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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much for your support. All Right, so, one of the
last hour we were talking about mass transit. Obviously, Mecklimburg
County has this big referendum coming up to add a
penny to the sales tax to pay for this big
transit plan. But one of the issues associated with mass
transit is safety is crime because the use of mass
transit relies on a high trust society. Okay, otherwise nobody
rides it. People will not ride in a you know,
in a cylindrical coffin with forty fifty sixty other people
if there's no guarantee of safety, or if you know,
there's if there is some sort of violence that erupts
that there's then no justice for the victims, and so
people will not put themselves into that situation when they
have other means available to them. Right, So, if you
have high crime, if you have the perception of high crime,
if the perception is that the mass transit system is
not going to be safe for you, and you have
a vehicle, you're not going to ride mass transit and
you're not going to vote to raise taxes to support
more of the mass transit.
Speaker 2: Look.
Speaker 1: I grew up on Long Island, New York, and about oh,
probably three quarters of a mile from my house out
on the island was the Long Island Railroad. Now, I
did not have a stop that was near there that
that was just the tracks, But I could go to
the next town over, and people did this all the time.
They had station cars, not to be confused with the
station wagon, which was usually used by people who didn't
take it to the train station. The station cars were
like these were beater cars. You would take like you
would find some five hundred dollars nineteen seventy two Honda
Civic and I say that because that's what I owned,
and actually mine was a seventy seven. But you would
take this to the train station. You wouldn't even lock
the doors, if they even locked it all, no air conditioning,
no heat. Right, the thing barely got you to the station.
The point was that you could leave it there all
day and nobody would steal this thing. And you didn't
use it if you were going on a trip. You
were you know, in your home on the weekends. You
didn't drive it any other time except to the station.
And the trade off there is that you get on
the train and then you ride it into the city
if you're working in the city, and a lot of
people do that. They live out on the island, they
have a better quality of life. They get on the
train and then they drive, they ride it into the station,
and you could go in a car. They got like
the quiet cars now where you go in there and
you're not allowed to talk, dimly lit, you know, can't
play music out loud, that sort of thing, and they
actually have a conductor that walks through and you know,
takes your ticket, you know, stamps it or whatever or
punches out the little card and you know, enforces the
quiet car stuff. And the trade off on all of
this is just to say that you can go in
there and you can read, you can sleep right, you
can watch a movie like you get your time back
that you would otherwise spend sitting in traffic, and so
that is part of the equation as well. But if
you don't feel safe going to the station, parking the
car at the station, someone's going to steal your car
or slash the tires or something. You're going to be
accosted at the station, You're going to be attacked on
the subway car, you have to walk multiple miles after
you get to the city, or you've got to make
multiple transfers. Like, all of these things factor into the equation,
and safety is a very big part of it, which
is why I think Democrats are completely stupid to be
having this meltdown over Donald Trump sending troops and taking
over the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, d C. First off,
it's a federal district. He is he can do this,
It's he can only do it for thirty days. Then
Congress has to, you know, has to give him permission
to continue to do it. But I gotta believe that
deep down, a lot of the people that are complaining
about this are secretly kind of happy that somebody is
going to do something thing about the crime in Washington, DC.
And like we keep hearing these stories. We see the
stats and they're trying to gaslight us, saying, well, actually,
our crime stats are down. And I went over this
the other day. You had the NBC story from a
month ago that reported how a commander had been suspended
for falsifying the crime data they've been and the report
said that there were all these anonymous sources, and one
on the record was the local chapter of the FOP
that was saying that they're juice in the stats. They're
falsifying the data. When they go to a scene and
it's a violent attack of some kind, it's you know,
some sort of a bad crime stat they'll they'll mark
it down as a lower offense so it doesn't get
registered as a violent crime, and then it doesn't get
reported to the FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics. That's a problem, right,
That's a problem. And Donald Trump said this at his
press conference yesterday. I just want to play this clip
real quick and tell me if this sounds like a
familiar philosophy that he is expressing here.
