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I'm Barry Weiss and this is Honestly. Good evening and thanks for joining us. The World Health Organization has now confirmed what many epidemiologists have been saying for weeks. The coronavirus is a pandemic.
As we prepare to enter year three of this pandemic, I've been thinking about all of the measures this country has undertaken to avoid the worst outcomes of the virus. There are 30 states across the country this morning seeing spikes in COVID-19 hospitalizations. More than 620 schools have closed or are scheduled to close, affecting more than 430,000 students. And taking a sober look at all of their unintended consequences.
Well, school closures due to the coronavirus means millions of parents are now supervising their children's education from home. I can't think of an area where that is more significant and more morally urgent than the cost of schools being shut down.
The coronavirus will likely keep California schools closed for the rest of the academic year. What this means for students and parents. Rising number of cases in New Jersey has some school districts making the tough decision to go back to remote learning when classes resume next week. The statistician Nate Silver recently took a lot of heat when he tweeted that school closures were a policy decision of disastrous invasion of a wrath magnitude. Now, setting aside whether you agree with that particular analogy or not,
The reality is that many people in the media, in public health, in government are just now sort of kind of coming to terms with the consequences of keeping tens of millions of kids home from school for months on end.
But my guest today was way ahead of the curve. Rigorously, diligently, empathetically, Alec McGillis, a journalist for ProPublica, has been exposing the effects of our pandemic policies on children, specifically minority and low-income students, from the very beginning of this virus. Alec also reported on how lockdowns and the measures cities are continuing to keep in effect are contributing to the crime surge plaguing much of the country.
Ultimately, when you look at all of Alec's reporting, what it exposes is just how quickly COVID-19 and our reactions to it devastatingly sped up the already growing divide between the haves and the have-nots across America. There's so much to get to with Alec, so we're going to release our conversation in two parts. Today, kids, schools, and crime. We'll be right back.
Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.
There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Alec, thank you so much for doing this and for your reporting, which I want to just go ahead and dive straight into. Well, I'm glad to be here.
I want to start off with the cost of school closures on teenagers. Specifically, can you tell me about what you witnessed in Hobbs, New Mexico? Yeah. Hobbs is a town right on the Texas, West Texas border, a town of about 40,000 people. And I found out late last year that they had had pre-suicides, youth suicides in that town between 18 and 19.
April and December of 2020. And one thing I immediately discovered as I started looking into this terrible situation is that the town has this very kind of striking location, namely that it's right on the Texas border. You had a situation where you had, I think almost like nowhere else in the country, an incredible contrast
in policies right across one state line, where on the one hand, you had New Mexico, which had some of the most stringent COVID responses in the country, really just right behind some of the East Coast states in terms of its shutting down everything, schools and so much else. And then right across the line in Texas, things were so much more open and so much more normal.
And you had these teenagers in Hobbs who had lost everything. School was shut down, sports was shut down, and they were having a really hard time. And what made it even harder was that they would look right across the border and they'd see these towns right across the border where their peers were able to proceed with life pretty much normally. They were still going to school, they were still having sports, there was still Friday night football, and it made it all the harder for the kids in Hobbs. The life that I focused on the most
was that of a young man named Cooper Davis, who was a 17-year-old high school junior, real standout kid, really good student, very popular, very kind of
happy, glowing young man, very active in church, and also a very serious student athlete. Played basketball and football, specialized in football, was a quarterback, real tall kid, dreams of going to Stanford and playing college football. And the junior year is, of course, so crucial for your college application, your grades, and for an athlete, for getting your game tape to send out to teams, to recruiters. And suddenly that had all just been taken away from him.
him and his classmates and his teammates. And he found it just absolutely crushing. My name is Cooper Davis. I'm a junior here at Hobbs High School. And he was actually very vocal about this and very eloquent. It's just crazy to think that we're stuck at home when just down the road, they're in full football season.
They're almost done with their football season. They had a protest at the school football field one day in October where all the students got together to talk about what a hard time they were having. I just believe that we should be here at school. And me, I'm willing to keep my teammates and my classmates in line, abiding by their rules, just so I can be back here doing the stuff I love.
And then two months after that, Cooper took his own life, making him the third student in Hobbs, youngest of which was actually 11 or 12 years old, to take his life that year. Father, we come before you heartbroken, aching, full of sorrow. Thank you for the years that we, each and every single one of us, got to spend with Cooper, the gift that he was. We need your strength today, Father. In your name we pray. Amen.
I remember from the story that his father basically says that had schools been open, his son would still be alive. That was absolutely the sense that the people around Cooper had. And his father, his parents, his minister, his teachers, his coach, they saw this real change in Cooper following the closures. One should state, of course, that one can never know these things for sure.
I think a lot of us like to think that tragedies like the suicide of Cooper Davis are rare, but a lot of the data that's come out show that there is a rise in anxiety, depression, and self-harm among young people in America right now. Last month, the Surgeon General warned that emergency room visits for adolescent girls who were attempting suicide rose by 51% in early 2021 compared to 2019.
