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- [00:01]
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- [00:30]
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- [01:04]
Rafael Mangual
Hi, it's Saturday. It's a show, specifically the Gist. And this is a Saturday show where we sometimes bring you one from the vault and one from the week we're going to do that. We sometimes do this particular variation where the one from the vault will be an old interview, but the one from the week this time is not something that aired on the gist. I was on a St. Louis radio show hosted by Mark Reardon, and he had read my reporting my column in the Free Press wherein I talked about something I was talking about in three parts in the spiel on the Gist, talking about a subway shooting which was about a man who wouldn't drop a knife. That man had entered the subway by jumping a turnstile and also slipping through a side gate and evading a fair. And because he was a fare evader, the activists chanting at police stations and getting arrests and getting arrested and causing protests and a lot of the media reported it as a shooting that started with Faravi evasion or a shooting based on fare evasion. My point in this is to understand what happened, as we all should as citizens, is to understand that this is not about a fair evasion. It was about not dropping a knife, which is very dangerous. And as you may have heard, you're not allowed to have a knife, a large knife, a knife for someone who's not a worker on the subway. So Mark was nice enough to have me on his show. You will hear me on the phone as I talk with the host of KFT case Mark Reardon show based on this topic and I've always been interested in the topic. A recent interview I had fairly recent about policing and I've done dozens over the years was with Rafael Mangual and he recently is back in 2022. He wrote a book called Criminal Injustice was a wide ranging conversation. I think at the time it was titled Debating Defunding the Police because that was very much in the air. I find Raphael Manual an excellent voice on these issues, so enjoy both of these conversations. The other day I hosted a poker game. No one really wanted to get sloshed, but you know, to loosen things up. If you're a tight player, maybe it helps to have a little fun, a little buzz. But then you got the ordeal, the hangover the next day, the added weight gain. We got a solution. It's Sol's out of Office THC Beverage. A lot of the fun buzziness without the downsides that come from booze. This podcast is sponsored by Sol's out of Office Beverages. They're microdosed with hemp derived THC and CBD to give any situation a vacation vibe. Like I said, the well, it wasn't the raspberry lemonade, it was the cucumber flavor. Many of the poker players that I was playing with found oh so delicious. No hangovers, no alcohol, sleeplessness or anxiety. Nope, it's not what Sol's got. Whether you're looking for a sleep aid, enhanced focus or pain relief, Sol has all your wellness needs covered. If you want to feel your best, head to getsoul.com and use code the gist for 30% off your order. That's 30% off your order. Using Code the Gist one last time getsol.com and code the gist for 30% off. Elevating my style used to mean well, spending way too much money and way too much time figuring out what website. Then when you go you say does the sweater look good? But quince ends all that I know and can rely on high end versatile pieces at prices I can afford. Quince is a delight to clad myself in the Mongolian cashmere sweaters from $50. The leather jackets, great pants for every occasion, formal casual pleats non they got it all Quint Items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. The key is they partner with top factories, they cut the cost of the middleman, they pass the savings on to us. I mean, that sounds kind of cliche, but that's what they do and it works and you look good in them. They only work with the factories that use safe, ethical and responsible man manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. I have a Mongolian sweater. That's the one. I have worn it on a few of the videos that we put out so you could see it. You'll never know how good it feels from the inside, but I'm here to tell you it's plenty good. Indulge your affordable luxury. Go to quince.com the gist for free shipping on your order and a 365 day return. That's Q U I N C E dot com the gist to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com the gist.
- [06:11]
Mark Reardon
You can't write this. It's all real. You're listening to the Mark Reardon Show.
- [06:23]
Sue Thomas is not going to be happy that she missed a piece of bumper music from Eddie Money. She's a fan of Eddie Money. The late Eddie Money. We should say we have audio cut of the day before the hour is up. I found a piece that was in the Free Press the other day by a guy by the name of Mike Pesca who's gonna join us here. He's the host of something called the Gist podcast. But the story's about a police shooting that's relatively non traditional. A lot of nuance to this one. Mike's gonna unpack it for us here this afternoon on 97.5 FM Talk. Mike Pesca, how are you this afternoon? Welcome to the show.
- [06:54]
Mike Pesca
I'm well. Thanks for having me on.