Speaker 3: You know, my father always used to tell me I
had a wonderful father, very smart, and he used to say, son,
when you walk into a restaurant and you see a
dirty front door, don't go in, because if the front
door is dirty, the kitchens dirty.
Speaker 2: Also, same thing.
Speaker 4: With the capital.
Speaker 3: If are capital's dirty, our whole country is dirty, and
their all respect us. So it's a very good question.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what is that.
Speaker 1: It's a form of the broken windows philosophy of policing.
If you care about the little stuff, it sends a
message that you care about the big stuff too. In fact,
you care about the big stuff even more. You know,
if you allow people to do things that create chaos
and so disorder in your high trust society, people lose
trust because the bad actors, the sociopaths and psychopaths among us,
they will take every inch you give them. They will
continue to behave in antisocial ways, and the people who
are not antisocial will now remove themselves from the equation.
There was a story that the president of El Salvador
told Okayley is his name, and he was asked about
this crackdown on gangs and cartels and crime in general,
and he talked about you know a guy who grows
tomatoes I think he said, was the example, and takes
them into the market to sell, and he may be
there all day long trying to sell the tomatoes from
the farm, and he may sell five dollars worth of tomatoes,
and on the way back from the market, he gets
attacked by the gang and they take his five dollars.
So what is the message that the farmer now takes
away from this? It is better for him to go
and take five dollars from somebody else who's selling their
stuff than it is to actually do the work and
play by the rules and engage in commerce.
Speaker 2: And when you have enough people.
Speaker 1: That decide that that is the preferred path because that's
what's being rewarded or at least, you know, not enforced,
then you have a breakdown in your society.
Speaker 2: Then all you have is like Gangland. That's not a
high trust society.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: Your number one job as gov CO is to provide
the umbrella of security to allow for commerce among free
people to occur. And if you can't get that right,
City of Charlotte, Washington, DC, then you need to reprioritize
the other things that you are doing that is distracting
you from this core service. It is the thing, the
only reason why people band together and create a government
power in the first place.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 1: Mutual defense, that's it. If you can't provide that, you
have no reason to exist. It's not for the buses, people,
it's not for the trains. It's for mutual protection, enforcement
of law, for violators, punishment. All right, if you're listening
to this show, you know I try to keep up
with all sorts of current events, and I know you
do too, And you've probably heard me say get your
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detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed
with ground News. It's an app and it's a website,
and it combines news from around the world in one
place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You
can check it out at check dot ground, dot news,
slash pete. I put the link in podcast description too.
I started using ground News a few months ago and
more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate
because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered
and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which
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but it also supports ground news as they make the
media landscape more transparent. Here is a message from Mark.
It's a Pete mail.
Speaker 2: Pete.
Speaker 1: The DC mayor Muriel Bowser of the of the What
Mario Brothers fame is stating that violent crime is way down,
the lowest in thirty years. However, murders are at record levels.
That's because you can't juice a murder stat it can't
be shown as a lesser offense. That's exactly right. It's
a great point, Mark. It lays bare the fraud that
are the DC crime stats. Right they keep talking about
in their defense of DC and in opposition to the
you know Orange Hitler that how dare he help us
police our streets when we've got we've got a violent
crime that's way down. Yes, because the commander who just
got suspended was falsifying and apparently this has been running rampant.
Speaker 2: They've been declassify, not declassified, but.