And I guess I want to ask, how are families and parents and also school professionals trying to manage this spike in mental health crises in self-harm? What did you see in Hobbs and in your reporting beyond Hobbs? Well, they're just overwhelmed by it. They really don't.
I mean, it's last year when the school, when the schools in places like Hobbs were closed, it was of course, especially difficult because they had no, there was no actual contact. So the teachers, teachers weren't, weren't really, weren't seeing Cooper. So often schools are so important probably because those, it's the teachers or the other professionals in the school building who notice that something's up with a, with a given kid. And that, you know, then can, you can start some kind of a,
the alarm gets set off and you can have outreach to the family, outreach to the kid and things can go on from there. But that basic kind of warning system just completely broke down when schools were actually closed. They were not actually seeing these students. They didn't know them. I mean, I've seen teachers commenting online about the bizarre experience of say running into a
kid at the store and the kid saying, "Oh, you know, Mr. Johnson, good to see you." And Mr. Johnson's like, "Who the heck are you?" Because Mr. Johnson hasn't seen that kid at all because the kid has camera off. He never even knew what he looked like. But now that they are, most kids are back in school, what you're seeing is that schools are just overwhelmed by the mental health fallout from the year plus of the kids not having been there.
I talk to a lot of parents who are outraged and maybe I would even say politically radicalized from what their kids have experienced. What are you hearing from the parents that you're speaking to?
It's a mixture. I mean, I think it really depends on where you are. I got at this in my initial article on the school closure set in Baltimore back in September of 20, when I was just kind of amazed to see that all these cities, most of the cities in this country were going to, in fact, not going to open the schools to direct instruction. And what you saw there is that one factor in the decision for a lot of these schools
cities to stay closed was that you did have real anxiety on the part of a lot of parents. I mean, the fear had been just instilled so deeply through, you know, the media and what the parents were hearing from the teachers who were themselves scared to go back. You know, just all this really
alarmist language, despite the fact that very early on in this terrible pandemic, it became clear that children were blessedly less vulnerable to serious harm. You're still seeing this now. You're seeing this in Chicago and some of the other cities where the reopening debate is still playing out. You do still have some parents who are still anxious about having their kids in school. But then, of course, in many other places, you have real growing anger. I have two children.
One has autism and he has been severely affected by this shutdown. Our special needs children need to be in schools. They cannot learn on the computer. And it absolutely is starting to become a political issue for the Democrats. And that's what you saw.
in Virginia and New Jersey in the elections in November. With signs held high along the roadway, parents and students in Fairfax County called for their child schools to reopen. It's going to be hard for me with three kids in the house. It's just really devastating as a parent to just see my kids have to suffer. Where it absolutely played a role, a huge role there. And I'm quite sure you're going to see it playing a role again in this November in the midterms.
I want to get to Chicago and the fight that's playing out there still with reopening and for sure the political fallout of the past two years. But let's talk about another story from your reporting first. You know, I'm struck by the fact that in the case of Cooper Davis, he had a relatively stable family. He had a dad, he had a stepmom who supported him. Before the pandemic, it sounds like he was straight-A student, excellent athlete. He had a laptop and an internet connection.
But that certainly wasn't the case for everyone that you reported on this year. And I'm thinking now of Baltimore, where you live. And I'm thinking specifically of a young man who you wrote about named Shamar.
And this is where I, where it first dawned on me just how devastating the closures were going to be for a lot of kids. And it was way back in the spring of 20 when the schools first closed everywhere. Millions of quarantined people had plenty of ways to stay entertained this Easter weekend. It was great seeing Tom Hanks looking so well hosting Saturday Night Live and a new episode of Tiger King. It was quite enraging, actually.
puzzles the pastime of the pandemic. Hey, good morning to you. Happy Monday. You know, while all of us are hunkering down, you know, safe harboring at home, one Roseville family actually went TikTok famous and they're joining me live right now.
I think for a lot of people, it was almost kind of nice. It was like a kind of initially kind of a cocooning effect where you're just, everyone was sort of safe in their own homes and basically just kind of taking it easy with board games and puzzles and ordering things in and getting your Amazon orders and your groceries delivered and everyone kind of sealed off in their own safe nests. And of course there were all these other kids who were experiencing this in a much less idyllic kind of way. And I
window I kind of had into that other realm was this boy, Shamar, who at the time was
12 years old, at just under 12. And he was a boy that I've been working with as a mentor here in Baltimore. And for him, those months were just much darker. And I mean, literally dark. He was spending those months sitting by himself in various homes, kind of shuttled between different homes, different members of his family that kind of passed him back and forth.
and would just spend the whole day in a room in a house with the blinds drawn, generally just playing his Xbox with no human contact, doing virtually none of the virtual schooling because there was all sorts of problems with
the laptop, the internet connection. But not just that, even once he would get his laptop and the internet connection in a given place, the bigger problem was actually the communication, that he wasn't getting all the sort of notices from his teachers with this link or that link for that day's class or assignments. They would often come through an app. He didn't have the phone for the app. These breakdowns of basic communication
So he had never, never had any real idea what he was, when he was supposed to be logging on, where he was supposed to be logging on. There was one, especially heartbreaking moment where I checked with him one morning to make sure he was in class and in virtual class. And he said, yeah, I, you know, actually this morning he had actually gotten up on time and logged in. He said, but there's only one other person here. And I said, what do you mean? He says, yeah, there's just, it's just me and Joaquin, another student. And I said, that's funny. And
And I looked into it and it turned out that the link had changed at the last moment. And so he and Joaquin were just sitting there all by themselves for like half an hour, just sitting there in this virtual space. And the class was going on somewhere else in the ether.