- [06:56]
Mark Reardon
Let's hear first and foremost about Mike Pesca. Shame on me for not being familiar, but you do a lot of things right. You even do some sports stuff. Have you?
- [07:04]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. How dare you, not having heard of me.
- [07:06]
Mark Reardon
I know my PR guy.
- [07:09]
Mike Pesca
I was, I was a reporter for about 10 years with NPR, National Public Radio, huge rival of KMOX. I know. And then I work for a place called Slate for about nine years. And there I started hosting the Gist, which was the first ever. It's the longest running news and analysis podcast. That's my day job. I do the Gist every day and we talk mostly about news, but other things. And then I left Slate and started doing it on my own and I write for another number of places and now I'm happy enough to be on with you.
- [07:44]
Mark Reardon
That's awesome. Are you, are you based in New York? Where are you?
- [07:48]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I live in Brooklyn, where this incident that we're talking about occurred.
- [07:52]
Mark Reardon
Well, yeah, let's. So let's get to this this. This happened when? It was last year, Was it the year before?
- [07:58]
Mike Pesca
September of last year?
- [07:59]
Mark Reardon
Okay. There's a shooting that occurs in a subway station in Brooklyn, and the shooters were members of the nypd, as you've written. But the story that gets out there in the media, in the New York Times, isn't exactly an accurate representation of what happened that day, is it?
- [08:16]
Mike Pesca
No. And no one was killed in this shooting. And so maybe it didn't go national in the way a lot of other shootings, especially New York City policing incidents, do. Or, of course, Ferguson policing incidents also go national. But in the shooting, what happened was a man enters the subway. His name is Darrell Nichols, and cops confront him and essentially say, leave. So he beat the fair or tried to evade the fair. He leaves. He comes back a couple minutes later. And in between leaving and coming back, cops looking at closed CCTV see that he has a knife. And not just a knife, an exposed blade. He has it out. So he comes back again, right in front of cops, goes back into the subway again, once again evades the fair. He has this knife. The two police officers confront him, not extremely aggressively, but they are clear. Drop the knife. He refuses. Drop the knife. They say, drop the knife. Or an equivalent 38 times at different points. He says, you're going to have to shoot me. He says, mutters, I'm going to kill you. You're going to have to shoot me. He goes onto a train car, off of a train car. The train has come, and this whole confrontation took place on a subway platform. The cops keep instructing him to drop the knife. He won't. They tase him. The tasing doesn't work. He tears out the Tasers. At this point, yeah. Now at this point, he's on a subway station. They've told him 38 times to drop the knife. They have tased him. So they've tried nonlethal force. And he still has the knife. And at one point, he charges at one of the cops. The cops shoot him in the stomach, the bullets. Because the cops, and I do criticize the policing tactics, and it's very hard, and I've never been a policeman, but they're standing on opposite sides of him. So when one shoots, turns out the other cop, his fellow officer gets shot, but so do two onlookers. One is variously reported as grazed or a little more serious in the leg. She's going to be fine. And then an instant bystander is also shot in the head. Unclear if it's a ricochet or what. Happens, he's going to survive. But it was, it was. When you're shot in the head, it's a very serious injury.
- [10:30]
Mark Reardon
Well, yeah, so you can, you can say, you can. I think what I hear there is you can argue that the officers certainly had justifiable reason to fire their weapon at the dude with the knife, but they didn't really do it in a. In a safe way, which is maybe a basic of training.
- [10:45]
Mike Pesca
Yes. Policing tactics would tell you that if you're going to fire upon someone. And by the way, this is very, very rare in New York. The NYPD has been tracking firearm discharges for decades. And you know, the year it was born in 19, there were 3,000, almost 3,000 firearm discharges. Last year, there's something like 75. It very rarely happens and not all discharges result in a death or even a serious injury, if you would, if you could believe that. But yeah, they weren't positioned. Well, that was poor policing, but it was a very. It was, you know, they did try to tase him. He does come out of the subway car. It was difficult for them. But yes, that was quite imperfect. Police. Right.
- [11:26]
Mark Reardon
So that night, even when this is happening, you got a bunch of activists that surround the police precinct inc there and they say that the way that they spin this is the NYPD committed a mass shooting in the subway. That's the way that they're selling that the protesters. Correct, right.
