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- [00:08]
A
Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast. I am your host, Raphael Mangual. I am so thrilled to be joined by one of my favorite colleagues. Thank you, Heather McDonald.
- [00:18]
B
Thank you, Raphael.
- [00:20]
A
Today's episode is going to be a fun one. It's part of a new series called who We Are, where we're going to take a deep dive into one of the kind of core pillars of MI's work over the years. And as you may have guessed, this episode is gonna focus on policing and public safety. And so who better to take us through that than the great Heather MacDonald, who has done just incredible work over the years, which I have been reading since I was in college, believe it or not, and, you know, really helped.
- [00:49]
B
Me when I was like, in the old age home.
- [00:50]
A
But, yes, well, it really helped me see through so much of the nonsense that I was being force fed when I was in my first year sociology class, for example, which is what prompted me to, you know, go down the rabbit and actually found that's how I found the work at the Manhattan Institute. But I feel like a good place to start because so many people are just now engaging with MI and our work at City Journal and don't really realize that we have a very long history, particularly with this issue, particularly as it relates to New York. And so I wonder if you can just talk to us a little bit about where City Journal and the Manhattan Institute were in the broader debates about policing and public safety when you first came to the Institute and started writing for City Journal, I think in the.
- [01:36]
B
Mid-1990S, well, it was a great time. It was a time of urban renaissance, when the ideas that one of the Manhattan Institute fellows, George Kelling, had put into the public sphere, which was that city governments, police and other aspects of government should pay attention to public order, that that's a core function of cities. Without that, if you have crime, if you have, you know, teen mobs rampaging, if you have litter, if you have graffiti, you're falling down on your obligation as a city. And that the perception of disorderly environments leads people to fear higher levels of crime for good reason and to flee. To flee public spaces. So George Kelling had written a seminal article on what was called, they called Broken Windows Policing with James Q. Wilson in the Atlantic in 85, I believe that far. So it took a while. So we should all not give up when nobody's paying attention to us. Be patient. And they got an ear among some early police reformers, William Bratton being one who started out in the Boston Police Department. And he started paying attention to the subway system in Boston and said, we need to bring order back there. And there was also in the late 80s, early 90s, which was a very bad time for New York. The homicide. Our highest homicide rate was 2,262 in 1990 under David Dinkins. And I remember I just came through Grand Central Terminal to get here to record. And there's. We now have. At least after. Even after four years or eight years of Bill de Blasio, and now having elected a socialist mondame who is anti police. I'm not gonna believe anything until I see him actually revoking those policies. We still have held onto public order, but. So Grand Central Terminal looks very good now.
- [03:53]
A
It does.
- [03:53]
B
But in the late 80s, it's remarkable.
- [03:55]
A
It really is.
- [03:56]
B
In the late 80s, there were a bunch of people forming things called business improvement districts that were private partnership of business owners that chipped in extra tax dollars as if they weren't already paying enough to try and get sanitation services and security in their business communities. They made a video of Grand Central Terminal that was horrific. It showed, you know, doors to the outside hanging off their hinges, being held on with string vagrants populating the outside. The inside, it had turned into just an insane asylum. So in the late 1980s, the Business Improvement districts were forming and putting the broken windows concept further into realization. And then you had the turning point for New York, which was the election of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who'd run on a public order platform. And it kills me to have to say this now, but when one invokes Rudolph Giuliani, especially to younger audiences, you get a guffaw of contempt.
- [05:10]
A
Well, he's a very different man now than the one that we remember as mayor.
- [05:16]
B
It's a tragic fall of the hero. Because I cannot stress enough to people who don't know what Giuliani was for New York City. He was the greatest urban visionary that I can ever think of that had a gut understanding of the need for public safety, of the social compact. You don't hand out welfare with no strings attacks. You ask people to take responsibility for their lives. Anyway, so he brought in Bratton, and the two of them embraced a revolutionary idea, which was that the police can actually lower crime.
- [05:51]
A
Right. So I want to stop there because there's so much to unpack when we talk about policing today. People like Zohram Hamdani, who you mentioned, immediately go to this idea that, well, what police really exist to do is go after serious crime. They shouldn't be bothering with all the little stuff like traffic enforcement and you know, fare evasion and littering. But the story of New York's comeback really did start with public order enforcement as you mentioned. Which is strange, right? Because at a time in which the city is experiencing in excess of 2000 murders a year, you would think that the biggest priority would be going directly after that problem. After the serious violent crime, after the shootings, after the gangbangers and the drug dealers. And yet the story of New York's comeback is really one that began with a focus on order and just break down the mechanics of that. Why did that work? Help people understand why it is that it actually makes sense to go after the small stuff when you have such major problems.
- [06:56]
B
Well, first of all, I just want to just reassert Rafael, your point about Mamdami. This is the main conceit of anti cop left wing academics and activists, which is okay, if you put a gun to our heads, haha. We will concede that it's maybe okay for the police to go after violent crime. But there's this dichotomy, this Manichean distinction between serious and non serious crime and non serious crime. Police should not look at that. So that is rebutting this is absolutely essential to restoring public order.
- [07:30]
A
I agree.
- [07:30]
B
The reason one, there's many reasons why public order matters. One is there's a great chain of being of criminal offending. The people that are out there doing drive by shootings are not assiduously paying their fares as they go into the summit. Gotta pay my fare, you know, be law abiding citizen.
- [07:49]
A
I like to say when I'm giving talks about this stuff that there's no such thing as a purely violent criminal. Who says I only hurt people but I don't litter, I don't, I don't drive too fast, I don't break any other of society's rules, just the really big ones.
- [08:00]
B
It's one package. And the fact is is that violent crimes as awful as they are, are relative rarities. But the commission of low level offenses for these guys that are in the underclass, they've got the underclass mentality, social pathologies going out the ears. They are breaking laws all the time.
- [08:22]
A
That's exactly right.
