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Buck Sexton (2:22)

Pam Bondi is out as Attorney General as of today. What the heck is going on at doj? Also Trump giving her a high five on the way out about a national violent crime drop that he says she played a role in and who should be the ag how's that whole anti crime approach working for this administration. And also we'll talk a little bit about Kami Mamdani and NYC and his crime policies. Rafael Mangual is with us now, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He's a crime guy, not that he commits them. He knows a lot about them. He is an expert in the crimes. He is not an expert in doing, in doing the crimes. So anyway, my friend, great to have you here on the program today. So we got the Rafael Manguals here, we got the attorney general is out Pam Bondi. And we're going to get into a replacement talk here in a second, but I wanted to read something to you from Trump's Truth Social. He says Pam Bondi is a great American patriot and a loyal friend who faithfully served as my attorney General the past year. He did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in crime across our country with murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. Let's drill down on that for a second. Whether, you know, Pam Bondi was really the one in mainly in charge of that or not. Put that aside for a second. Is that right? Are we really at this massive murder drop nationwide? Talk us through the numbers and the reality.

Rafael Mangual (3:54)

Yeah, yeah. So what people are predicting is a 125 year low on homicides in this country. And that, look, I mean, data, you know, prior to 1950 is probably significantly more shoddy than, you know, post war data. But it is what it is. There's no question that we've been making progress on that front nationally. I always tell people they're kind of two cautionary notes here whenever you talk about this stuff. One is resist the temptation to nationalize the conversation. Right. Like a 125 year low for the national homicide. Homicide rate doesn't really mean a whole lot because the national homicide rate doesn't mean a whole lot. Right. It doesn't describe accurately what life is like, where any person is at a given time. Right. The national homicide rate doesn't describe almost any locality. Right. So you can be living in, you know, West Garfield Park, Chicago, and maybe the homicide rate's 100 per 100,000. If the national homo rates, the homicide rate is 5 per 100,000. That doesn't mean a whole lot to you because you're just living in a very different reality. So resist the temptation to nationalize and just resist the desire for a very clean Neat and sort of uniforial explanation. The reality is, is that yes, we are moving in that direction. Yes, homicides are at a significant low, but there are probably a dozen, if not more factors that are driving this. And I would put them into two buckets. I would put them into policy related buckets and non policy related bucket. And on the non policy related front, I mean, there have been a lot of real changes in America over the last few years that I think have helped drive this. Since the pandemic, more and more people are working from, which means a lot of them have decided to move out of cities altogether. So the urban population is dropping, the suburban population is increasing. That's important because crime tends to be an urban phenomenon. So if urban populations are losing people, then there are fewer opportunities to commit serious violence against those individuals. People are drinking less in America. Alcohol consumption is way down. Attendance at bars and nightclubs is way down. What that means is that, you know, alcohol is a criminogenic substance. People tend to get into fights and stuff at bars and nightclubs that spill over into more serious kinds of violence outside those, those places. And then we had massive homicide spikes in, you know, the lead up to 2020 and then certainly in 2020 and 21. And the reason that that's relevant is because there's a lot of overlap between people who kill and who get killed. We tend to think of homicide victims when we hear that term. We think of like the cases of innocents who are tragically killed. But the reality is, is that if you were to look history, the likelihood of gang membership and the demographics of, you know, both homicide victims and suspects, which you're going to see are, you know, a relatively indistinguishable pair of groups. Right? So homicide victims tend to have similar numbers of prior arrests, similar likelihood of being in a gang. And what that means is when you have a massive spike in homicides over a short period that's multi year, you're taking a lot of chess pieces off the board and that's going to help reduce crime. And then of course, you have the policy stuff, which is where Bondi comes in and look, I think what the federal government has done is helped. There's no question that the task force.

Buck Sexton (7:01)

Can I, can I ask you specifically about some of this? Just because, you know, go, go place by place, like on radio. We have, for example, station in Memphis and we have a big listenership in Memphis. And they are saying that since Trump started his. And now to be fair, the mayor of Memphis, we invite him on the show. He hasn't come on yet. We're hoping he will. He's a Democrat, but he was willing to say, you know what, let's work with the federal resources here to bring down crime. People are saying Memphis is in a different place. I mean, callers are telling us this, we're getting emails. And is that one reflected in the data? And what do you think the changes are that caused it?