- [11:41]
Mike Pesca
Social media gets that claim out there. And it is true that New York City has been having a lot of problems in the subway. More murders. Last year they tied a record in a couple months after this would happen, a homeless woman is set on fire by a Guatemalan immigrant in the subway. And there were, and I'm sure this got out to you in St. Louis, there were people who are being pushed onto the subway. Yeah. The public was clamoring for something to be done. And I didn't even mention fare evasions. And fair evasions happen and they rob the system of three to $400 million a year. We don't even know quite how much because once fares are evaded, you can't quite count them. So the mayor, the governor, everyone is talking about and actually implementing more policing in the subways. So here is an. I'm not even. I think maybe some of the protesters didn't understand or were perhaps in good faith, because if it was true, and this is what they were saying, that because of fair evasion, four people were shot, including two innocent bystanders. Yeah, that would be pretty appalling.
- [12:47]
Mark Reardon
Right, Right.
- [12:48]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. I'd want to do a story on that, but that wasn't a story. As I said in my article for the Free Press, it wasn't the case that a man was shot for fair evasion. It was the case that a knife wielding, who refused to drop the knife, who happened to have evaded a fair, was shot. And if this guy went into the subway and paid his fare, he still, the second time, he still would have been confronted by police because they knew him and they knew that he had a knife. This whole thing would have gone down had. As it went down. But the fair evading part of it might not have caught fire with the public and led to mass protests and dozens of arrests and, you know, tumult that is not even being reckoned with properly to this day.
- [13:33]
Mark Reardon
But what I really am interested in beyond that and that you address here, Mike Pesca is here. He hosts a podcast called the Gist is the way the New York Times handled this story, because I highlight media bias quite a bit. It happens almost every day. You indicate that the Times has run seven stories in none of those stories in the headlines have they mentioned the word knife. And I love the fact that even, you know, when, when some of this stuff was investigated, one of the headlines was one hop turnst nine police bullets, four people shot. Does it add up? But nothing indicates, you know, that the dude had a knife at all.
- [14:06]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And the answer to that headline, it doesn't add up because you're not putting in the most important factor, right. The reason that it happened. And that story wasn't done in the. In the direct aftermath. It wasn't done in the fog of war when people don't know exactly what's going on. And the stories that were done got the names of witnesses wrong, got facts wrong, but those things happen. I excuse those facts. And I'm talking about the New York Times, this article. And the only reason I wrote the article for the Free Press, because I'd be covering the incident. This article ran on March 3rd. So this article ran months and months later. And they had all this time to dedicate all this, all these resources, and they interviewed all these people. And the headline is still one hop turnstile, nine police bullets, four people shot. Does it add up? Subhead New York subway has been flooded with patrols to prevent crime and stop Fare evasion. One Sunday in Brooklyn, it all went wrong.
- [15:02]
Mark Reardon
How?
- [15:03]
Mike Pesca
From that headline, that subhead engagement with that. And I also talk about the local public radio station and the National Public Radio station. And you can the BBC. If you are what I am, a person who wants to be fair minded, wants to be civically informed, doesn't want terrible policing where they shoot people for no reason. How are we supposed to come to the right conclusion?
- [15:22]
Mark Reardon
Yeah, see that, that's, that's the point here of our journalism, right? And that's really. You make a great point of this, because there was no. Here's how he writes it. There was no chance, virtually no chance for a conscientious New Yorker to get an accurate story about the Daryl Nichols incident if their media diet consisted of the New York Times, public radio, and their aligned social media feeds and affiliates, which pretty much everyone does. And, you know, I think what's even more important here is you're not claiming the police don't deserve some criticism here. But see, this is where I talk about media bias a lot, where it's biased by omission. There are facts that are important here and relevant to the cases, which some, sometimes the editors, the reporters leave out, and they're very important and germane to the narrative. And that really is misleading.
- [16:03]
Mike Pesca
A headline is supposed to get attention, but also convey the most important, the most salient aspects of a story. Right. We can agree that's what the headline is for. Maybe if you're a terrible tabloid, the headline's supposed to trick you. But when your station, when my show, when we do headlines, what's the most important thing? And if you never put knife in the headline, you're just robbing the public of the chance to make proper conclusions.