- [08:23]
B
So that's one if you want to get them. And so you know, the Giuliani years started out under Bratton with these famous instances where they found rapists that have been on outstanding warrants, you know, warrant absconders by enforcing turnstile jumping. So that's one thing, but that still kind of plays into the Mondame worldview, which is, well, it's really all about the violent criminals. But it's about more than that. You've done this, I've done this. I go to police community meetings in high crime areas and as you said, what you don't hear is I want you to get the drive by shooters off the street. What you hear is I want you to get the parking violations out of control. I want you to get those youth that are hanging out by the hundreds fighting the disorderly conduct. Whatever happened to enforcing truancy laws or loitering laws? And the police have to say, well, the Supreme Court doesn't allow us to do that any longer. But the people that live in high disorder neighborhoods, what they care about most is broken windows enforcement more than middle class whites.
- [09:30]
A
Public order enforcement is good for its own sake.
- [09:33]
B
Exactly.
- [09:33]
A
This is the thing that people don't understand, right? They, they pretend that by enforcing public order that the police are being oppressive occupiers of these neighborhoods. When in reality the people who actually live in these places, as you say, what they want more than anything else is to be able to enjoy the spaces in which they live. Which means getting the loud music under control, getting the street takeovers and street racing under control, getting the double parking under control, getting the abandoned vehicle off the street so that they can park in that spot and so that it doesn't become an attraction point to all kinds of other sorts of disorder. And this is something that I don't think people really realized was a massive motivator for people voting the way that they did in 1993 and putting Rudolph Giuliani into that office. And I think it's important to point out that 1990 wasn't the only year in which we had 2,000 plus murders that had been happening for years before, before that. And yet Giuliani lost his first bid for the mayoralty in 1989 despite the fact that the city was still experiencing that. So it really does speak to the effectiveness of pushing that kind of public order message for getting broad public support.
- [10:41]
B
Right. And you could say, well, it just shows contempt on the part of the elites for these neighborhoods of oh well, you know, they can't do anything better. But there's so the, another possible explanation is even worse than that, which is that for progressives, that kind of disorder signals authenticity.
- [10:56]
A
Right.
- [10:56]
B
And this is what I fear with Mondami, you know, because when, when the bids, the business improvement district started cleaning up the lower east side and. And the police were finally getting rid of squatter buildings and whatnot and enforcing codes. There was this complaint that arose from the New York Times and other journalists, hipster journalists, of, well, New York is losing its grit. It's losing its grit. And it is, you know, it's no longer the case that pimps and prostitutes and X rated stores control Times Square. Now you have families walking it all. It looks like Disneyland, you know, and that's bad for them. A nice, clean, safe place shows that it's anti urban. And so mondame, you know, I think the city's gonna get even filthier right now. It is very squalid in my neighborhood. I go nuts at the ugliness, the litter. It's gonna get worse because they don't even see it. They think this is part of what makes cities great is litter, graffiti, broken street furniture and whatnot.
- [11:58]
A
That's right. They watch movies like Escape from New York and see it as. Yeah, as sort of. They view it with nostalgia as opposed to seeing it as the cautionary tale that it is. When in reality, real New Yorkers, we're not enjoying graffitied subways or smelly train platforms or crazy homeless people. We all wanted safety.
- [12:17]
B
Yeah.
- [12:17]
A
We all wanted to enjoy our neighborhoods. I very much prefer the New York that I came home to from law school in 2015 than the new York that I grew up in, you know, in the early 1990s and late 80s where, you know, my grandmother's chain got snatched on the subway. And, you know, so it really is, I think, important for people to understand that public order played a major role in pushing this. But you also highlighted the unexpected benefits that came with that concentration on order enforcement, which was the discovery of other serious crimes and contraband. That wasn't exactly part of the plan. And this is one of the things that I think people misunderstand about broken windows. And I have tried my best to get people to sort of look at broken windows and understand it for what it is, which is really a psychological theory, right. Of how we process visible disorder. What signal does that send to us, and how do we interpret it and respond? Broken windows policing is really just the integration of that theory into how police are making decisions about, you know, resource deployment and tactical decisions. But people have it in their head when they hear broken windows that that means zero tolerance. Throw everybody in jail for as long as you can for the smallest possible thing. And I, you know, had the wonderful privilege of getting to work with George Kelling in the last couple Years of his life. And one of the things that frustrated him to no end was how people sort of bastardized. In his words. That was the word that he would always use. His the. And I want people to understand that enforcing public order wasn't undertaken based on this idea that we were gonna get at more serious crime. That was kind of a happy surprise. And we started to understand that there was actually tactical advantage to doing this sort of thing. And Bill Bratton, who you mentioned earlier, I think, really made this idea famous when he called it the Cracker Jack box effect. Right? You don't buy Cracker Jacks because you really like the popcorn. You bought it for the prize that you would get in the box. And so you fare evasion wasn't the sexiest kind of work for a police officer to do in the transit system. But when they realized that you can get illegal guns, that one in every 20 or 21 offenders had an illegal weapon, when one in seven had an outstanding warrant, then it became kind of more justifiable. And so just talk about that a little bit. Like, how important is it that people understand broken windows for what it actually was? And sort of how important was that realization to how New York City was policed moving forward?
- [14:50]
B
Well, Bratton's position seems to be sort of. We're reverting now to the idea that it was to get the warrant. Absconder rapist. But as opposed to it being an end in itself, which I again, completely agree with. I also, this issue of zero tolerance. You know, Giuliani, he did become an order freak. And here's a confession. I am too. Like, as far as I'm concerned, you can never have too much public order and too much rule enforcement. So he used this phrase. And Kelling did try to distance himself from it. My view is there should be zero tolerance for disorder. I'm sorry, there should be. But you know, Julie, I think he was. He really was seen as going too far when at some point he said, okay, we're now gonna start enforcing the laws against jaywalking, right? And everybody said, no way. This is my entitlement as a New Yorker.
- [15:45]
A
As a New Yorker, yeah. I still.