Rafael Mangual (7:36)

Yeah, you're seeing more than a 40% decline in crime since the launch of the Memphis Safe Task Force. I was just in Memphis a couple of weeks ago, actually.

Buck Sexton (7:43)

Oh, you were there? Wow. Okay.

Rafael Mangual (7:45)

Yeah, I did some ride alongs with, with some of the task force members and it was, it was eye opening. I mean, there were a couple of things that were really surprising about what I saw. One was just how much community support these guys have. And we walked into a restaurant and, you know, it was like they were celebrities. I mean, very different reaction from the people on the ground, from the public, than what you were seeing in places like Minneapolis and Chicago where these guys were getting hounded with cameras and yelled at and doxxed. People are very, very happy to have these agents on the ground in Memphis. And that' city has been living with insane levels of crime. I mean, Memphis has consistently been one of the most dangerous American cities in the top 10, you know, for my entire lifetime. And so, you know, flooding that zone with a massive amount of federal resources that have also partnered with state and local. So every single team on this task force has either a local Memphis police officer or a Tennessee Highway Patrolman riding with them. And that's been important because not only does it allow them to take an integrated approach, there's intelligence sharing, but also it gets over some of the jurisdictional limits on federal agents. Right. Like, for example, if they are looking for guns and there's a known gang member that they've been tracking and he gets into a car, they would really love to pull him over. But the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction on traffic. Right. They can't make car stops for traffic offenses, but they always have a THP or a Memphis PD guy who can pull them over for the broken tail light, and then that can lead to the gun arrest. And so that kind of teamwork and that integration and that cooperation I think is and central to a really super steep crime decline that we've been seeing in that city. And we saw the same thing in Washington, D.C. with that task force. And so I think those are two really positive models that tell A compelling story about the federal government's capacity to help drive some of this stuff down. Now, does that explain the national level decline? No, but it has certainly helped, especially when you couple it with the immigration enforcement and the focus on criminal aliens, you know, and then just look at what states like Tennessee and other states like Louisiana and Florida have been doing on the policy front. You know, the last 20 years have kind of been characterized by policies aimed almost exclusively at decarceration and deepolicing. But the last handful of years, you have seen some parts of the country really turn it around. Tennessee, I think, has been a great example of that. You know, Cam Sexton, the Speaker of the House there is. He's been leading.

Buck Sexton (10:18)

No relation, by the way.

Rafael Mangual (10:19)

No relation Ask. But he's done truth and sentence saying there's a three strikes proposal making its way through. They just passed a constitutional amendment that will allow judges to jail people pre trial if they're dangerous. Right. So in Tennessee you have a constitutional right to have bail set in your case as long as it's not a capital offense. Well, that's going to change. Blended juvenile sentencing, a repeat offender statute for misdemeanors. I mean, Louisiana rolled back a bunch of its 2017 criminal justice reforms. So you're seeing a lot of these trends. Same thing in Texas, Florida, I mean, the country is changing its tune. Even California, I mean, you know, Prop 47 got partially reversed by Prop 36 in November 2024, which was a year in which you had a lot of progressive prosecutors lose their reelection bids, get successfully recalled or you know, decide not to run for reelection. So, you know, Chicago, Kim Fox is gone. You know, Baltimore, Marilyn Mosby's gone. You got Ivan Bates now taking a much more aggressive approach. George Gascon in la, gone. You got Nate Hockman now. Pamela Price in Oakland, she's gone. Chase Aboudeen in San Francisco, he's gone. You know, Athens, Athens, Georgia, where Lincoln Riley was killed, that DA is gone. So, you know, there's been a lot of change on the policy side. Police departments are reasserting themselves, arrests are up. And for the last two years that we have data, the prison population nationally is up, which you know is a reversal of a more than decade long trend.

