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I'm Camille Foster, in for Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. Good evening again, I'm Sandra Bookman. And I'm Bill Ritter. There's no question that crime is up. There's no question that these horrific high-profile tragedies need to stop. And there's no question that this fear of crime is real and growing. But there are many questions about how to regain control of our streets, our subways.
Over the past two years, the United States has experienced the largest crime surge in decades. In Times Square, a woman pushed to death on the subway tracks. In the Bronx, an 11-month-old baby shot in the face. And in Harlem, two police officers shot to death while on duty. Aggravated assaults went up. Shoplifting went up. Domestic violence went up. Carjacking became so common that cities put up signs warning that entire streets were no longer safe to park on.
And of course, homicides also went up. In 2020, the US murder rate rose 30%, the largest single year increase in recorded US history.
I've never seen so many guns in a neighborhood. It's just a very sad situation. Certainly the levels of safety that we saw during the last 10 years are now being reversed. And it's a serious moment. No one should undermine how serious this is. And yet, the most dominant voices for the past decade, and especially since the summer of 2020, are the ones that believe our attempts to mitigate crime have been too punitive.
These racist cops are about to go. Too racially discriminatory. The protesters took to the streets Saturday in St. Paul outside of the state fair, yelling, quote, pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon, end quote. And that the solutions lie. No police! Police! In less people in prison and less police on the streets. No police! Take it to the streets to find the police, not justice!
So today, a debate about the state of criminal justice in America. My guests are Laura Bazelon and Rafael Mancual.
Laura's a lawyer who spent her career advocating for criminal defendants and writing about the systemic breakdowns in courtrooms. She's a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she directs the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Clinic and the Racial Justice Clinic. Before that, she was a federal public defender in Los Angeles, as well as the director of a local innocence project.
Raphael is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he's the head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative. His recent book, Criminal Injustice, argues that the criminal justice reform movement is radical and harmful, and that the mainstream narrative about criminal justice in the U.S. is wrong. Here's the thing. Raphael, Laura, and I probably agree that the criminal justice system is broken.
But where we disagree is about the particular defects, the scale of the issues, the root causes, and ultimately what we ought to do about it. And that's where we're going to dig in today.
It's important because crime has become one of the top issues for voters going into the midterms. And many Democrats are desperately trying to distance themselves from the defund movement. Look, we knew the other side would make up lies about me to scare you. Now they're claiming I want to defund the police and abolish ICE. That's a lie. I'll make sure our police have the resources and training they need to keep our community safe.
Some even pivoting to touting their own records as supporting increases in police budgets. I love serving my community as sheriff. Tim Ryan knows defunding the police is ridiculous. He's brought back $467 million to put good cops on the street. I trust Tim Ryan to keep our community safe.
In fact, these very issues may be the deciding factors in pivotal Senate races in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Let cops do their jobs. Insist that prosecutors do their jobs. Ask mayors like John Fetterman to support people doing their jobs. John Fetterman has the courage to do what's right. Dr. Oz doesn't know a thing about crime. He only knows how to help himself. This is John Fetterman, and I approve this message. There's a lot at stake and a lot to talk about. 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.
Lauren, Raphael, I want to thank you both for joining me today. Thank you for having me. Thank you. I want to put my cards on the table for your benefit and for the benefit of the listeners. I'll admit here at the outset that I'm always more interested in having conversations than I am in participating in debates. I think that's especially true when I'm talking with people who I genuinely like and respect as much as I do both of you personally.
I also have my biases. I've been a longtime advocate for criminal justice reform, but I'm also pretty wary of many arguments and priorities I hear articulated by reform-minded activists. So I'm hopeful our conversation will both expose listeners to different points of view on these issues, but also highlight some key areas of agreement that perhaps don't get as much shine as they ought to.
Let's start with the data here so we can get a better understanding of how to think about this crime increase, because I've personally had some debates with people online. The most dominant voices who insist that focusing too much on the spike that we saw recently in violent crime rates is inflammatory in ways that it shouldn't be.
So I want to know from you both, how do you think about this and where do you think the emphasis should be when we're talking about crime stats in general? So maybe, Laura, I start with you and then Raphael, you weigh in.
