the prioritization we have in.
Speaker 4: Our society, exactly. I just want to bring that point a.
Speaker 1: Thanks for your show, piena appreciation, all right, but I
appreciate it. Joe, Yeah, have a great weekend. This New
York Times article from nineteen eighty four lays out who
was responsible for the closing of the institutions. And you
had all of these different groups with different incentives. Politicians, lawmakers.
They didn't want the pr damage from the abuses that
were reported in some of these institutions. They didn't want
the costs, right, so they offloaded all of that said
send it out to the community centers. You had psychiatrists
that were like, this is the way forward. This is
the hot new thing. We got these drugs now that
we're going to just you know, put people on the
drugs and that's going to solve the problem. Extravagant claims
were made for the benefits of shifting from state hospitals
to community clinics, said doctor Brewster Smith, who was the
vice president of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and
Health and Independent Bodies set up by Congress in nineteen
fifty five. He said the professional community made mistakes and
was overly optimistic, but the political community wanted to save money.
Charles Schlafer, a New New York advertising executive who served
as secretary treasurer of this group, said that he was
now disgusted with the advice presented by leading psychiatrists of
that day. He said, quote tranquilizers became the panacea for
the mentally ill. The state programs were buying them by
the car load, sending the drugged patients back to the community,
and the psychiatrists never tried to stop this. Local mental
health centers were going to be the greatest thing going,
but no one wanted to think it through. Legislation sought
to create a nationwide network of locally based mental health centers, which,
rather than large state hospitals, would be the main source
of treatment. The center concept was aided by federal funds
for four and a half years, after which it was
hoped that the states and local governments would assume responsibility.
You'll never guess what happened after that. Yeah, politicians and
health experts were carrying out a public mandate they thought
to abolish the abominable conditions of insane asylums. But in retrospect,
it does seem clear that questions were not asked that
might have been asked. In the thousands of pages of
testimony before congressional committees in the late nineteen fifties and
early nineteen sixties, little doubt was ever expressed about the
wisdom of de institutionalization. I am reminded of the line
from the documentary Jurassic Park. You spend so much time
thinking how do we do it? You never stopped to
think should we do it?
Speaker 4: All?
Speaker 1: Right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so
much for listening. I could not do the show without
your support and the support of the businesses that advertise
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