- [15:46]
B
I do walk. We all. But there's no enforcement, so why shouldn't we? But. So I guess I would distinguish. If we're gonna be against zero tolerance, I would distinguish two aspects of it. You can say, we are not gonna overlook disorder, but that doesn't mean we are sending you to jail. And so what works is. And police officers will say this, you know, if they're encountering somebody, a group of guys that are drinking from open containers on a stoop, they don't have to arrest them. You pour out the booze, you know, and you just. You give them a warning. But you should intervene. You shouldn't let that happen. And why is that important? It's again, you know, I'm telling you what you already know. The public drinking people think, well, what's wrong with that? It does lead to. And I've heard this again from people in these communities. If you allow that to happen, five hours later, there's a knife fight or a gun. So. So those types of behaviors should be stopped. The question is, what's the appropriate penalty? And that there's wiggle room on.
- [16:49]
A
Well, this is where people sort of get into a bit of the bias question, right? Because when they critique police intervening in something like public drinking, right, you and I are thinking, you know, some perhaps underage or, you know, young men on a stoop drinking hard liquor, being loud and rowdy, and they're thinking, you know, in Central park, watching, you know, one of the free classical music performances with a bottle of, you know, $200 merlot or something like that, there's no fight that's gonna break out at that event. And they say, well, you know, we've never been approached by police. And so why should the police approach, you know, the group of teenagers doing the same thing, just trying to enjoy the outdoors? What do you say to that?
- [17:32]
B
Because that's where the 911 calls are coming. They are not getting police calls in Central park with New York Phil Summer. They're getting it from people that are terrified either about the guys drinking or about the kids hanging out. And so, you know, the police face so many excruciating psychological binds. My heart just goes out to them. If they respond to the public demands for order, the ACLU is gonna sue them for generating disparate statistics. So they can either ignore their constituency or they can, you know, do the bidding or ignore the aclu. And ignoring the ACLU means they're going to haul you into court and maybe, you know, you're going to face 10 years of litigation over your police practices, as the New York Police Department did. So I think, you know, one of the people that's also in the New York, in the Manhattan Institute of Orbit is Philip Howard, who's an attorney at Covington, Burlington. And he's waged a crusade for decades now calling for revalorization of discretion. And he said, we've become too rule Obsessed. We don't trust people in government or other types of officials from being reasonable and commonsensical. Maybe for good reason. We don't trust them. But you just gotta recognize reality. And that give the police some discretion to say, you know, this is where it's needed, it's not needed there. Rather than being sticklers for heart and.
- [19:10]
A
Fat, discretions are a big part of this story. You know, if you read the original Broken Windows article, you know, it started with a discussion about the Newark Foot Patrol experiment and what George and James Q. Wilson were talking about. They were giving out examples of how the police knew what the sort of social mores were in that neighborhood and how to enforce the pro social norms, often in a very informal way, like what you said, right? Pouring out the liquor and telling somebody to move on. The importance of having enforcement authority is really so that you can have an answer to the question of. Or what? Right. You know, say, you know, the group of teenagers, they're drinking, they're being loud. Police come, they pour out the alcohol and they say, you know, we're gonna drive around the block. When we come back, you better not be here. They say, or what? Or what? Then you're going to jail, you know, to have an answer to that question. But at the core of a lot of what changed in the criminal justice space, particularly in the 60s and 70s, and it really started with sentencing. You had like Robert Martinson and some other folks, people were upset about exercises of discretion leading to disparate outcomes. Right. If we give police discretion, if we don't have hard and fast rules, then we create the conditions for their bias to come through in the decisions that they make. It seemed like people had kind of made the choice that we're just not comfortable with that. And I think that that was a massive mistake. And it elevated. It began the elevation of this issue of bias, and it became the be all, end all of how we make decisions about policing and criminal justice policy. What do you make of that?
- [20:48]
B
Yeah, I mean, everything that's going on in the criminal justice system and has been going on for the last three decades is driven by race. Simple as that. Like, if viewers have been observing what's been happening with prosecution and the progressive prosecutors, why they're not enforcing the law, why we see these guys getting picked up with 20 former arrests for, you know, violence, non violence, and they're still on the street. You know, why? Why? It seems like nothing is being done for criminals that get sent out. It's all because of race. It's all because of. If you enforce the law in a colorblind, neutral, constitutional fashion, you will have a disparate impact on black criminal. Not because the law is racist, but because the crime rates are so disparate and America turns its eyes away from that fact. We spin these preposterous counter narratives that black parents are right to fear that their children are gonna be killed by a police officer or a white person every time they step outside. Which is what Obama, President Barack Obama said. What President Joe Biden said.
- [21:56]
A
Well, Bill de Blasio said.
- [21:58]
B
De Blasio as well. These are complete fictions. The reality of interracial crime is that blacks are 33 times more likely to commit an act of violence against whites than vice versa. That's the reality of interracial crime. But it's scary to Americans to acknowledge those disparities. And instead, we've been blaming the messenger for years. And again, this is like another thing that the police have to put up with. They have to go into these households. I've gone on ride alongs, you've gone on ride alongs. One cannot overstate the squalor and the chaos in these households. Filth, trash everywhere. Children, you know, being kept up, not fed at 2am allowed to run around, the mothers strung out on crack. And the police can't talk about it because we're in this denial and we're saying, oh, no, it's. The police are at fault. They're biased for making these arrests. They can't talk about it. And you cannot enforce either broken windows policing, which is higher in these neighborhoods. The level of disorder is higher. I invite anybody to get out at 125th street in Lexington on the subway stop, check out the litter, check out the graffiti, or the violent crime. The bodies don't lie. There was a study after the George Floyd race riots that found that in four American cities, New York, Chicago, Boston, and I think Philadelphia, black juveniles were shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. That's not the police making that up. So that's the biggest. That's the big problem. And we can either enforce the law and have a disparate impact, or we can say we're going to avoid disparate impact, we're going to avoid disparate rates of incarceration, and we're going to just allow crime to run around. But those are the choices. There's no middle ground.