- [16:31]
Mark Reardon
Well, which is, I guess, what I would argue they do on a regular basis. Mike Pesca, unfortunately, before I let you go, by the way, great conversation. Thank you so much. What's your overall. Do you have an overall thought right now on just the way things are going in Washington? I know that's a pretty broad question given the nature of where we are, but with Doge, etcetera, I was never, just to give you a little background, I was never a Trump guy in 2015. Didn't think it was a good idea a couple years ago. Probably was more in the DeSantis camp. Certainly came around because I didn't see anyone else that could do the job. And I like that. The start that they're off to right now, I mean, there's certainly some questions you've had this kerfuffle the last couple of days with intelligence. But thoughts overall, how would you rank this administration off to a start?
- [17:12]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I come from a different perspective. I told my Listeners, I've never done an endorsement, but I can endorse Donald Trump. I did endorse Kamala Harris. My three big issues were January 6th, and Ukraine was a giant one. I was probably wrong on the third one, which is what would happen with wokeness and the backlash about political correctness. But here's what I think, what I wonder about what I'm reporting on. Does political gravity still matter? Does it hold because a normal politician would, say, have his approval take a hit or have Wall street tell him this isn't going well or maybe lose many, many cases in court, although I'll put an asterisk on that. Plenty of politicians lose in court. But normally you would say once you become so much less popular, you're going to tack. Right. And that's what happened with the tariffs the first time around. And so I wonder how committed he is to what I think is a really bad policy that will hurt a lot of people, which is the tariffs. And are we just going to see an administration that says, I promise this I'm doing no matter what? I don't know. I think that there are signs that. And we'll see if April 2nd comes and goes and what he does, but I think that there are signs that he will at least behave more or less like a normal politician in that republic.
- [18:28]
Mark Reardon
Yeah. And look, you know where we would. We would agree. I'm very concerned about the tariffs. So, you know, on that particular topic, I do have a fair amount of concern, especially given the nature of where the economy is and whether or not we head into negative growth, et cetera. But did you. Wait just a sec. I'm not gonna. Did you say you endorsed. Did you endorse Kamala Harris? Did you say I did. Oh, Mike.
- [18:50]
Mike Pesca
Mike, I am. I am so upset about what's going on in Ukraine. I took in a family of Ukrainian refugees. I don't walk around with hate in my heart discussions or anything like that, but it is just a fact of foreign policy that if you don't do something with Putin, he's going to do a lot to expand his reach. And I don't think that this is the right way to do it.
- [19:14]
Mark Reardon
Well, we're going to have to agree. Yeah, we'll have to agree to disagree on that particular point with Kamala. I don't. By the way, I don't dismiss your concerns about Ukraine either. You know, a lot of these things right now are very complicated. Mike, I'm going to check out the podcast. Thank you so much. It's called the Gist. We'll have you back. Thanks a lot.
- [19:30]
Mike Pesca
Thanks a lot.
- [19:40]
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- [20:07]
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- [21:02]
Rafael Mangual
Rafael Manuel is a Senior Fellow and Head of Research for Policing and Public Safety at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. And let me tell you about our overlapping existences. Though Rafael is about a dozen years younger than I am, he grew up up about a mile and a half from where I'm sitting right now. He then moved to Long island, about three towns over from where I grew up. He's somewhat obsessed with New York crime and policing statistics, as am I, and we have come in fact to many of the same conclusions. So it might be weird. And maybe I'll prepare Raphael by saying this interview might be a bunch of disagreement, but I have to say we mostly agree on the big things. Raphael's written a new book called Criminal Injustice. The inn is in parentheses, so I don't know whether to say it first or but I'll just say it like that. Criminal injustice what the push for decarceration and de policing gets wrong and who it hurts the most. Rafael, welcome to the Gist.
- [21:59]
Mark Reardon
Thank you so much for having me on.
- [22:01]
Rafael Mangual
Last question first. Who it hurts the most is clearly in your estimation, black communities, right?