Speaker 1: They've been what would I say that to demoting or
something like they they define it down right, they're making
them less serious offenses at the point of the police report,
so it doesn't get coded as a violent crime. Hence
the miraculous turnaround. But here's the thing, if you even
compare it to twenty eighteen, it's still higher than it
was before COVID twenty eighteen. I see them talk about
twenty nineteen, but it's still higher. It's been going up
and up and up and up. And by the way,
the carjacking numbers are through the roof, it's like four
hundred five hundred percent increase. So President Trump announced that
he was federalizing the police force in Washington, DC and
mobilizing the National Guard to clean up the streets of
the district. Washington, writes David Strawm at hot air dot com,
as one of the most dangerous cities in America. It's
in the same basic category as Chicago, New Orleans, and
Saint Louis. Its murder rates exceed those of Bogata and
Mexico City, both famously dangerous cities. The city, which famously
puts taxation without representation on its license plates, also wants
to be a state. If it were its own state,
it would be the most dangerous state in America. DC
has a higher violent crime, higher murder, and higher robbery
rates than all fifty states, recording a homicide rate in
twenty twenty four of twenty seven and a half murders
per hundred thousand residents. It also experienced the nation's highest
vehicle theft rate, with eight hundred forty two thefts per
hundred thousand residents. Eight hundred forty two thefts. That is
three times the national average. So they're part of that average,
which they drive up, and there's still three times more
than that. The District of Columbia is, by some measures,
among the top twenty percent of the most dangerous cities
in the world, not to mention the fact that DC
is cooking the books to make things look better than
they actually are. One thing the establishmentarians are saying is
that they don't care what happens to people as long
as those people aren't themselves. Basically, it's been amazing to
watch all of these quote unquote elites.
Speaker 2: I got to come up with a better word than
that elites.
Speaker 1: Fo leats these folites right, because they think they're elites,
but they're not. Okay, and they're like, oh, what is
all upset about? I work in DC every day, and
I go in there by an uber and I don't
ever have any problems whatsoever. And I live in Arlington, Virginia,
and it's no problem to me. Yeah, so a problem
to you because you don't live there and you don't
take mass transit in I got a quote here. Hang on,
let's play this quote. See if you can peg who
this is. It's from a couple of years ago. But
take a listen.
Speaker 4: Driving home, my staff lives here in the hill reminded me,
don't stop at a stop light until I'm out of
town if I see a red light late at night,
since there's very little traffic slow up at the other block,
so I never come to a full stop except in
the middle of the block.
Speaker 2: Because of carjackets.
Speaker 4: Stopping to light, people standing in a corner walking up
with a gun.
Speaker 2: Do you know who that was? Can you tell?
Speaker 1: It was from nineteen ninety two that my friends is
Senator Joe Biden. Now, people in DC that are Democrats
and media, But I repeat myself.
Speaker 2: They may claim that.
Speaker 1: It's not a problem at all, but I have seen
reports that carjackers are now getting carjacked in d C too.
That's how bad it has become by the way. I
did this in nineteen ninety six, I believe it was
I went to see The Grateful Dead Bob Dylan opened,
and that's why I went, because I wanted to see
Bob Dylan because I thought Bob was old and he
was going to die, and I wanted to see Bob
Dylan in concert before he died.
Speaker 2: And then a month later, Jerry died. But so we
went to d C to RFK Stadium.
Speaker 1: And yeah, they checked our vaccinations and all of that
before we went in.
Speaker 2: If you had that scenes then they wouldn't let you in.
But no RFK Stadium.
Speaker 1: And we got lost because we didn't have map Quest
or any GPS stuff. And we were driving around trying
to get out of DC, and it was very late
at night and it was summer. Windows were down, no
AC in the car, and we're driving around. I stop
at a stoplight and I hear some people on the
corner saying, you're not from around here, and they said
that because of our skin color in the vehicle and
all of the Grateful Dead stickers on the car. Probably
but they yeah. And so that was the last stoplight
I stopped at in downtown DC. And that was thirty
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Speaker 2: Back to the piece.
Speaker 1: This is from hot air dot com by David Strom,
who points out that liberals cannot wrap their minds around
the idea that Americans are tired of watching everything get worse.
That is true. We are we are tired of it.
I keep saying it. This is a choice. And now
that enough Americans are choosing a different path, and that's
what Donald Trump is reacting to. Donald Trump is giving
voice to. Donald Trump is saying no, we don't have
to live under these conditions. We can make these things better.