That's just how it went endlessly for him. But of course it was invisible to everyone else. And that's what I kept thinking about was all these kids out there who already as it is in our society, they are not visible enough. Low income kids in our big cities who are just deeply disadvantaged in all sorts of ways. But at least they are in a normal course of life. You do see them at least. You see them in the schoolyard. You see them on the bus. You see them walking home from school.
But now suddenly with the school shutdowns, they had become truly invisible. They're now truly completely off the radar while we were, you know, sort of safe in our own spaces with our puzzles and our Amazon. And of course, they were fortunate if they were, in fact, just in those dark rooms. That was at least better than the alternative of being out on the streets at increasing risk of being harmed, which we've, of course, also seen these last couple of years just escalate.
That as we shut down schools and shut down all these other services that and kind of cast people loose, that that absolutely has played a role in the dreadful rise of violence around the country as well. You quote Shamar's fourth grade math teacher who says this. His story could be any number of kids. There's thousands of him. There's millions of him.
What do you see now two years into this pandemic happening to the thousands or millions of shamars throughout the country? I think we have no idea just how sweeping and long lasting the ramifications are going to be. I mean, you're seeing it already now in India.
in stories like Erica Green's from Bethlehem, where you have these schools that are now still just now that even as they're back open, just struggling to regain normalcy. You're seeing it in these really, really depressing stats that are coming out on the achievement gap growing between white and black and Latino students because the effects of the closures were just so, so disparate. I mean, here in Baltimore, we had
The private schools were open for months while the public schools were closed. And that was happening in many other cities as well. And when you already have such incredible disparities in a city like this between the fancy private schools and underfunded public schools, and then on top of that, you literally have one of them still open for business and students getting direct instruction and social interaction and all that.
And then this whole other set of schools that already has a disadvantaged population not even being open at all for direct instruction and the disparities that are going to come out of that are going to just be gaping. And I'm already hearing, I mean, just really additional depressing stats about...
going rates, schools that were actually previously sending quite a few Black and Hispanic students onto college saw a huge drop off in those numbers in the past year or two. It's really actually kind of hard to even think about just how lasting it's going to be. You've seen this in the past. And the fact is we had precedence for this. This is something I tried to get at in that Baltimore piece in September 2020 as like a warning sign that we had to
We have documentation from the past of what's happened when you have long-term school closures. You saw it in Prince Edward County, Virginia, the county that where the famously the white segregationists shut down the schools for years. They simply shut down the public school system instead of having to integrate it after Brown v. Board. And so you had...
thousands of black schoolchildren who simply didn't have school for years with just, you know, lasting lifelong illiteracy and all sorts of other consequences. There were all these reasons for us to fear the consequence of what we were doing, but we went ahead and did it anyway.
You mentioned that you mentored Shamar and I assume that you're still in close touch. I'm wondering how he thinks about what he's lived through, continuing to live through, and how he talks about it to you. Yeah, I am, of course, still in contact with him. I took him to school two days this week. It's actually his birthday today, so I'll be going over later today for that. And it's really hard. I mean...
You have children like him for whom school was already a trial. It was already tenuous. It was sort of a daily fight to make sure that he got there and was doing homework and was sticking with it. Then along comes these closures and this sense that society is sending out that school, actual school, physical school,
maybe kind of optional and not necessarily that important that we can maybe do it this other way and they get that message absolutely they get that message and it you know gives this implicit sense that actually it maybe doesn't matter that much so why get yourself up on a cold winter morning when it's still dark out and walk across
a quarter, half a mile to the bus and then take that to the other bus to go to school if society's been sending this message that it was not necessarily that important. Because if it was that important, then we would have fought harder to keep the schools open.
So there's that lingering legacy of the closures that I think is always going to be there for kids like him. And something also that's really important to keep in mind with a lot of kids like him is that for a lot of kids like him, the shelter, this sort of place of refuge this last year or two really has been video games. I think we often think of that as kind of a white suburban kind of phenomenon, the sort of excessive...
you know, losing oneself in that world, the gaming world. But it's absolutely also a phenomenon with kids like Shemar. I mean, that is where he has lived in his last year or two is in his games. And he's playing them
incredibly late at night. He has no real social contact with friends or other classmates outside school. It's just the games and that's his world. And the challenge with virtual schooling is that he would often just rather just switch over to the games. - To the other tab. - On the other tab. - Yeah. - Yeah, and I think that's the case with so many kids. That's no way to live. - Alec, one of the arguments that we heard a lot, especially I would argue from sort of blue check mark
online voices on Twitter, privileged voices were saying, you know, better that the kids are alive and uneducated and alone than in school and dead. Obviously, I'm being crude here. Was that a perspective that you saw represented at all in places like Baltimore or Hobbs or any of the other cities that you reported from over the past two years?