- [23:59]
A
No, I think you're right. I do. I just think it's interesting because, you know, just going back to the discretion issue, For a second, there was an attack on discretion based on this idea that discretion was sort of the mechanism through which bias worked its way into various kinds of decisions. So we adopted more stringent sentencing guidelines, right? To make sure that whites weren't being sentenced more favorably than blacks. We required more paperwork on the part of police so that they could articulate the bases for their stops, et cetera. To make sure that there wasn't bias working its way into. We started. We did a very famous study on traffic enforcement in the New Jersey Turnpike, right? There was this idea that, well, blacks were stopped more, and that was because police were racist. And it actually turned out that black men were speeding at significantly higher rates, which explained the entirety of the disparity of the rate as to why they were pulled over. We adopted body cameras based on the idea that this was going to limit the wiggle room that police had to act when they were on duty. And in every case, we've adopted these reforms, and the disparities have remained. And it seems like, just as you said, I mean, what is really reflected here is an unwillingness to talk about the reality that the problems that police exist to respond to are not evenly distributed. And the question becomes, what do we do about that? Because we obviously cannot let it drive our policymaking. We have seen what that does, right? I mean, you have, you know, the Ferguson riots that you mentioned, all the homicide increases that followed after that, after the riots in Ferguson, after the riots in Chicago, the Freddie gray riots in 2015 in Baltimore, the riots here in New York after Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald. I mean, the list goes on. We de policed police pull back. We started decarcerating at a significantly higher rate. Ferguson gave birth to the big boom that was experienced in the progressive prosecutor movement. With Wesley bell unseating Robert McCullough, you have all these dominoes start to fall, and everything gets worse. But it doesn't just get worse for everybody. It got worse, particularly for the communities that everyone said we needed to stand up for and propose these criminal justice reforms in their name. How do we get past that? How do we get people to be honest about the racial issue within the world of policing without blowing up our society?
- [26:37]
B
Yeah. Well, first of all, I just have to again, confirm what you've just said. People like you and I that are unblinkered about crime and policing or just care about civil society, like, we look at these protests and where they're not protests, and we keep saying, like we thought black lives matters, right? Why black children are being Gunned down in drive by shootings that literally never occur in white communities. Never. This summer in Washington D.C. that you know, we heard from all the Washington D.C. people is so wonderfully safe, you know, and Trump's just an authoritarian calling in the National Guard and how dare he Got things under control this summer. Three year old was shot at a July 4th barbecue day after in the head and died. Cheadle, her name was. The year before another three year old girl shot in a car drive by.
- [27:42]
A
Shoot.
- [27:43]
B
If white kids were being gunned down at this rate, there would be a national revolution. And there has never ever been a Black Lives Matter protest when it's black on black crime. Never the children. We are not saying the names right because if the activists were to pay attention to black victims, they would have to, if they were honest, remotely honest. Notice that the people killing them are black. So it's truly astounding for those of us who write from a more law and order perspective to observe the blatant double standards and hypocrisy of the activists. It is not about saving black lives because as we both know, the number of black men, unarmed black men who are shot by the police every year is like averages maybe 12 to 15. And even that's an overcount because the database that we get for those, use for those numbers way over counts what it means to be unarmed. But in any case. So what do we do about it? I'm probably more hardline than you are on Rafael. Like I've been doing this for too long, that I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of the apologies, I'm sick of the inhibitions. I just say we've got to enforce the law. I would call on police chiefs. I think they're cowards. They let their officers twist in the wind under these specious charges of racism simply because they're going where the crime is and enforcing law and responding to community complaints. I think every time a police chief has or a sheriff has a public spotlight, he should be bringing out, let me tell you where the shootings happened in my jurisdiction, who the victims are, who the suspects are, whose identities we get from the victims and witnesses, not the racist police. And start educating the public because the public really is clueless. Really is clueless.
- [29:43]
A
No, I think they are. I think they are. And I think you're exactly right about what needs to be done. I mean, one of the attacks that I've taken is just to try and focus on the victims.
- [29:53]
B
Yeah, I know.
- [29:53]
A
That's because the Disparities are just as pronounced. Right? And you're right, it doesn't work, at least not entirely. I like to think that I have changed the minds of some people who are on the fence by taking that route. And what I mean here is just to highlight the fact that because crime is not evenly distributed, neither are the victimization rates. They're not evenly distributed geographically, they're not evenly distributed demographically. One of the studies that is fairly recent, I want to say it was published in 2019, really blew my mind. It looked at the homicide decline from 1990 to 2014. Nationally, homicides declined about 50% over that period of time. And it assessed what the impact of the decline was on life expectancy, and it broke it down by race and sex. And for white men, the homicide Decline added about 0.14 years of life expectancy. Patrick Sharkey was the lead author, a man with whom I couldn't disagree more on public policy with respect to policing. But for black men, it was a full year of life expectancy. But that's more than 8x difference.
- [30:57]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [30:58]
A
In terms of the benefits associated with that decline. So the question for me becomes, well, how do you explain that decline? Now, people like Zoramdani, people on the far left, their worldview is fundamentally rooted in this idea that crime is a socioeconomic phenomenon, that it is a byproduct of deprivation, and that if these people just had more programs, more wealth, more healthcare, better schools, whatever, that that crime wouldn't happen. This is the conceit at the root of the defund the police idea. Right. The idea was to take that money and put it in the things that we know can deliver public safety, as someone like Zoram Hamdani said many, many times. And this is actually, I think, another one of those kind of core pillars of the work that MI has done and that City Journal has done on this issue over the years. Because one of the tenets that was rejected explicitly by James Q. Wilson, George Kel Dilulio, a lot of the sort of criminologists who were doing great work in the 80s and 90s was this idea that you had to solve society's problems in order to control crime, which was the dominant view back then in sociological circles. And what we proved in New York City and then in the country was that, actually, no, we went from 2,262 murders in 1990 to 292 murders in 2017. And the question I love to ask leftists on this is, well, you give me the socioeconomic explanation. For that because the poverty rate didn't change. In fact, it got slightly worse. There's no connection to unemployment in the data. I mean, the unemployment rate doubled in New York City during the Great Recession. The homicide rate continued to decline significantly. We didn't suddenly get public schooling. Right. We didn't, you know, there wasn't a launch of some new program that, you know, made everyone suddenly start following the law. We still have crime and criminals. What we did was we added the number of. Added to the number of police officers we had. Those police officers became more aggressive in terms of conducting stops, making arrests. Those arrests were followed through on with more force from prosecutors who were sending more people to jail in prison. And the results were what they were. I mean, how important is it for people to get it out of their head that crime is not the fault of the criminal?