And I think that's really the fear, is that people
are going to see that the city becomes safer. People
are going to feel safer, and then they may start wondering, well,
why hasn't this been done before? Why aren't the people
that we keep voting for, why aren't they doing these things?
This is from the National Review by Rich Lowry, And
I would just point out before I get into this,
that San Francisco cleaned itself up for the commie leader
of China, Winnie the Pooh, when he came to town.
Speaker 2: Right, why did they do that? How did they do that?
How could they do that?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: They obviously know what to do and how to do it,
but they just won't do it for their American citizens.
I mean, think about the contempt and the disdain that
they must have for their own citizens to live under
those conditions. But when the communist leader from China shows
up with his jar of honey, and then it's like, well,
clean the streets, you know, rouse the hoboes, get them
all out of here, so it all looks nice and
clean for the communists. So the communist gets to see that,
he gets to experience the best foot forward in San Francisco, anyway,
Rich Lowry says, At its best, Washington, DC is a
city of timeless grandeur, of iconic monuments and world historical
centers of power. At its worst, it's a harrowing place
where a remorseless fourteen year old could steal your car.
The Metropolitan Government of Washington has never been worthy of
the seat of government of the greatest and most powerful
nation that has ever existed. Ever, it's consistently been an embarrassment,
and for decades now has tolerated and worse, created the
conditions for disorderly and dangerous streets. He then runs through
a brief history. The federal government had to put a
financial control board in charge in the nineties because the
district was on the brink of bankruptcy. In the grand
scheme of things, Trump's intervention is more the norm than
an exception in DC's history. Way back in the nineteenth century,
Congress governed the district via committees before giving home rule
a try in eighteen seventy one, and then it had
to quickly pull back after the district was yes financially mismanaged.
DC has enjoyed home rules since nineteen seventy three, although
with the Financial Board exercising significant power from nineteen ninety
five through two thousand and one. As usual, Lowry says,
Trump is opting for the sledge hammer over the scalpel. Still,
his indictment of Washington, d c. For allowing lawless young
people to blight the city is accurate. The critics object
that violent crime is actually falling in Washington. Yes, it is,
although from an unacceptably high level. As of twenty twenty four,
d C had the fourth highest homicide rate of major
US cities and a higher homicide rate than all fifty states.
Charles Layman of the Manhattan Institute points out that the
city's homicide rate for young black men has been above
the national average for decades. The killings overwhelmingly involve males
who have already been entangled in the criminal justice system
with substantial rap sheets and prison time. Layman cites a
report by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform that
found that about five hundred people that are identified. Five
hundred people are in this category of you know, substantial
criminal histories in prison time. These five hundred people account
for sixty to seventy percent of all the gun violence
in the city. They know who the people are. The
carjackings tend to be carried out by miners. And I
actually have a text here from Ellen who says miners
are not included in the DC numbers. Yeah, those go
down as auto thefts, right, which are violent. Carjackings are violent.
Layman argues that the the DC cops or sorry. The
DC needs more cops who are more active making stops,
making arrests, and there need to be more prosecutions. Right,
if you do not punish the anti social behavior, you
will get more of it. And people who heretofore were
not antisocial and did not engage in that behavior, they
will see no reason to not join with the anti
social behavior if they don't leave. It is a rational response, right,
It is rational to do so if like, Okay, well
this is the way it is, and my government's not
going to protect me, then I'm going to engage in
the behavior because why not.
Speaker 2: You offer no incentives to get people.
Speaker 1: Off of that career path if you will and onto
a legit one.
Speaker 2: Don't know who this is from.
Speaker 1: On the text line, I lived in Charlotte my whole life,
forty six years. I rode the light rail when it
was new and vagrants didn't pay their fares. Then these
pro trained liberals have no clue. Who will ride straight
into their safe quote unquote safe suburbs. That's always been
the argument against mass transit is that you now allow
a criminal population to spread out more whereas before it
may have been localized. And by the way, at the
heart of this crime issue is the victims, and the
people who are most victimized by these soft on crime
policies are the poor and minority neighborhoods. They're the ones
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dot com. So I just saw this. This is the
Washington DC Police Chief, Pamela Smith. They're doing a news
conference and Smith was apparently formerly before she became chief,
she was the chief equity officer at the Metro PD.