It was certainly more perspective more in Baltimore because Hobbs is a very conservative town, conservative part of New Mexico. So it was like a red town in a blue state. And so there you had much more willingness on the part of parents to have their kids go to school, much more kind of across the board frustration with the fact that the schools were closed.
in Baltimore, you did have more parental fears there. But there's something, what's really struck me, what's happened on this front in the last couple of years is that
is what happened after the vaccines came out. In the summer of '20, when I was first reporting the Baltimore piece, so much of the discussion about whether schools should open, whether they were safe to open, was around kids as vectors. It was less- Yes. Yes, there were some parents who were worried about their kids' safety, but there was a general awareness already that kids were less
much less exposed to this virus. And what we had to worry about was that the kids were going to bring the virus home to their parents, their grandparents, that they would bring the virus into the classroom and infect their teachers. There was so much more talk around that problem. And even though there was also already some indications that kids were also
less likely to, not only to get very sick, but also less likely to transmit and that schools were not elsewhere and other parts of the world were not proving to be real sites of major transmission. Nonetheless, that was the context of that sort of safety debate around the schools. But then the vaccines arrived, thank goodness, and teachers got vaccinated, vulnerable family members got vaccinated.
And it was astonishing to watch how the debate evolved in the last summer of '21, where suddenly we are at this point, suddenly shifted to kids as the vulnerable ones, that we are talking much more explicitly and much more alarm about kids being vulnerable because they were not vaccinated. So suddenly it was as if there was a certain amount of fear in society that just
that we almost had to have a certain amount of fear still around the virus, even after we'd gotten these great vaccines. And we sort of shifted the fear from the teachers and the older family members who were vulnerable
but we're now vaccinated, we shifted it right onto the kids themselves. So suddenly you had this whole debate about because they were not vaccinated, the kids being incredibly exposed and all the debates around masking the kids and how young kids should be masked and all the rest. And whether preschoolers should be wearing N95s. I mean, that's where the conversation is now. Right. And it's in that, I don't know, I was amazed to see that happening at the time. And
That's where things shifted, even though early on, it seemed like as if we almost unlearned some of what we had known in 2020 about kids being less vulnerable. Yes.
Well, we also just know a lot more now than we did at the beginning, right? We can make a judgment about how justified this fear is to children's health, even if the children are unvaccinated, right? So according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children have represented between 0% and 0.27% of all COVID-19 related deaths. So
a total of 803 American children died either from COVID or with COVID over the last two years, which is less than the total deaths from the flu and RSV in a typical pre-pandemic year. That combined with the fact that, as you said, hooray, thank God the vaccines are here and teachers are vaccinated. So you would think that those two key pieces of information would mean that the issue would be settled.
So why, in the days after winter break, did the Chicago Teachers Union fight tooth and nail with the mayor to once again go back to remote schooling? What is that fight really about? It's, yeah, I'm watching it unfolding in Chicago and it's unfolding here in Baltimore too, to a somewhat lesser degree. Here we shut down about a third of our schools were shut down this week or switched over to remote learning.
In that case, it was really a staff issue. I mean, they just didn't have enough teachers and staff to man the classrooms. And one big part of that is that they've decided to stick with the 10-day isolation policy that if a teacher tests positive, even if they're asymptomatic, they're out for 10 days. Even though the CDC has now recommends five days. Right. They've not switched over to the CDC recommendation to go with five days. And so, of course, if you're
If you're losing staff for 10 days at a time, you're very quickly going to end up in a shortage situation. In Chicago, it was much more of a clear real sort of union battle. I mean, Chicago has for several years now had one of the most activist teachers unions chapters in the country. And this was in a way just more another around in a long, long running battle. And what was so striking, of course, was that the
Democratic mayor, quite liberal Democratic mayor, Lori Lightfoot, put her foot down as much as she did and basically said, no, we're not going to switch over to virtual learning. You need to come to school and we're not going to have the remote learning as the fallback. It's real direct instruction or nothing. And so then you ended up with this incredible standoff. There was
There was an extraordinary headline one day in the Financial Times while this was happening that I thought really boiled it down very starkly. It was something to the effect that Chicago teachers in standoff, Chicago teachers shun direct education.
contact with students. And that really, you know, put it in sort of stark relief of what was happening there. So, and now, you know, it's good to see that it's, that has been resolved, but now we once again lost, for those tens of thousands of kids, lost a whole bunch more days of instruction. What's, what has just been generally so frustrating about this year is that
precisely when we've actually needed more instruction to catch up everything that was lost last year. There's been such staffing struggles and then but more than that, also just concerns about students and maybe also teachers kind of mental health coming out of this really crazy couple of years that there's actually been a deliberate effort to sort of dial down the amount of instruction and to sort of
make things somewhat easier for everyone. And so we're not actually catching up. We're, if anything, falling even further behind.