- [22:06]
Mark Reardon
That's right. That's right. You know, we often talk about crime in kind of national terms, city wide terms, you know, statewide terms, county wide terms. And you know, it's an understandable colloquialism. It makes it easier to, to kind of have the conversation on terms that we can all kind of digest. But what that kind of framing clouds is that crime is a very hyper concentrated phenomenon. It's not something that we all experience equally. You mentioned the communities that we grew up in. In Long Island. Crime was a very different story there than it was in, you know, the Brooklyn neighborhoods that I grew up around in the 1990s. Even Park Slope was not particularly great in the 1980s and 90s.
- [22:44]
Rafael Mangual
And I'll throw something another, another common data point. Your dad worked in the 67th Precinct, which is right down the from where I live. So although he wouldn't police my block or he wouldn't have policed my block, if I lived two or three blocks over, he would have.
- [22:58]
Mark Reardon
That's right. That's right. So, you know, it's like I said, it's not something that we all experience equally. And I think we don't do enough as a society to kind of appreciate the extent to which crime is a very discreet problem for certain communities and not much of a problem for other communities, specifically when you talk about violent crime. Right. So in New York, as I say in the book, a minimum of 95% of all shooting victims every year for which we have data, this is going back to at least 2008, a minimum of 95% of all shooting victims are either black or Hispanic. Almost all of them are males. Last year I think it was over 96%, which, you know, at that point it might as well be 100. It's one of the starkest, most persistent racial disparities in the criminal justice data that you'll ever find. And it doesn't get nearly enough attention. Neither does the fact that in New York City, about 3 1/2% of street segments see about 50% of all crime. If we're deploying police resources to the places that have the biggest crime problems, that right off the bat, police are going to interact much more with the people living in those communities than they will with people living in communities with much lower crime problems, and if you have an overrepresentation of demographic groups in those areas, and that's going to be reflected in the data.
- [24:09]
Rafael Mangual
Right. So just to flesh out some of these statistics, the vast majority, by vast majority, it's almost 100% of shooting victims black and Hispanic in New York. We should note that in New York City, if you had the white Asian population, that's about 55%. So it is not the case that we're even a black and Hispanic majority city, just to underline how stark that statistic is. But what I hear you saying, there is a rebuttal, a prebuttal to the prevalent notion that the amount of police interdiction with the black community is disproportionate to the white community. Shootings of black people by police, killings of black people by police are disproportionate to their population, to their representation in the population. But you're making the point, point that you can't look at purely the representation the population. You have to look at in some way how likely a black person or Hispanic person, but mostly a black person in the ways this is talked about, how likely they are to be involved in crime. However, even if I've always, this has always been a stumbling block, even if it is true that black people, African Americans are much greater disproportionately victims of crime and disproportionately perpetrators of crime and violence, violent crime, that doesn't necessarily perfectly map onto the perceived likelihood that they will be involved in crime. So there is still a disconnect. While it's true, and I agree that you can't just say, oh, oh, black people are three times as likely to be stopped by cops if you look at their representation the population, you can't then I think just jump to the prevalence of African American murderers to say that should be the stop rate.
- [25:54]
Mark Reardon
Right, Right, Yeah. I mean, and also it's important to just take a step back and note that it's not the entire black community that's bearing the brunt of the costs associated with a particular enforcement program. Right. Most black people aren't getting stopped and frisked or arrested. The vast majority of people, even in high crime, black and brown communities are law abiding citizens. And if you look at things like police stops, they tend to be concentrated in and around the crime hotsp that have the most criminal activity, which is, you know, in a lot of cities, as I mentioned, you know, just 3.5% of street segments in New York are very, very small areas. We're not talking about entire neighborhoods, we're not even talking about entire blocks. We're talking about particular intersections, places where police have reason to believe, you know, there, there's a lot of drug activity or there's been a pattern of robberies. You know, so one of the things that I think has been really positive about the the introduction of complex data into policing decisions is that it's allowed police to be more precise and how they deploy resources that, you know, when, when used, can, can have, you know, a really harsh effect on communities. Right. It's not, it's not a pleasant experience to be pulled over, stopped, searched. I mean, you know, I, I'm not a criminal. I've never, you know, committed any kind of serious crime. But, you know, my dad was a cop. Even, even still, when I get pulled over, I find myself getting a little nervous. Right. It's, it's not a particularly pleasant experience. But, you know, what data has allowed police to do is be much more precise in how they deploy those, those tools and who has those negative experiences, which I think has made things better. One of the things that really frustrates me about the sort of rhetorical posture of our criminal justice debate and our policing debate in particular, is the fact that police don't really get much credit as an institution for getting so much better over the decades. Right. I mean, when it comes to things like stop and frisk. Right. I mean, we saw, you know, a huge decline in the number of reported stops, you know, since, since the sort of peak time of around 2011. Didn't really see that reflected in the sort of protest after 2020 here in New York City.