- [33:22]
B
Right.
- [33:23]
A
That this doesn't represent choice making.
- [33:25]
B
Right. And I just want to throw in another statistic about the disparate victimization rates, which is the CDC. This was like the Biden CDC, not the Trump CDC, found that blacks between the ages of 10 and 24 die of gun homicide at 25 times the rate of whites in that age group. 25 times. That is statistically just off the charts. Whites, males, really, you know, you don't really have to worry about being shot as you. What if you're black? You do. Yes. The victimization rates are just, just totally in different universes. As far as the question of what the.
- [34:06]
A
How you, I mean, how you. You get people to understand that it's.
- [34:11]
B
Not public, it's not root causes, I guess, or it might be root causes.
- [34:15]
A
But not so significant.
- [34:16]
B
Well, no, I would say that the conservatives have also been undermined in that because both sides have their favorite root causes for crime. For the left, it's inequality, racism, poverty, social deprivation. For the right, it's always been family breakdown. And the. Now it's like maybe 69% illegitimacy out of wedlock birth rate for blacks got as high as about 72% years, several years back. And so we keep saying it's the lack of socialization in the home that's creating, which I think is true, by the way. It's true. But in the 90s, to the things that didn't change, which includes poverty, income inequality, we can also add out of wedlock birth rates, they stayed very high despite even welfare reform. Another one, I'm sure we'll have a City Journal podcast on that. But as you say, what did change was the efficacy of the police. And so it turns out what we learned in the 1990s and 2000s is that enforcement works. And as I started to say in the beginning, that was a revolutionary concept. William Bratton, when he became police chief commissioner in New York, he did something unthinkable, which is to set himself a numerical goal, and said, I'm gonna lower crime 10% in my first year. Why was this so radical? The FBI, in its Uniform Crime reports every year had this little disclaimer saying, well, of course, we all know that the police can't actually lower homicide because that's because of social inequality. And Bratton said, no, we're actually gonna do that. And he not only met his goal, he bested it. Came in at 12%, and the next year, he upped the ante. 15%. Came in at, I believe, 16%. So it turns out, and I think we can also add to that, to the Bratton CompStat, or the broken Windows revolution, Another thing that spread across New York and across the country, which was the Compstat revolution, which is holding police commanders accountable and measuring everything that moves, getting up to the minute data and following it, where the crime pattern's emerging, but also using that data to hold precinct commanders accountable. And under Giuliani, this idea of rigorous data management, analysis, and accountability spread to other agencies, and they started comp. Stating everything in sight. So, and in law enforcement as well, the federal probation offices started also compstating. Their results are people getting. Staying out of the criminal justice system. You know, how many people have you found work for Welfare? Started comps. And that idea was this was again, this era of urban renewal, a governance revolution that had legs, it spread, and now we seem to have forgotten it also. You fight these battles, and then you have to keep fighting them, and it gets tiring and boring if you're me, but if you're you, it's like something still to take on.
- [37:31]
A
Yeah, well, we have to. You know, I think what I have sort of come to terms with is that lessons need to get relearned from time to time.
- [37:39]
B
That's right.
- [37:40]
A
You know, we will not be the last people to make these arguments, unfortunately. I mean, every once in a while, I'll go back and I'll reread one of my favorite books on crime, and that is James Q. Wilson's Thinking About Crime, Originally published in 1975, second edition in 1983. And if you read that book and you take out all the dates and you just plug in the dates from today, I mean, it really could have been written last year. The debates are still happening. They're still relevant. We're still, you know, fighting over the same questions. But I think you make some. Some really just good and excellent points. And. And, you know, one of my sort of favorite and scariest moments was I had an exchange with Roland Fryer on Peter Robinson's Uncommon Knowledge. And I think Roland was a little skeptical of the praise that I Was heaving on CompStat in my little soliloquy. And he asked, well, I mean, what did it tell us that we didn't already know? I think if you asked any cop, you know, in the 1970s, even where the serious crime was, they could have told you with a pretty good degree of accuracy. I said, well, I think that's true. But what's underappreciated about CompStat is exactly what you said was that it's an accountability measure. You can get granular, and you can see whether or not the data are actually responding to the different tactics, and that was the real value in it. And that seemed to satisfy him. But when you make everything a data point, I think people on the other side, and I want to do them some justice, they'll say that everything becomes a numbers game. And in a lot of their minds, people who came up in the mid 2000s, they came up being taught that one of the worst consequences of this took the form of stop and frisk, where the NYPD essentially put an unofficial quota on how much stop activity officers had to be doing, irrespective of the crime levels in their precincts or areas of patrol. And that led police to abuse their authority and stop people at unimaginable rates. I think the number that's often cited is in excess of 600,000 stops in a year in 2011, which was at its peak. And it led the NYPD to be sued in federal court, now liable in federal court for violating the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. And one of Bill de Blasio's very first official acts as mayor was to drop the appeal in that case and allow the NYPD to be subject to a corporate monitorship that it is still subject to to today, many years on. How do you explain the stop and frisk era when you are sparring with people who are on the other side of this? My approach has been. I've generally questioned the numbers. I don't think that the NYPD was actually making 600, some odd thousand Terry stops in a year. I do think that there was a problem with the incentive structure that was Created by. By only giving police credit for Terry stops and not giving them credit for level one or level two stops that, you know, where the person's still free to go. I think it induced police officers to categorize lower level interactions where that were legally distinct from a Terry stop as Terry stops, because that was all that they would get credit for. And I think that artificially inflated the numbers. So I'm willing to concede that the incentive structure was problematic in some ways. But what I'm not willing to concede is this idea that it had no impact on public safety.