I think, Camille, I will take a bit of an issue with your premise that the loudest voices have been on the reform side, at least recently. It does seem to me as if, especially now that midterms are approaching and Republicans are really grasping for an issue to help them maintain or take over both chambers of our legislature, that they're using crime. They're really using crime as a bludgeon, and they are attacking Democrats.
for being soft on crime. And that is, of course, because, as you referred to, we're seeing somewhat of a crime spike. And in response to that, Democrats, rather than doubling down on the language of reform, are coming out from Joe Biden to more moderate Democrats, to even some left Democrats and saying, no, no, no, we're not for defund the police. We are for funding them. In fact, there was just a bill passed in the House to give them $60 million. And
And a real show of, okay, we're not going to be painted as the party who is soft on crime. So I actually think that recently there's been a real move away, including from the Democratic Party, from the language of reform. And I think the real question about the data that you're putting out is not whether or not it's accurate. I think we should just all agree on the numbers and not dispute them. The question is what to do about crime and whether returning to the policies of the 80s and the 90s and the aughts
is the correct answer and is going to be the kind of measure that is going to bring crime down. That is by embracing more punitive measures, whether it is enhancing people's sentences, whether it is charging more crimes, whether it is more aggressive forms of policing that echo what we've seen in past decades is the answer or not. I think that's the key point of dispute.
Yeah, I mean, I certainly think that's the key point of dispute. I would also just distinguish between
political rhetoric and actual policy impact. I think if you're looking at policy impact, there is no question that the loudest voices on this issue have been those on the side of the reformers. I mean, just from George Floyd's murder on, just in the year after that, the New York Times noted in April of last year that 30 states had collectively passed 140 criminal justice reform bills just in that year,
largely as a response to what happened to George Floyd in New York State. Governor Cuomo signed 10 criminal justice reform bills into law that following June. I mean, there's just been a lot of substantive movement. You've got the Safety Act in Illinois, bail reform in New York, discovery reform in New York, raise the age in New York and lots of other places, the election of progressive prosecutors,
the massive declines in our incarcerated population, declines in arrest rates, declines in the number of police officers on the beat. I mean, basically everywhere that you look, what you will find is a trend on the policy side that I think can be fairly characterized as policies that lower the transaction costs of engaging in criminal behavior and also raising the transaction costs of enforcing the law.
Now, in terms of what to make of the data, I mean, I'm perfectly glad to live in a world where those data aren't being disputed, but there has been a lot of pushback on
how those data have been characterized. I mean, you know, with respect to the homicide decline, which, as you noted, was the largest on record ever year over year in 2020 and seems to have gone up in 2021. You know, people responded to that by saying, well, yeah, homicides are up, but they're not as high as they were in the 1990s. This is something that I've just heard over and over and over again. In fact, I ended up writing a Wall Street Journal piece responding to this point because, yeah, that's true in the aggregate.
But no one really lives in the aggregate. And that's a really important point to sort of understand how I think about these issues, right? When we talk about crime, we
we tend to do it like in very national terms. I'm guilty of this too, or, you know, statewide terms or citywide terms, talking about America's crime problem, Chicago's crime problem. But the reality is, is that crime is very hyper-concentrated geographically. It's hyper-concentrated demographically. And so, yeah, you could look at the homicide numbers nationally and say, like they weren't as bad as they were in the 1990s. Um,
when they were near their peaks, but that really depends on where you look. There are plenty of cities across the country, well over a dozen in the last two years that have surpassed all time homicide records.
Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Louisville, Columbus, Ohio, Cincinnati, Ohio. So it's really important to understand that, yeah, the aggregate things might not be as bad as they used to be, but in some places they're as bad as they've ever been. And one of the reasons that's really important to me is because the concentration of crime has really important implications for how we understand lots of other data with respect to enforcement, with respect to enforcement disparities, especially along racial and geographic lines. If crime is
is something that is hyper, hyper concentrated. And just to illustrate this, in a given city in the United States, around 4% of street segments, which are defined as corner to corner, both sidewalks, we'll see about 50% of that city's violent crime. This is referred to as the rule of crime concentration. It's something that's been replicated in cities across the world. Now, if certain demographic groups are more highly represented in those geographical areas where crime concentrates, then that's going to affect
how we should understand and what we should make of the demographic distribution or representation and enforcement statistics, which I think is a big
elephant in this debate, right? It's at the root of a lot of criminal justice reform proposals. And the way that I see it is that if we're only looking at the enforcement side of the ledger, it becomes very easy to be swayed by the rhetoric of even the most extreme reform proposals like defunding the police and prison abolition. But when you understand that crime is also an issue that disproportionately affects vulnerable communities, particularly low-income minority communities,
That complicates the discussion and it's one of the things that I try to bring attention to in my work. I mean, that feels like a point that's worth underscoring. And Laura, I'll give you a chance to respond to some of that before we move on. That there are particular neighborhoods, particular streets that have their own crime rates. That when you see a 10% increase overall across a city, there might be a 50% or 100% increase within a particular neighborhood. Right.