I'm not telling you anything you don't know to say that, you know, one of the most tragic and persistent realities in American life is that if you're born in a certain school district or in a certain neighborhood, because of the circumstances of your birth, you are stuck attending a crappy school, often underfunded and often dangerous. And that other kids, because of their good luck,
are born into richer school districts and or have wealthy parents that can send them to good private schools. And this is one of the core political battles in American life about how to solve this problem. And into this sort of intractable debate comes the lockdowns. And I guess I want to ask if, you know, has the case for school choice been resolved?
Ironically, made more definitively than hundreds of white papers and op-eds from center-right or libertarian think tanks, has that case been made actually by the teachers' unions themselves?
This is something I also warned about in that piece way back in September of 2020 about Baltimore and about Shamar, that there was a real risk that this was going to happen, that you were going to see an unraveling of public education. And the numbers that we're seeing so far suggest that that might be happening to some degree, that you've seen big drops, declines in enrollment in various cities that had the most extended closures as a lot of parents have turned to
to private school, to parochial schools, to homeschooling. And so all those numbers mean less tax revenue for the schools because the spending is generally based on enrollment.
And of course, it's not just about the spending, it's also about the political investment, the political support for public schools. So if you pull your kids out of the schools in anger and resentment over what happened in the last couple of years, you're much less likely to support bond issues and tax increases in town to pay for the public schools. As I wrote about in that article, our country, one of the great things about our country
was that we were one of the first countries in the world to make mass public education a reality. And it has been kind of astonishing to watch people who were actually part of this great institution talk about... Speed up, it's unraveling faster than any other thing. Right. And it's really hard to watch. And it's been... And what I found hard to understand as I was reporting that piece was why...
Unions are rightly self-interested. You're fighting for the interests of your members, and that's your purpose. And what I struggled to understand when I kept sort of asking Randy Weingarten and Becky Pringle and the other union leaders I was talking to was, are you not concerned from a self-interested standpoint that these closures would
which are so much more extended in this country than in other developed countries, which were so much more extended in these big blue democratic cities in this country than they were in red states, that they risk causing a massive loss of support for public education. That will harm your members down the line if we start to see a real unraveling and a collapse of financial and public support for public education. Because it just seems so obvious that that could happen.
And they just kept telling me that they weren't too worried about it, that this was a temporary thing and that schools were such an obviously integral part to American society and that basically people would come back when things opened back up and it would all be okay. What we're seeing now is that it may not all be okay. After the break, how our COVID response may be the key to understanding the crime surge across the country. Stay with us.
In addition to schools and education, the other thing that everyone I know is talking about constantly right now is crime and the spike in crime, especially in cities like the one I live in, which is Los Angeles. And at the cross section of the question of lockdowns and the spike in violent crime is this really gut wrenching story that you reported on earlier this year, or I guess last year.
And it's the story of Nikesha and Dominic Bila. I wonder if you could tell me that story. Yeah. So...
I've reported on violence over the years, urban violence, mainly in Baltimore, which of course has some of the worst urban violence in the country. And saw just a horrific spike in violence starting in 2015 that has now been sustained for many years since then. But when I was reporting that piece on Baltimore, what made Baltimore stand out was that all these other cities...
were doing so much better, had seen just these massive declines in violent crime over the years. And so you only had a couple of cities, basically Baltimore and St. Louis were some really the only cities that were still just had really high rates of homicides sustained as high as they had been in the early 90s. And the city I always kind of looked towards somewhat longingly was Philadelphia, just up the road. Philadelphia had had these big declines in violent crime
And I thought, you know, gosh, why can't Baltimore be more like Philly? They're not entirely dissimilar cities in a lot of ways. And in starting 2020, Philadelphia and a whole bunch of other cities that had experienced these wonderful declines in violent crime just saw this massive resurgence starting really right around the time of the closures in the spring of 2020 and then the protests after the murder of George Floyd.
So you saw this incredible surge in violent crime and murders and homicides and shootings, all these cities across the country. And I decided that I needed to figure out what was happening. And I decided to base my reporting in Philadelphia, though I could easily have gone to any number of other cities that were having similar surges, such as Columbus, such as Louisville, Cleveland. And there were so many that were going through this. And the death that I chose to focus on
was of a young man by the name of Dominic Billa, who suffered what has become such an incredibly kind of
Awfully typical death that was not tied to the drug industry, not tied to gangs. That was just utterly, ridiculously random and meaningless. An encounter, an altercation at the mall in North Philly where he'd gone with some friends.