- [41:11]
B
Well, I remember in the height of this, I started writing about the police in 1999 with the Amadou Diallo case. This was the Ghanaian immigrant that was shot 41 times in the Bronx. Al Sharpton and Susan Sarandon were leading daily protests at the Police One Police Plaza headquarters. And I'd never, unlike you, I hadn't come from a policing family, so I'd never really, really been involved with the cops. The New York Times was running three articles a day, three and a half articles a day on the awful nypd. They finally had their issue to go after, Mayor Giuliani. And so I thought, well, if the Times is saying something, there's pretty good bet that's absolutely the opposite. So I would go out to neighborhoods.
- [41:52]
A
Still a good rule today.
- [41:52]
B
Yes, even more so now. They like, don't even try to look objective. But I would go to neighborhoods and, and these are anecdotes. So it's really, I concede fully that this is not an adequate response. But I would hear from people saying young Caribbean males saying, I've never been stopped because I'm a good boy. And the police know that. And I remember there was a community activist, Richard Greene from Brooklyn, who I don't think is around anymore, but he said, if I had a choice between being stopped and being shot, I'll choose being stopped. And so you could find, you know, the narrative was that there's not a single young black male who hasn't been aggressively stopped in New York City. And that I just was not anything that I found. But I think you're absolutely right to bring that up as a challenge. And we also have to look at the fact, well, we could take the argument purely yours, which is that the 600,000 was completely fake. And so the 80% drop in stops or whatever is completely exaggerated, which is.
- [43:12]
A
Important because people will cite that very steep decline and say, well, this is prima facie evidence that the stops weren't working because crime Continued to go down.
- [43:20]
B
Continued to go down.
- [43:21]
A
And so, you know, this was, you know, even National Review made this argument right. You know, in Roundabout 2016 or so. But I mean, there are a lot of reasons to take that number with a massive grain of salt. In addition to the fact that they had this incentive structure in place that encouraged them to artificially inflate it by either lying about the number of stops that they were making, making stops up entirely, or categorizing level one and level two stops as level three stops. As you and I are both trained as lawyers, we know the legal distinctions between a level one, level two and the level three stop are not black and white. I mean, they're very smart lawyers and judges will disagree about what constitutes a search, about what constitutes a stop, about whether somebody is actually free to go. The idea that police officers with no formal legal training were accurately making these distinctions in real time in the field with a rate of 100% is nonsense to me.
- [44:17]
B
And there's been studies elsewhere. Paul Cassell, who was a federal judge and now he's in at University of Utah Law School, he did, I think it was in Chicago at one of the multitude of Ferguson effect depolicing moments where the police had come under enormous press activist pressure and backed off from proactive stops and found that crime did go up.
- [44:43]
A
Yes.
- [44:43]
B
And those studies are much more frequent than the case in New York. So what does one do about New York? I guess you can say, A, the rate was inflated and B, okay, maybe it was a little bit high. But that does not discredit because, you know, I had a criminal procedure professor at Stanford Law School who's we've had a little tense relationship recently on his part towards me, nothing on my part towards him, but he's a lefty and he once wrote that there's nothing, nothing you can do that is more important for gun violence than proactive stops. And you know, there's all these studies that they call them hotspot policing that find that it has a very obvious effect on large. Well, what's hotspot policing? Stop. Question of risk. It's intervening in suspicious behavior in high crime zones.
- [45:46]
A
Right.
- [45:47]
B
So. So the idea, and let's just get back again to this idea that policing or crime is driven by social deprivation, which I remember when the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, was either still running or just come in and you know, there are these wilding incidents where. Or flash mobs where youth.
- [46:10]
A
There was just another one. Last week, seven people were shot inside the Chicago theater.
- [46:14]
B
Right. Well, and there was the usual, it's a public gathering, a tree lighting ceremony, and within like two hours there were two mass shooting incidents.
- [46:24]
A
That's right.
- [46:25]
B
One young boy was killed, 14. And it's the usual thing where if you know that it's a mass shooting that isn't like targeted school shooting. You just know the demographics. I'm sorry, there's like almost, there's zero exceptions to that. And Trump has now called for coming in again and we're all supposed to again pretend that, oh, Chicago's really great because, because nobody cares about black lives being shot. But anyway, Johnson came in after Lori Lightfoot, who, in response to these rampages downtown from kids coming in from the south and west sides, enforced a curfew and actually raised the drawbridges into the loop and downtown area. And Brandon John said, oh, the problem is these youth just lack opportunities. Well, social media is police officer's best friend because all of these people committing the youth committing the drive by shootings, rampaging, mass looting, they all have smartphones and they're all throwing their gang signs on Instagram and showing off their loot and their guns. And the police can do nice flowcharts of the gang structure. Anybody that has a smartphone is not lacking in opportunities a hundred percent. And it's not that you can't put bread on the table, and that is, I don't believe anybody in this country cannot put bread on the table that drives you to spray bullets randomly across a sidewalk. That is not a crime of economic deprivation, it's a crime of socialization deprivation, 100%.