And that can be really dramatic when a particular segment of your community, of your city, is bearing the brunt of that crime spike. That changes things dramatically. So I do, I've often been a little perturbed by the way that some people will say, oh, I don't worry so much about this. I mean, compared to historic rates of violence, it's
things aren't necessarily so bad. I'm opposed to sensationalism in general. I'm similarly opposed to not recognizing that certain kids have to walk to school in a neighborhood that has a crime rate that is really only analogous to living in a war zone in some other part of the world. And that's ultimately what we care about. I think we're all interested in trying to address
the particular concerns of uniquely impacted communities and people.
I would agree with that. And I would also say in response to Raphael's point about crime not occurring in aggregate, it also shouldn't be talked about in anecdotal form. And too often that's what happens. There's this one outrageous story and it becomes the narrative. It takes hold of the media. We hear about it constantly and then it drives policy. I always say whenever a law is named after someone, it's generally not a good idea that that law was passed. Right.
It ends up with these outsized consequences and these conclusions that are anecdotally based. So you're absolutely right that crime is concentrated, that our system of justice is disaggregated. When we talk about the criminal legal system or the criminal justice system, what we're really talking about are thousands of microsystems.
and a lot of what we're talking about isn't federal, although people love to talk about federal statistics. That's a fraction of the population. It's not even the state. It's these counties and these microcosms within the counties. And I think what's important to remember when we're talking about these spikes is, first of all, that they're very complicated in terms of what causes them, but also what we're all focused on is having them not recur, having them come down. And so the question is really, what is the...
best response if that's the goal? If the goal is we want our children to walk down the street and not feel endangered, we want to allow them to walk a couple of blocks to school by themselves without us trailing after them and being worried, then what is the best way to get there? And I think all too often what we hear are these really reductive solutions, which is essentially we just have to take everybody off the streets who's behaving a certain way and lock them up for as long as possible. Or these characterizations of
proposals on the left is we have to abolish prisons. I'm not a prison abolitionist, but we're also nowhere approaching abolition in any respect. So it's not really a serious policy proposal or we shouldn't really incarcerate anybody. And both of those things are lying at the extremes, anecdotally based and not actually getting at the crux of the problem or what potential constructive solutions might be.
I think that's a really perfect place for us to pivot a bit here. Obviously, George Floyd was mentioned a little earlier, and that is a name that a lot of people think about with respect to these conversations. And specifically linked to that name is this kind of abolish the police, defund the police, de-police neighborhoods narrative. And I think those themes became popular in ways that most people were shocked by in 2020, just most voters. Yeah.
But when we look at the places like Minneapolis that were the epicenters of these movements, we have also seen crime rates increase in some of those areas. Obviously not uniquely those areas, but we've seen it happen. And you wonder what actually happens when police withdraw from violent neighborhoods. And Raphael, I know your recent book is about this, so I'll perhaps give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about the correlation or relationship that you see
between the popularity of these narratives and the reality that communities have faced since this has happened and the extent to which the defunding has happened? Because I think that's a legitimate question as well. I agree that using anecdotes can set us up for a really faulty discussion. But
But I find that critique as often applied to one side much more than the other side, right? I mean, you know, I didn't hear lots of people criticizing the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act based on the fact that it had, you know, incorporated the name of someone and, you know, represented a movement that was really based on a very powerful anecdote. And, you know, one of the things that I have tried to do is sort of push back on the degree to which anecdotes that are often misinterpreted
told to support radical reforms, sort of highlight where there's a gap between what those anecdotes purport is reality and what actual reality is. And so I do think, however, anecdotes can really be helpful when you're trying to illustrate what the broader data say, because anecdotes
We do have a tendency to rely very heavily on data, as we should in these conversations. But sometimes that kind of sterilizes what I think are really important realities with respect to crime. And, you know, I'm saying all this at the outset because you asked what the impact is on communities of pulling police back. And it can be extremely ugly in a way that I don't think very many Americans are able to understand.