Buck Sexton (11:50)

Very interesting stuff. We'll come back with Rafael Mangual here from Manhattan Institute in a second. Talk about the New York City situation specifically on on crime and on policy in general and Mayor Mamdani. But our sponsor is Pure Talk. Pure Talk is my cell phone service company. I choose them because the service is excellent, their customer service is incredible. And their pricing has redefined the industry for the benefit of all. They're also a longtime sponsor of this podcast series. Pure Talk is veteran led and they help veterans as their North Star that donated over a half a million dollars to America's Warrior Partnership, an organization on the front lines of preventing veteran suicide. Pure Talk creates American jobs by building a customer service team that's 100% based in the U.S. they're committed to delivering the best experience possible for their customers. Go to PureTalk.com buck to change up today, switch to Pure Talk. That's PureTalk.com buck America's wireless company. Pure Talk. All right, Raphael. Commie, Mom, Donnie in New York City. How is it going? Is there, is there any chance that any of these major cities you think, given what you, what you laid out about the federal local partnership and how effective it is in reducing serious crime, you know, the bad crime that everyone really wants to, to get rid of or lower as much as possible, I should say, is there any chance of, of a more sane police approach in New York City under the Mamdani administration than was maybe thought? Where do you stand on that?

Rafael Mangual (13:15)

Yeah, look, I do think that there's absolutely a chance of it because we're seeing it happen right now. I mean, so far, look, Zorra Momdani is not a mystery, right? We understand what drives him politically. He has a very long and clear record of being a police antagonist. Right. He doesn't like cops. He doesn't like the criminal justice system. He wanted to abolish them until about five up to about five minutes ago. Right. So his change in tune is really just about political expediency. And I don't really care what it's about as long as he keeps his powder dry on some of these more radical ideas. I'm a happy guy and I think New York City will be better off for it. And so far, that's what we've seen in the first hundred days or so of his mayoralty on the campaign trails. O Ramdan, he took some pretty radical positions, but he also backed off of some others. He backed off of defunding the police and dismantling the police department and abolishing jails. But he did also take radical positions, like committing to abolishing the New York City Police Department's gang database. He committed to taking disciplinary authority away from the police commissioner and executive command staff and handing it to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which would be a disaster in part because the CCRB is perceived by the rank and file as being very anti cop and not without reason. And, you know, he wants to get rid of the SRG, the Strategic Response Group, which is part of the NYPD's Critical Response Command. And you know, is a unit that has counterterrorism capabilities and is meant to respond to large gatherings and do crowd control and respond to mass casualty events. So, you know, these are some pretty big deals. And so far he has not pulled the trigger on any of them. And I think the reason for that is one that he tied his hands with Jessica Tisch. Right. He, on the campaign trail, committed to keeping her on board before the election. And what that meant was that he had to keep her around for at least some significant period of time after the election so as not to look like he was breaking a campaign promise. And my guess, although I have no inside information on this, is that she has use that leverage to keep the NYPD in the posture that has allowed it to make progress on the crime front. And that progress has been very real. New York City has, you know, really seen tremendous declines in shootings and homicides in particular. And that's gotten a lot of media attention, as it should. But what hasn't gotten a lot of media attention is that New York City is still very much in a worse place when it comes to all of the other crime measures. So if you look at robbery, rapes, felony assaults, car thefts, I mean, car thefts are 150% higher last year than they were in 2018.

Buck Sexton (15:53)

So this is really interesting, by the way, Rafael, what you're talking about, because it used to be that everyone assumed in the crime stat business, if you will, and in the media side of it at least, that murders, because you can't hide a dead body and people pay attention, that murder is the, that's the big thing. And everything else will kind of move in tandem with that. If it's going up, everything else is getting worse. Like 1991, New York, 2200 murders, give or take. I mean, there were so many robberies and everything else, it was totally, totally like hundreds of thousands of robberies. It was completely out of control. But what you're telling me is that it is actually possible to see a situation where shootings are going down, murders are going down, which is a good thing, but everything else is still actually really bad. What's going on? Like what's causing that dynamic in New York as you see it?