- [28:06]
Rafael Mangual
Well, to be fair, driving those decline in stops was a court order claiming it's unconstitutional.
- [28:12]
Mark Reardon
Yeah.
- [28:13]
Rafael Mangual
I don't know how much back padding the police should get for, you know, not violating the Constitution.
- [28:17]
Mark Reardon
Sure. You know, but, you know, look, they, they, the, the, the, the, the question is, is, you know, are the outputs changing in the direction that reformers wanted them to change? And I think on that front, the, the answer is absolutely yes. And same thing on use of force. Right. In 1971, when the NYPD started keeping track, they shot more than 220 people that year. You know, that number is down to like the low 20s. I think they kill less than 10 a year. I mean, that's a massive gun, the.
- [28:41]
Rafael Mangual
Gun discharge statistics, because they were, weren't, they weren't good shots. Right. So if you go to the 70s, the total number of gun discharge statistics was, you know, I think some years it was, it was touching. A thousand.
- [28:53]
Mark Reardon
Yeah.
- [28:53]
Rafael Mangual
And, and they, they count, the NYPD counts every time a gun is discharged, and it's in the dozens.
- [28:58]
Mark Reardon
Yeah. And also, yeah, I would note the NYPD doesn't have particularly high hit rate when, when they fire their weapons. I suspect that part of that has to do with the Fact that the NYPD artificially weights their, their triggers on service weapons. So typically, you know, a firearm like a Glock, of the standard issue firearm choices for the NYPD, that comes with a standard trigger weight of about 5 pounds. So it takes about 5 pounds of pressure to pull the trigger. They modify those for the cops and make them £12.
- [29:27]
Rafael Mangual
That's good, I think. Right?
- [29:28]
Mark Reardon
You would think, Right. The idea was that it's supposed to sort of give people another split second to make the choice whether or not to shoot. But it also makes it very, very difficult to be accurate under pressure because when you have to pull that much harder, you're more likely to jerk the firearm. And it's one of the reasons, I think, that the NYPD has such a low hit rate, particularly compared to deployment departments that don't artificially weight their triggers.
- [29:48]
Rafael Mangual
Huh. Interesting. Okay, so let's, let's expand this out a little bit beyond New York. In the book, you look at certain neighborhoods, extremely high crime, high murder neighborhoods throughout the United States. A couple in St. Louis, the 9th and 9th and 10th precinct of Detroit, northwest Baltimore, west side of Chicago, four cities. You total the murders there. It's a tenth of all the murders of the entire country of England and Germany. That's horrible and incredible. And if our politicians or public policy really grasp that, how would things change? How would things change if we began to define crime and murder as a, you know, specific census track problem 80 to 90% of the time?
- [30:37]
Mark Reardon
I think it would do a couple things. I think it would reinforce this sense of urgency that I think is lacking right now in terms of addressing the violent crime problem in particular areas. But I also think, and, you know, I wonder about this, I think it would also remind people just how safe they are. Right. If you were randomly dropped somewhere in the United states, you know, 99 times out of 100, you're going to land somewhere where the murder is of zero or very close to zero. If you repeat that experiment, you know, 10, 20, 30,000 times, every once in a while, you're going to land in a place like West Garfield Park, Chicago, which has a murder rate of 131 per 100,000 compared to the national rate of about five and a half per 100,000. You know, I think one thing that, to me, the most important reason to highlight how discrete this problem is and how concentrated it is is I think, to allow for decisions about deployment of law enforcement resources to be directed to their highest possible use, to their most effective possible use. Right. I remember when sort of one of the central critiques of police was like, you know, they're not responsive enough to crime in low income black communities. Right. You can hear it in rap music today or J. Cole lyrics where he's making jokes about how long it it takes police to respond to 911 calls in white neighborhoods.