There are so many degrees of removal between the typical American and the level of violence that is experienced in communities like West Garfield Park, Chicago, or Brownsville, Brooklyn,
And it's important for us to sort of help people understand what that reality looks and feels like if you are among those who don't have the opportunity to leave those communities for greener pastures and are stuck living there. And so, yeah, I mean, we saw a huge pullback on the part of policing. Yes, we did see defund efforts actually be successful in Los Angeles. I think there was something like a hundred million dollar cut over some time.
passed for the police budget there. Over a billion dollars of cuts were signed into law for the NYPD. There was an entire academy class canceled, two academy classes canceled. And you asked kind of how I see what the relationship is. It's really kind of just beyond question that when you increase the police presence in a given geographical area, crime will go down.
Every single causal analysis that's been done of this question shows that. Now, we can argue about whether those benefits are worth the cost, right? There are people who will say that policing also has externalities that maybe outweigh the benefits that are associated with the crime declines that increasing police presence produce. But there are also studies showing what happens when you sharply reduce police presence or police activity.
I'm thinking here of a paper that Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi wrote, I think a little over a year ago, looking at the impact of federal pattern and practice investigations on crime in a handful of American cities, finding that those investigations were associated with very, very sharp increases in serious violent crime. And the most likely causal mechanism that could explain that was the sharp reduction in police activity, things like stop.
arrests. When that happens, two things kind of follow that. One is that you cut into the deterrence
that police have on people. One of the reasons that crime goes down in a given area when you increase the police presence in that area is because people don't want to be caught for crime, and so they don't commit them in the presence of police. It's just common sense, and very few people, I think, would push back on that idea. But the other thing that you do when you cut back on police activity to such a significant degree is that you lower the potential incapacitation benefits that are associated with that police activity. You know, when police...
discover contraband or crime and make an arrest, that person gets taken off the street, at least for some period of time. In my opinion, that's happening much less often in a way that's problematic. And when that person is taken off the street, they're not able to victimize the people in the communities that they would otherwise spend their time in. Now, this may be an inartful solution, but I think when we're talking about reducing the harms associated with
really traumatic exposure to violent crime, art be damned, we have to stop the bleeding. Band-Aids are okay with me, especially given that I don't see any real viable alternative that can produce those same crime reduction benefits. And so, yeah, I mean, there are really valuable lessons that we learned today
during the 1990s with respect to policing and incarceration that we are eschewing to the detriment of a very small slice of our population in a way that really troubles me. And I think that if we
were better about applying those lessons in a more narrowly tailored way, we could both be less dragnet in our approach than we were in the 1980s and 90s, but also produce significant crime production benefits. To talk specifically about policing and about the narrative around depolicing and its relationship to the crime increase, Laura, I'd love to have you weigh in on that. And relatedly, I mean, I'm someone who lived in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and...
I know people who live in those communities, and I've seen recent studies that suggest that a number of people in high-crime areas, low-income residents, want more policing in their neighborhoods and not less, which seems to be at pretty sharp odds with what we'll hear a lot from reformers. So I wonder if you could address both the relationship that may or may not exist between de-policing, to the extent it's happened, and
And the delta between the elite opinion, perhaps, is a way to describe it, and the actual perspective that is often dominant in a lot of these neighborhoods.
Sure. I also just want to respond briefly to a couple of points that Rafael made, just because I think there's some areas of disagreement. I don't think that defund ever took hold in any sort of meaningful way. Rafael referred to the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. That legislation died. There were some early efforts to defund the police. Those largely were not only reversed, but in fact, the police budget's
then got tens of millions of more dollars than they were even seeking, which is what happened, for example, here in San Francisco and many other jurisdictions. So I think the idea that post-George Floyd, the police were starved of funds and not allowed to function is just a chimera. I don't think it happened in any significant way. And so I just fundamentally disagree that the output from George Floyd was that consequence. I
I also just worry that this nostalgia for the crime prevention and policing techniques of the 1990s really elides over some extremely serious problems, which is to say that a lot of those policing techniques
They not only harassed and disrupted the lives of many people who didn't deserve to have that happen to them. And you can talk about the wildly out of control stop and frisk that was finally put to an end in New York. But you can also just talk about what we've learned about these techniques and what they've done. And in particular, and this is one of my areas of interest.