And she was asked a question by a reporter and
see if you can spot something.
Speaker 2: That is suboptimal. Let's say, does what the share of
command is?
Speaker 4: Now?
Speaker 2: What does that mean?
Speaker 1: Quote? Is it cam Bondi's Greeks does his work?
Speaker 3: So?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 1: So now they bring in the mayor. So she has asked,
so can you explain what the chain of command is now?
And her response is what does that mean? She is
the chief of police and does not know what the
chain of command means? Doesn't know what the term means. Guys,
I think I think I may know the problem.
Speaker 2: In DC.
Speaker 1: Raphael Mangul he is the he's a contributing editor at
the City Journal, and he does public safety issues for
the Manhattan Institute, and he says a good portion of
my work has been focused on trying to remind people
that poor mostly minority neighborhoods bear a disproportionately large chunk
of America's crime problem. The collateral consequences of violent crime
for a community are enormous, and not just for the
immediate victims. The ripple effect goes far beyond what most
people who casually take positions on criminal justice policy have
ever considered. It's long past time for conservatives and other
quote unquote tough on crime folks to reoccupy the moral
high ground in these debates and take up the job
of defending the pro social against the anti social. Bottom line,
there is absolutely nothing moral about failing to meaningfully incapacitate
repeat offenders who have exhibited through a long pattern of
criminal conduct, that they will not play by society's rules.
He's exactly right people who are talking about soft on
crime policies and why they should be adopted, people that
want to just treat the judicial system as a turnstyle
for repeat, repeat offenders. You do not occupy the moral
high ground. You are revictimizing entire communities of people. It's grotesque.
It's more grotesque given that you promote yourself as the
caring one that you care more about these very neighborhoods
and communities that you allow to be repeatedly victimized by
the same people, over and over and over again. Which
brings me to the District Attorney of Mecklenberg County who
has announced that there will be no charges against police
officers Charlotte Mecklimberg police officers in the shooting death of
Reggie Allen Knight. This occurred on March seventh. It started
at about four point forty in the afternoon March seventh,
at one two five two four, Headquarters Farm Road in Charlotte.
Earlier that day, CMPD received a nine to one to
one call stating that Reggie Knight was wanted by police
and had recently been seen at this residence. Six cops
respond to the scene. Prior to approaching the house, the
officers met at a nearby location and they briefed right,
they looked at they got the photo of him right,
they pulled his rap sheet and stuff, and they worked
out their plan. This guy had unserved Mecklenberg County arrest
warrants four possession of meth, possession of a firearm by
a convicted felon, carrying a concealed weapon, resisting a public officer,
possession of drug paraphernalia, communicating threats, domestic violence, two counts
of assault on a female, assault with a deadly weapon,
and assault by strangulation. Unserved warrants on this guy. Additionally,
he had pending orders for arrest for a felony probation, violation,
intoxicated and disruptive behavior, driving while license revoked, and driving
while impaired. Three cops go to the front door. One
places himself on the right side of the house, one
on the left, one in the backyard. They ring the bell.
The mother answers the door and lies to the police
and says she hadn't even seen her son in a while. Meanwhile,
her son is leaving out the second floor, comes out
on the deck, proceeds down the stairs, starts making his
way across the backyard. He's told to stop, he refuses.
He starts to run, then he stops, turns around and
opens fire on the cops. One of the cops hit
in the leg, the other one got hit in the belt,
but the belt stop the bullet, and the one cop
that got shot in the leg takes the guy down,
wrestles with the gun and gets it out of his hand.
Speaker 2: As his colleagues.
Speaker 1: Open fire on the suspect, killing him, which saved us
all a bunch of court costs. All right, that'll do
it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.
I could not do the show without your support and
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thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.