Dominic was in his early 20s. He had, you know, a young man who'd had a whole bunch of jobs over the years, graduated from high school, had left his job at a hospital in early 2020 because he was worried about bringing COVID home to his family. So it's had been off work for months, just at home with his mom, who he was very close to. And he
His mom had actually moved them to Northeast Philly years earlier out of North Philly to get them to a safer neighborhood. And so they're in Northeast Philly, he's living at home with her, and he finally decided that he was going to go back to work. He was either going to go back to work at the hospital or he was going to try to get a job as an apprentice in a carpentry, union carpentry program, and had actually gone to the mall to buy some clothes for the carpentry job. And he's at the mall and all
All we know is that the security cameras in the food court pick up a fight between Dominic and his friends and some other guys. And next thing you know, one of the other guys pulls out a gun and shoots Dominic dead right there in the middle of the mall. And his mom, Nikisha, was just awful. She was an awful coincidence. She was a bus driver. She was a bus driver for SEPTA, for the Philly transit system. And she was...
on her bus route, driving her bus right by the mall and saw all these cruisers and ambulances and even helicopter overhead and asked someone who was getting on the bus, what's going on there at the mall? And he said, ma'am, I think someone just got shot in the mall. And she was, you know, didn't think too much of it, but then she drives on and she looks down at the next stop. She looks down at her phone
And she sees that she's gotten all these missed calls, all these people trying to call her. And then it starts to hit her, to dawn on her that something might be terribly wrong. And she finally reaches someone who tells her what's happened. And at that very moment, the SEPTA police officer, part of the transit system police department,
Cor comes, sort of pulls her over, figures out, makes the connection between her and this young man who's been shot at the mall. And she gets out of the bus and the guy, the cop is just standing there. And he says, you know, Miss Bella. And she just collapses into the cop's arms. And yeah, so I set out to tell the story of Dominic and what was going on in Philadelphia and just trying to get to the bottom of it.
Why is all of this happening? Meaning the spike in, right, if you look at the statistics from Philly, where in 2021, there were, I think, 559 homicides up from a previous record high from 1990, where there were 500. And it's New York, it's Los Angeles, San Francisco. We could go through the statistics all bear this out. Why is this violence on the rise? And what does COVID have to do with it?
So I spent all this time reporting on this and I actually, and I should say that I did it together with two very talented reporter producers at Vox. We did a podcast to go along with my article and we spent a lot of time in Philadelphia and Miles Bryan and Jillian Weinberger were my partners on this. And
There are all these different factors. So I came to think of it as a kind of layering of almost like lasagna dough, kind of just layering of causes, one on top of another. But the biggest cause of all, the biggest, the most consequential layer of that being the COVID closures, the shutdowns. There are, of course, people who believe that the biggest factor was the new approach we've taken in a lot of cities, including Philadelphia, to
to prosecution. Philadelphia has the highest profile representative of the new movement of progressive prosecutors, Larry Krasner, who was elected with the explicit mandate to completely overhaul the way we prosecute crimes in big cities with the explicit aim of trying to reduce the number of people behind bars. And there are many people in Philadelphia and elsewhere who believe that
that there's this change in policies, which really have been quite a dramatic shift in policies in some cities that played the overriding role in the surge. And of course, Larry Krasner is part of a movement of these DAs, right? Exactly. Los Angeles has George Gaskin, San Francisco has Chesa Boudin. I think the one in New York is Alvin Bragg. And they're all part of this sort of, well, you describe their ideology, actually. Yeah.
Their belief is that we have been, you know, over the years, that one reason we've ended up with just these extraordinarily high rates of incarceration that are, of course, incredibly disproportionately affecting Black and Latino Americans, males, is that we've been overcharging all sorts of crimes that shouldn't necessarily result in an extended time behind bars. And so they have set out to reduce...
seek shorter penalties for crimes to, in many cases, simply stop holding people before trial. So basically completely do away with the sort of bail status quo. And even in some cases, take a much different approach to even more serious offenses such as possession of illegal guns and just
stop, essentially, at the sort of more extreme articulation of it, that we should not necessarily assume that someone possessing an illegal gun is out to do harm. That person may just have been carrying a gun to protect themselves and that we should stop filling up prisons with boys and young men who've been caught with guns, that this is somehow almost perhaps on
on par with the drug war of old, that we're now, instead of just tossing guys, all these guys in jail and prison for drug possession, now we're doing it for gun possession, and that it's almost with similarly disproportionate racial results, and that we need to rethink this. And so that's a short summary of that movement for progressive prosecutors.
i you know after spending a lot of time reporting on this and speaking with larry krasner
I came away thinking that, and what my article sort of gets across, is that the changes, these policies undoubtedly have played a role in what's happened in a city like Philadelphia these last few years, but that they're not the overriding factor. Because you've seen the surge of violence happening also in cities that did not have progressive prosecutors. It's been so almost universal across the country. You know, I think of a city like Jackson, Mississippi,
that just stunning numbers. I mean, they are, Jackson's a city of only, I believe, 162,000 people. Their rate of homicides per population last year was so far beyond other cities. It was around 90 per 100,000 people. Wow. To put that in perspective, if Detroit had a rate that high, Detroit's a city that's demographically fairly similar to
to Jackson, it would have had 580 murders. You have these unbelievable numbers coming from cities that are somewhat out of the spotlight, that do not have progressive prosecutors. Something has been happening around the country. So what is the something? I tend to believe that the progressive prosecutors perhaps bear more of the blame than you do.