Rafael Mangual (16:40)

Yeah. So I think what's happened is that the NYPD understood that this was such a dire problem that is redirected so many resources to controlling that problem. Right. So the homicide and the shooting problem is a very discreet problem. It affects a very narrow slice of the population and it happens in a very small slice of the city. So what the NYPD has done really well is directed and flooded those zones, those high crime zones, with more resources, with more patrol officers. And it has really dedicated its resources to developing the intelligence on the gang front to figure out who the gangs are that are driving most of the shootings and then using that intelligence to do these gang takedown prosecutions. So in 2025, I think the NYPD did almost 70 gang takedown prosecutions which took over 400 gang members off the street. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot. 400 in a city of eight.

Buck Sexton (17:29)

That's a lot.

Rafael Mangual (17:30)

I mean, yeah, if you're talking about 400 of your real shooters, I mean, that's a lot. Especially when you're talking about only about 1500 shootings a year. You know, during the spike, you know, you can make real progress by getting people like that off the street. And I think that the department has been incredibly effective with that sort of prec and gang led policing strategy. But on the other side of the coin, right, there are other problems in the city that require a different approach that, you know, you need more resources to get your arms around. And I don't think it's been a secret that the NYPD has been short officers.

Buck Sexton (18:06)

How much of this, let me ask, as a former New Yorker, sorry, I fled for Florida, eventually we'll see you down here, Rafael. Eventually you'll love it down here. But maybe it'll be when you retire, but maybe sooner.

Rafael Mangual (18:17)

Sooner.

Buck Sexton (18:18)

Some people are saying maybe sooner, but. But let me ask you, how much of what we're seeing in New York is the, the decision by prosecutors? And because I would assume this is true in other cities as well, large cities that are run entirely by Democrats, that basically unless you kill somebody or do like a violent rape, you can get arrested 100 times. Like, how much of the other stuff is that we're just actually refusing to. Is that the main reason? Is it the, is it the mental health thing of we have true wackos and I mean that people who are really just extreme mental health cases who keep committing crimes short of throwing somebody in front of an oncoming subway train, but they get arrested 50 times?

Rafael Mangual (18:59)

Yeah, no, I think that's a big part of it. And I do think that the prosecutors are playing a role in that problem. But it's not just the prosecutors. It's the criminal justice reforms. You know, New York has not undone a lot of the reforms that it did in the lead up to these spikes. So you had, you know, raise the age in 2017, which went into effect in 2018, which made it, you know, basically impossible to send teenagers who commit even serious crimes to prison and jail. And, you know, not coincidentally, the one group where you haven't really seen a reduction in the serious violence has been in the juvenile sector. So juveniles have kind of resisted the broader trend of declines and serious violence. And I think that has a lot to do with that reform package that is still very much in effect. Bail reform, discovery reform has made it, know, significantly more costly to carry a criminal prosecution from inception to a case closure. And so a lot of cases are getting dropped, they're getting dismissed at significantly higher rates or not being brought altogether, not just because of the ideological commitments of the prosecutor, but just because of the structural barriers to prosecuting cases that these reforms have erected. And then, of course, bail reform makes it so that even if you get arrested, the vast majority of crimes that you can get arrested for in New York City are not bail eligible. There's basically zero chance that you're gonna end up in pretrial detention, which means that if you can get arrested over and over and over again, you're still gonna go back out into the street, as long as it's not for one of those really serious crimes that are bail eligible, which are rarer kinds of offenses. And so it's not at all surprising to me that you see this sort of disparity between crimes like robberies and burglaries and felony assaults and then crimes like homicide and shootings, you can pay really close attention to those most serious. But in a world of limited resources, which the NYPD is very much living in, you can't wrap your arms around the entire crime problem. And now you're starting to see that divergence. And look, I think what the NYPD has done is defensible, right? I mean, if you have to pick and choose where you're going to put your resources.

Buck Sexton (21:02)

Save lives. Sure.

Rafael Mangual (21:04)

Save lives.

Buck Sexton (21:05)

Yeah. Oh, that's great stuff, Rafael. Thank you so much. Rafael Mangual from the Manhattan Institute. You know, gold makes sense to me. And our sponsor here, Birch Gold Group, believes gold is going to continue to grow in value.

Rafael Mangual (21:15)

You.

Buck Sexton (21:16)

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Rafael Mangual (21:49)

Thanks for having me. Appreciate you.

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