- [48:00]
A
And not only that, but there's really good research recently out of the University of Chicago. Actually, Jens Ludwig did a great review of the literature looking at the effect of changes in income on crime. And while he finds that yes, there is some relationship between property offending and crime, it's relatively small in terms of the effect sizes. There's no relationship to speak of between socioeconomic status, things like employment or income or welfare benefits on violence. And the reason for that is that most of the violent crime has nothing to do with getting richer. You don't become richer when you shoot a rival over a, you know, a stupid dispute, an interpersonal dispute that doesn't put money in your pocket and may give you some social status within a small gang. But that's not, you know, you can't monetize that. And you're exactly right. I want to talk about something else, actually, which is, you know, just a little bit of some of the issues that we are going to be dealing with now. I mean, I think we've gone through some interesting parts of, you know, our history here, but we're going to have, have a very interesting four years in New York. Zora Mamdani, as mayor, has committed himself to abolishing the gang database, which has been, I think, at the core of New York City's recent success on the serious violent crime front. Which is really, I think, an incredible accomplishment that Jessica Tisch deserves a good bit of credit for. Because the NYPD is down a significant number of officers. They are still having to deal with about a million more calls for service than they were dealing with less than 10 years ago. And yet the shooting and homicide numbers have decreased pretty significantly over the last three years. And I think the reason for that is, is that the department has made it its mission to target gang members in large numbers just through August of this year. Between January and August of this year, the NYPD had done over 50 gang takedown prosecutions involving over 400 gang members or around 400 cases. Gang members. That doesn't sound like a lot of people in a city of eight and a half million, but 400 people who are your, you know, high rate offenders who are committing most of them, I mean, most people don't realize it's only a few thousand people, even in a city as big as New York, that are, you know, responsible for the bulk of the gun violence. Being 400 people off the street in a single year can make a meaningful difference for the high crime pockets of the city that have been experiencing the majority of the shooting and homicide decline. Klein, what do you make of Zoram Namdani's proposal on the gang database? I mean, I think I know what you make of it, but like, how, how big of a deal would that be if he succeeds?
- [50:46]
B
Well, first of all, let's just point out that this is yet another instance where disparate impact is driving crime policy in a completely illegitimate way. Other places, California gets rid of theirs as well. The only reason is because blacks and Hispanics are way overrepresented in those gang daddies.
- [51:03]
A
91% is the fig that we're all bombarding with.
- [51:06]
B
If it was proportional, white everybody would say, lock him up and throw away the key. The only reason we are dismantling the criminal justice system is because it tells us that blacks have some really serious problems with regards to the socialization of young black males. That's a message we refuse to listen. And so we're blaming everything else in sight. So, so Given that the gang database is not racist, it contains actual criminals to strip police of a tool that allows them to figure out connections. And, you know, Mondami is all about, oh, violence interrupters and social worker prevention and whatnot. Well, that allows you to predict as well where retaliatory shootings are going to come from and who's connected to who. Whom.
- [51:59]
A
Well, in fact, the whole violence interrupter model is based on the same idea that gang policing is based on. It's this idea that there are individuals who understand who's in which gang, which gangs are feuding and what the basis of the feuds are so that they can intervene. They can't intervene without that knowledge. So he's not against the idea of gang policing. He's against police doing it.
- [52:17]
B
Right, Right. So I think it's a problem, but I think there's many, many more problems also on the horizon. You know, he's toned down his rhetoric. There's no way he doesn't still deeply mistrust the police. He still insists on this distinction that we began talking about of violent versus nonviolent or serious versus non serious crime. And Tish believes just the opposite. She believes in law enforcement and broken windows policing. So I don't know who's gonna blink first. I think he is defunding the police. I think he's creating this department of Community Safety within the police department, which is like, well, that's what police are already doing. So why is this different? That should be a warning signal that this is very, very different. But to fund it, he's transferring $600 million out of the police department to this new bureaucratic entity which will be top heavy, filled with incompetence. So he's defined funding policing, pure and simple. You know, he doesn't want to have the police commissioner be the final say in authority, disciplining officers. That's gonna. If Tish agrees with that, and I can't see that she will, that'll be hugely demoralizing for the cops. And as you've noticed, he doesn't have any intention of trying to build up the number of the police force.
- [53:44]
A
Right.
- [53:45]
B
So I think this marriage of convenience, and it's not surprising to me that Tish decided to stay on because there's no better job in policing than being in the nypd. Like, there's no place to go but down if you step away from that job. And she's a, you know, she's clearly a conscientious public servant, but I don't know how long this can last without one side or the other compromising their principles. And. And is Mondami pragmatic enough that he's willing to compromise his own and agitate and alienate his base? I don't know that we can at all predict that.
- [54:29]
A
Yeah, well, I think he's done that, at least temporarily. The question is, how long can he last in that position? Because, I mean, I don't claim to have intimate knowledge of Jessica Tisch's inner thought processes, but I have to imagine that she was able to extract some kind of concession on his part in order to make staying tenable, in her view. So how long will he keep his promise to keep his powder dry on some of these things? One of the other big topics, and we'll probably close with this, has been this idea of mass incarceration, which has just, you know, especially after Michelle Alexander's book, the New Jim crow, published in 2010, has kind of become one of these phrases that you can't help but hear in less than five minutes into any discussion about policing and public safety, especially if you're disagreeing with someone who's on the left. And one of the ways that New York City has kind of integrated that idea into its policy structure has been this move to close Rikers Island. And that is a crisis that I think is looming larger and larger with every month that passes. Because what people don't realize is that there are currently about 7,000 people on Rikers Island. It's set to close by legislative mandate in August of 2027 and be replaced with four borough based jails whose maximum combined capacity will be about half of the current population. And none of those jails are going to be ready in August of 2027. Which begs the question, what are we going to do if and when that time comes, comes? I mean, how. What role do you think that the incarceration debate has played? How toxic do you think it's been? I personally think it's kind of at the root of the progressive prosecutor movement, of this push to reduce the jail population, the prison population. And I think it's one of these things that people really need to get comfortable with if we're going to have good policy. Because I don't think we can live in a world in which we don't have cases like Irina Zyrutska, where people, innocent people, are being brutally murdered by individuals who have 10, 15, 20, 30 prior arrests. In the case of the woman who was just lit on fire in Chicago, that man had more than 70 prior arrests. There's no way to get those people all off the street without significantly increasing the number of people behind bars. How do we make sense of that?