You mentioned that it's sort of a lasagna. If progressive prosecutors play some role, what are the other roles that are driving this surge in crime? So one other role is something I've written about quite a bit over the years, including in the context of Baltimore, is the role of police behavior. There has clearly been in various cities a dynamic where in the wake of
police shootings of unarmed men and the protests that have followed, in some cases even riots that have followed. There has been a dynamic where a lot of officers have felt a certain degree of aggrievement and resentment about the protests, about the scrutiny they've come under for these shootings or other incidents.
and have decided to take a less proactive, I don't like that word, but the less proactive approach. Why risk becoming a viral video? Right. Why risk becoming a viral video? Why risk being charged and losing your job? And, you know, and as most basic elements sort of, you know, we'll show you life without us if you don't like, you know. Right. That's right. And that has been happening in various cities. And it's one reason why I've always, I've kind of wondered why
I've been looking at this, I was looking at this in Baltimore starting years ago, why there was not more of a effort on the part of the Democrats and sort of the left broadly defined in America to hold police accountable, not only for their acts of over-policing and moments where they did in fact use force unnecessarily and caused injury or loss of life unnecessarily.
That has been sort of the main focus of the left's critique of policing in recent years, but why there was also not more of an effort to hold police accountable for under-policing, for not doing their job, for not protecting...
all the neighborhoods in a given city for essentially withholding a public service from people in neighborhoods who were very vulnerable to crime and violence. That is another dynamic, and you saw that playing out again last summer following the murder of George Floyd and the protests and the riots. But I still believe that the biggest factor
So, overlaid on top of the progressive prosecutor reforms and the police withdrawal or sort of slowing down of sort of normal policing is the pandemic effects.
what happens when across the board, all these different institutions in life in a given city are just shut down. When everything, all the doors are closed and everyone is just left to fend for themselves. And you think about it, it's across the board. It's schools, so you suddenly have all these young people
who did have this one place that they would go or most of them would go and a place of contact, a place of interaction and even some social workers there if you were having a hard time or you just had some kind of structure in your life, that's gone now. And I was struck to see how many of the
the rise in shootings and murders here in Baltimore, I noticed a lot of them were young people who were being shot in the middle of the day. It'd be noon, and normally that would be a school day. You're seeing more of that because schools were now closed. A lot of kids were, of course, not logging on. They were just
logging on for their virtual school and they were out and about and things would happen. But it's not just schools. It's the afterschool programs. It's the libraries where kids would go off and just to hang out and do their homework or just sit on the computer or just bullshit with each other. Libraries are closed. The courts are closed. So you have all these cases that would normally be handled and processed, including some serious cases where someone would actually end up
being taken off the streets, someone who's actually bent on violence would normally be taken off the streets because of a past incident, that everything just gets deferred. There's a sense that nothing really matters anymore because there's no... You're in a world suddenly without consequence because the places that deliver consequence have closed and everything is postponed. The whole world is postponed. Of course, a lot of jobs...
I'm careful about this one. There's been a tendency to ascribe the rise in violence to economic difficulty and loss of income and economic stress, when in fact, what we've seen in the past, we saw this very clearly during the Great Recession, when you had tremendous economic stress in the Great Recession, all those foreclosures and just massive loss of jobs. Those years actually saw even further reductions in violence across the country, and there was an acceleration of that good trend.
And so I think that it was less about economic stress than it was about social stress. It was just the rupture of the social fabric. I mean, it should have been so obvious in a way that you can't just close down all of society or most of society and not expect change.
bad things to come from that. Even in cities that have all sorts of challenges, there is a fabric. There are things that hold people together. There are places you go during the day. There's people, there's contacts you have, there's support you get. And to suddenly just take that all away. I mean, the criminologist I spoke with just talked about how much violent crime comes from, of course, a small, we know this now, a small group of people within a given city and how important it is to identify those people. And then through various programs over the years, we've learned how to sort of
reach out to these young men and somehow try to pull them in and wrap services around them and just, yeah, really just kind of embed them with all sorts of protective services and measures and sort of blankets of sort of social contact. And all of that just got stripped away. We were something that we just like all those programs that were targeting the
Those young men trying to help those young men suddenly shut down. Everyone was just left to fend for themselves. And the consequences were dreadful. And what I found so...
awfully ironic about it was that this has been the case that has been made persuasively by people who all over the years have been arguing for a more progressive approach to fighting crime, that we need to have all these other services, whether it's schools or afterschool programs or the targeted kind of violence prevention programs. And they have made that case persuasively. And we've seen great, saw great gains as a result of that kind of approach in a lot of cities that didn't just have to be about, you know, the tough on crime measures of the 70s and 80s and early 90s.