- [32:05]
Rafael Mangual
My touchstone would be public enemy and 911 is a joke in your town. So 10 years difference, there you go.
- [32:12]
Mark Reardon
But it's still very much a prevailing notion today. What I don't think people fully appreciate is the degree to which the deployment of law enforcement resources has shifted to reflect this reality. But the lack of knowledge about just how concentrated crime is, is, has really, I think, toxified our national debate about this because it causes people to not really understand the disparities that that concentration produces in law enforcement statistics in the proper context. Right. And so when we see statistics like black overrepresentation among people arrested, among people prosecuted, among people incarcerated, we're looking at those statistics in a vacuum and not really taking account of the fact that, that hey, this is very much a function of police trying to protect the very, very small slice of American society that stands to be victimized the most by these sorts of offenses. And you know, I, I don't think it can be understated just how beneficial those efforts have been over the years. Right. There's, there's a part of the book where I talk about the, you know, the effect of the crime decline and how unevenly distributed the, the benefits were. Right. So, you know, from between 1990 and 2014, the National Homicide rate goes through the floor. I mean, it's just a massive, massive decrease. In New York City, for example, we had 2,262 murders in 1990. By 2014, I think we were down under 500. So that's a massive improvement. Nationally. That decline added a full year of life expectancy to the average black man's life compared to the average white man. It added only 0.14 years of life expectancy. So for black men, the public health equivalent of the homicide decline, which was brought about in large part, though not, not entirely in large part due to policing, incarceration and smart criminal justice policy, the public health equivalent of that was basically eliminating obesity altogether, according to one study. And so I think when we start to have the kind of conversation that we've been having since about 2010, but that's really intensified since 2020 in this country where the sort of dominant narrative is pushing in the direction of, eroding, these sort of traditional institutions of law enforcement that brought about this safety gain, we're eschewing the benefits that those institutions can bring. And that's going to disproportionately hurt, ironically. Exactly. The communities that a lot of reformers say they're standing up for. And that's one of the sort of main messages that I wanted to get across in the book, because I think people who are kind of pro law enforcement or pro sort of traditional criminal justice apparatuses were characterized as not caring about these communities, as not caring about the costs associated with law enforcement. And it's like, no, we acknowledge that there are costs associated with these programs, but you have to look at the other side of the ledger. There are benefits associated with these programs, and those benefits are just as unequally distributed as the costs are. And, you know, when you look at, you know, what low income black communities want, they don't say, we want less policing, they say we want better policing. For sure. Right. And they deserve it. And in large part, we've been moving in that direction over the decades. And again, I don't think that's something that's fully appreciated. But, you know, 81% of black Americans told Gallup last year that they want as much or more policing that they were currently getting, which, you know, I think often gets left out of the conversation.
- [35:34]
Rafael Mangual
Right. So a lot of activists and activists I've had on the show will say, inevitably say, well, it's a false choice. It's a false choice between safety and police brutality. It is true that it's a false choice. It's also the case that in these communities with high crime, even if they're addressed properly or much more properly than they were were 40, 50 years ago, it is at least not the perception and I think to some extent the reality that there isn't a divorce between brutality and safety that the two always do. I'm going to use the word seem, but let me amend that. The two always do go together to some extent. And what could be done about that?