- [56:56]
B
Yeah, again, sorry to be broken record. Another instance of disparate impact. Blacks are about a third of all the nation's prisoners in city, state and federal jails, whereas they're about a 13% of the population. So they're overrepresented. Again, the only reason anybody cares about this is because of the black over representation in the prison population. That then leads to this phony conceit of mass incarceration. As you've written, as I've written, you know, prison is a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. You have to work very hard, you have to work very hard, hard to get yourself actually sentenced to prison. The norm is endless deferrals, community based, you know, monitoring, which is no monitoring at all. We've both looked at the average number of arrests and convictions of people in prison and it's very high. These are not people that are being thrown in jail for a joint. The whole drug war is racist conceit was completely wrong. It turns out that the alleged racist penalties for possession of crack cocaine were identical to the federal penalties for possession of meth, which is a white and Hispanic drug. So if it's racist to put crack offenders in, it's also racist to put white meth traffickers.
- [58:22]
A
Not only that, but the hundred to one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine that everyone cites as the most racist piece of legislation that was embedded in the anti Drug abus Act of 1986. Sixteen of the 19 members of the Congressional Black Caucus co sponsored that bill.
- [58:37]
B
Right. They wanted it. Right. Fortner and James Forman at Yale have both pointed that out in one case against their better instincts. So mass incarceration, yes, we have higher rates of incarceration than Europe because our gun violence is so high. And they will say, oh, it's because you have guns. You don't have enough gun control. No, it's because we don't have enough family control. Because places with everybody armed in the United States that don't have these inner city problems, they don't have gun violence either. So it's not about the guns, it's about the lack of socialization. And so yes, the mass incarceration, it's terrifying. Also, we need more judges. The cases are taking too long. We need to expand the criminal justice system. Because you also read occasionally we have a very left wing, one of these progressive prosecutors, Alvin Bragg, who sadly was reelected. And he, you know, one of his day one memos was the whole list of crimes that he wasn't gonna prosecute. But occasionally you'll read one of these horrific stories of a vagrant pushing somebody behind into the subway, into the tracks, or just clubbing them. And the Bragg Manhattan prosecutor's office actually asked for a fairly decent sentence and the judge didn't give it. Well, I have to think, yes, we have a lot of left wing judges, but it may also be the sense of we just don't have the room, right, so we're just gonna let these people out because there's only so much stress we can put on the system.
- [60:08]
A
Well, one of the things that former Governor Cuomo bragged about when he was in office was that he oversaw the closure of 17 state prisons during his term. That's a lot, that's a lot of capacity. And I do think that you bring up a really, really good point that doesn't get enough attention. I mean, some people, you know, Reihan Salaam and Charles Fain Lehman had a great piece on this in the Atlantic, I wanna say last year or the year before on the need to invest in the criminal justice system. It's underfunded in every respect. I mean, think bail reform for example. This idea that we needed bail reform because people were, you know, the only reason we had that debate was because of how long people stood to stand in pretrial detention if they couldn't make bail. If your case was working its way through the system efficiently, no one would have cared about not able to make bail because you'd only be in, you know, a week or two or three weeks before your trial started. But the reality is, is that we don't have enough prosecutors, we don't have enough defense attorneys, we don't have enough magistrates, we don't have enough criminal court judges, we don't have enough of a jury pool. You know, all of that takes funding.
- [61:12]
B
And I would just say that is the core function of government.
- [61:16]
A
Correct.
- [61:16]
B
The core function of government is not trans rights and, and welfare benefits for illegal aliens or some new social justice program. The core function is public order and making sure that cities can sustain private initiative. And you know for sure that that is not going to get attention from Mamdame because he sees city governance as an ideological project for redistribution of wealth and anti capitalism. And as, as he said, there's no public goal too great for government to achieve and no private interest too small for government to ignore. So it's just incredible. The Function. Again, what we ask of government is do things that citizens can't do for themselves. Public order is one of those things. Safe streets, well functioning, transportation, cleanliness, sanitation. That's what we should focus on. And yes, we have to make sure that same goes obviously with the mentally ill. Get them off the streets. We know who they are. None of them should be here. The fact that we are willing to put up with the statistical certainty that in the next week somebody will be attacked by a mentally ill chemical abuser, undoubtedly, and we just accept that is an amazing change in public consciousness. And it shows the loss of faith in bourgeois values, that those who still abide by them don't feel they have the right to insist upon them any longer. And that we should spend. Government should spend all of its attention catering to the dysfunctional and the antisocial rather than to people who actually are hardworking and are trying to better themselves and their environment by participating in the great glories of public exchange and commerce.
- [63:17]
A
Well said. Okay, so we have focusing on the core function of government. Right? The true end and design of government, as Thomas Paine put it, keeping people safe, keeping the streets orderly. In order to do that, you don't have to solve all of society's problems. You just have to invest in policing. Give police the discretion to do their job, be proactive in how they enforce, have those enforcement actions be backed up by good prosecutors, willing judges, and a system that's adequately funded to deal with all of that.
- [63:47]
B
Right. And be colorblind. Do not let the race hustle inhibit justified policing. And the hope is. It's hard to say now, but we have a president who is not vulnerable to the race grift and race hustle. He doesn't care. It's been refreshing. He just. And he has zero tolerance for crime. His Aug. 11 Liberation Day speech announcing sending the national guard to Washington D.C. was one of the most thrilling moments, I think, of his presidency, because he just said crime is one is too many. That should be our standard. One shooting is too many. We shouldn't have to put up with that. They don't put up with it in Japan.
- [64:25]
A
That's right.
- [64:25]
B
They don't put up with it in Switzerland. We should not accept this as the urban norm because New York showed through enforcement that enforcement works and you don't have to put up with violence.
- [64:35]
A
I couldn't agree. Read More for those of you who are watching, thank you so much for tuning in. This has been a great episode of the City Journal podcast. Please do remember to like comment. Subscribe, ring the bell, do all the things. And I hope that you enjoyed this very first episode of this wonderful series, who We Are, and that you'll look forward to the next episode. We'll see you soon. Thank you.
- [64:57]
B
Thank you.