But then we, in those same cities that had come to take those good approaches, you saw this rush to just do away with all of it, to shut it all down and without regard for the likely consequences. So this is just something I've just seen. I feel like it's just been kind of...
Wending through, tying together all my reporting these last couple of years on these different fronts, whether it's schools or crime or politics and inequality and Amazon and all these other things, that what unites them all is just is what the enormous costs are.
Especially in these cities where these closures were especially extreme, the enormous cost to just utterly disrupting the basic social fabric of a place. And I mean, that's what we chose to do in these cities. And it came at a great cost across all these different fronts.
You've spent a lot of time in cities like Philly, obviously Baltimore, where you live, and you've reported from some of the more dangerous neighborhoods of those cities. And you've spoken with people who live in those neighborhoods. What do they tell you that they want? Because I imagine that the vision of sort of life without the police is not it. No, it's not. And this is what we've seen again, of course, this past year with some of the backlash to some of the more extreme crimes.
defund police kind of rhetoric or proposals where you've seen in the very neighborhoods that have suffered from police excesses, you've seen people rejecting proposals to massively reduce police spending or police presence. The way I've come to think about this is that is, and actually this is the phrase that I, where I kind of ended up, concluded my piece on Baltimore's terrible rise in violence is the notion of equal protection.
That is what people in high violent neighborhoods want. They want...
equal protection in both senses of the word. They do not want to be harassed. They don't want, they want to be treated the same way that someone in a white middle upper middle-class neighborhood in town would be treated. So they don't want to be discriminated against. They don't want to be roughed up. They also want to be protected. They also want equal protection in the sense that they want police in the neighborhoods to
Going after the men, the people who are known to be committing violence, and they don't want to see someone who everyone knows has killed a guy or two or three still walking around and sending the message that you can get away, literally get away with murder. What's been interesting, actually, in this last year is I think you are now, maybe because the surge of violence has been so much more
broad around the country, I've been struck to see more of a call from sort of the left generally for the other half of the equation, for police to be providing protection, doing their job
providing the service that they're being paid for in these neighborhoods. And that there's, I think there has been somewhat of a shift, there's been a political shift, somewhat of a recognition that the problem is not only the occasional violent excesses and unjustified uses of force, but also the problem of violence going unchecked and people being exposed to it. One of the things that I just think is sort of tragically ironic, and you see this all
all over LA, but maybe even more so in San Francisco where I spend a lot of time, is that all of this has sort of led to like a hyper caricatured version of like a right wing libertarian dream. In other words, rich people are, and even upper middle class people are building fences, building walls, hiring private security, setting up military grade surveillance systems. They're getting guns. And
The poor people or the middle class people just around the corner or at the neighborhood nearby can sort of afford none of it.
And it's this unbelievable chasm between, you know, the people that sort of can afford to be safe and those that can't. Absolutely. And this is what I found troubling going back to my earlier reporting in Baltimore, that there was not more of a recognition that this withholding of policing and of protection from whole swaths of the city represented its own form of discrimination. It's, in a sense, its own kind of redlining, where if we...
devalue lives lost over in this part of town because what the people there look like, what the neighborhoods look like, and the fact that this is always where all the murders are happening, that kind of devaluing is its own form of just deep discrimination. And I was...
you know, just struck by the fact that wasn't causing more outrage on the left. I mean, for me, the real kind of Bible on this front is there are a couple of great books that James Forman's locking up her own on just explaining how the a lot of the tough on crime policies of the 70s and 80s actually grew up out of black communities that were just really reeling under the increase in crime and violence in those decades.
But then also Joe Laiovi's Ghetto Side, which is a great book about homicides in L.A., which gets at this, I think, just really key insight that the best way to prevent violent crime is to solve homicide cases. Mm-hmm.
That is the key because at the end of the day, the most important thing is when a murder happens is to catch the person who did it for two reasons. One, that it, of course, gets that one person off the street, one person who's shown that they, you know, are willing to take a life, gets them off the street and keeps them from harming others. But more importantly, because it sends the message that there is consequence, that society actually cares. Even if it happened over here in this part of town, even if, you know, this is,
This was just some young guy, part of a crew selling on the corner that we still care. And that society as a whole is going to bother to get to the bottom of this. It's such a basic sort of fact of human nature. And this goes through all time, that no matter the place, no matter the race,
If there is a sense that there is no law, that there is no consequence, then over and over, we've seen through the centuries, people will take the law into their own hands. And so it's just so important that when it comes to a violent crime, that police are actually doing their job. And so I feel that was lost, I felt like, in a lot of those early years, following these initial surges in some cities like Baltimore. But now that there's been this broader, this terrible broader nationwide resurgence of violent crime,
I do think that we're seeing a sort of belated recognition of that basic truth. Thanks for listening. And please stay tuned for the second part of my conversation with reporter Alec McGillis, where we'll dive into how big tech and progressive policies are accelerating the divisions and inequalities that were already running rampant in America. See you soon.