- [36:18]
Mark Reardon
Well, what can be done about that is you can improve policing in the ways that we have over the last 50 years. I mean, the institution of policing has been professional in a really important way, and that has brought about, I think, massive benefits. And so the other thing, though, I think we have to just kind of take a step back and realize that like police brutality, while a major problem that is worthy of public attention, that should be addressed. It's something that shouldn't ever happen. Right. But it's going to. Right. Policing is a human endeavor. Humans make mistakes. The question is, can those instances, like what we saw Derek Chauvin do to George Floyd on campus camera, do those instances characterize policing as an institution? I think the answer is very, very clearly no. And the data speak to this, I think, overwhelmingly. Right. If you look at police use of force rates, they are infinitesimal compared to what you would think they are if you were just a casual observer of the national debate. When I give public talks, I sometimes poll the audience. I say, how often do you think police use force in the context of making an arrest? And I usually get numbers between like 15% and like 60%. The reality is it's. It's less than 1% most of the time. And, you know, I was on the Daily show with Trevor Noah yesterday, and he's like, well, you know, these are police statistics, so, you know, maybe they're underreporting some of these things. And it's like, well, if that were the case, we would expect to see an incongruity between. With. Between what police report as being the rate of force and what citizens report. Right. So the. The Bureau of Justice Statistics surveys citizens who've had contacts with the police every single year. And the rate at which those citizens report being subjected to force or the threat of force is basically identical to what police departments are reporting themselves. So given that that incongruity doesn't exist, I think we can actually trust what a lot of these studies are saying that are based on police data. And one of my favorite studies on these on this topic looked at over a million calls for service made across three police departments. One in North Carolina, one in Arizona, and one in Louisiana. Those million calls for service led to 114,000 criminal arrests. In that entire data set, there is just one fatal police shooting captured. And in that entire 114,000 criminal arrests, police affected more than 99% of those arrests without the use of any force whatsoever. And in 98% of the cases in which they did use force, force, there was either zero or very mild injury to the suspect. So, you know, yes, it is true that use of force is a problem when it goes too far. We should look for ways to minimize that to the extent that we can. But we also have to speak honestly about how much of a risk this actually is. So, you know, in 2018, I estimated that police officers fired their weapons a little over 3,000 times, but they made 10.3 million arrests. So that's 0.03% of arrests. If we assume that every shooting happened within the context of a separate arrest, again, it's not to diminish the terrible cases where police do abuse their power and hurt people and take lives that shouldn't have been taken. Right. I am by no means an apologist for bad policing, nor am I operating under the presumption that these institutions are perfect. But when we talk about the need to reform, the need to reduce police use of force, we have to start with the knowledge that police already get it right a really good percentage of the time. And by really good percentage of the time, I mean nearly every. Every time.
- [39:40]
Rafael Mangual
Right. So a couple of things. One, you know, what, polling an audience or what the public might think, and the mis comprehension, the misapprehensions they might have, it doesn't really tell me much. If NASA polled the audience, they get totally disparate lengths to the moon. It doesn't mean, you know, we shouldn't send a rocket up there. The national conversation first of all, there are 10,000 national conversations going on. But I agree for, especially during the summer of 2020 and before, after, after words like de policing and decarceration, as is on the COVID of your book, those were very much in the air. But I guess my question is not to think about correcting the worst arguments, but what do you do about the hard to ignore realities of. For instance, if what you just said to me about acknowledging and knowing how highly concentrated murder is in certain communities, as I heard your answer, it seems to me that it's unavoidable that something like what critics would call an occupation is inevitable, just more and more and more policing in those neighborhoods. And so how do we get away from, as Nixon put it and Chris Hayes borrowed from his book, the idea of the colony within the nation. How do we get away from the idea and reality that the way to solve this problem is massive police presence in the most hard hit neighborhoods?
- [41:05]
Mark Reardon
I don't think we get away from that reality. What I do think we have to accept is that that reality can over time bring about a situation in which the presence and of police becomes less and less necessary. Right. New York, I think is a really good example of this. In the year 2000, I think we had more than 13 precincts that were seeing more than 20 homicides a year. By the time that, you know, the, the stop and frisk litigation came to a close, I think it was only one precinct that was seeing more than 20 murders a year. When you get crime under control, you give communities the space to grow, you give them the time to become attractive investments to business people. And those things over time fortify the community against crime in really important ways. Right after, as the just the physical built environment changes, you have a higher concentration of businesses, you have more people moving in, more foot traffic, more traffic density. It becomes basically impossible now to do a drive by in even the outer boroughs of New York City compared to what it was like in the 1980s where you could drive through the South Bronx and there would be entire blocks with maybe one standing structure.
- [42:14]
Rafael Mangual
So you heard a lot from Rafael Manuel about his fault finding with different ideas for reform reform. He backed it up with data with good argumentation. But a big question remains. Okay, if that doesn't work, if all these reforms aren't the way to go, if these criticisms aren't apt. What is the model for better policing and safer communities in America? And we'll talk about that tomorrow. And that's it for the show. Cory Wara produces the Gist. Michelle Pesca, cbso I'll talk to you on Monday. The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.