the wrongful convictions that resulted from them. You have people being swept up as kids, being interrogated without their parents, being berated and bullied and coerced into confessing to things that they didn't do. Even when you're talking about people who are quote unquote rightfully convicted, getting these sentences that are just absolutely extraordinary, especially in the deep South, the use of habitual offender and three strikes laws on teenagers, giving them 60, 70, 80 years with no possibility of parole.
And we look back on all of that and we say, well, we really missed those times because the fact of the matter is that really stopped crime and it made it go down. And I think that there are a lot of criminologists who I deeply respect, including John Pfaff, who have crunched these numbers and have said,
at a certain point, the benefits of these policies far outweighed their detriments and that by the 90s when crime was falling, the million plus people that we were adding to prisons, it wasn't actually making us safer. And so I just worry that when we think nostalgically about Ray Kelly and Bill Bratton, the police commissioners and police chiefs and their broken windows policing and we think like, gee, we just have to go back to that and everything will be so much better. We are really aligning over
terrible things that we were inflicting on people. The other thing that I really worry about, this whole idea of the chasm or the delta between elites and what they think is best and the people on the ground and in the neighborhoods and what they think is best. I think there's also a danger here of really reducing victims in high crime neighborhoods and saying that they all want and need the same thing. And I say that on both sides. I think it's really problematic.
to say every single person who's been victimized in a high crime area, what they want is the hammer to come down for as long as hard as possible. And that anything less than that is not justice for them. There are some people who feel that way, for sure. And there are many people who don't. And I think we can talk about programs that have been put in place that treat community-based violence, which quite often is among people who know each other, even among families, and
and tried to address that in different ways that don't necessarily involve the criminal adjudicatory system in the way that you and I know and think about it and their success rates as alternative paths. So I hope that we get to that point at some point in this conversation. But to answer your question, you're absolutely right that many neighborhoods that are impacted by crime, they don't want to defund the police. They don't want the police removed from their neighborhoods. That's not what they want. And that's why in some ways that slogan is really just...
I think, misleading and toxic. Because when people like me are talking about reforming the police, we're not talking about taking all the money away from them and putting it into a completely different system. I think what we're talking about is thinking about policing in a different way. And rather than, for example, investing in stop-and-frisk reforming,
or rewarding police for how many citizens they stop, no matter how absurd the premise is, or just deciding because someone has cornrows and baggy pants that surely they're a criminal and deserve what's coming to them. We think about policing in a much smarter way, and all kinds of communities are trying this. Some reports of crimes, you send in people who are trained criminals
social workers along with the police to try to deescalate. There are violence interrupters. There's the program called CAHOOTS. There's all kinds of things I think that communities want. So when they say they don't want the police defunded, they're not saying we want the police from the 1990s. They're saying they want a different kind and conceptualization of safety.
Yeah, I'm thinking about a couple of different things. I mean, one is the degree to which we're having this conversation that's very nuanced already and that oftentimes takes on these very kind of local dimensions, particular kinds of solutions that work in particular areas.
But most of the conversation we have about this issue are about national policy and about these dramatic sweeping changes that feel a little one size fits all. I wonder about the extent to which you both think that that's part of the issue that we need to overcome here. But I'm also thinking about
tactics like broken windows policing, which have this particular lore attached to them, but also seem particularly resonant right now, given what we see on social media a lot, like these brazen kind of mobbings of an entire store. I mean, we're talking about just mobs of people that are in the street that will descend on retail outlets and cause major havoc.
And in a number of instances, the impression is that there is not any real repercussion, that there doesn't seem to be much that's done about this. And in some cases, that seems to be happening in places that are kind of reform-oriented cities. Chicago and San Francisco are often mentioned in contexts like that. But it's also the case that we do see crime rates rising in cities that aren't progressive enclaves. I wonder if you could speak to that, Rafael. Yeah, I mean...
I'm not sure it's right to say that we are seeing similar crime rises in conservative enclaves. One, I think that there's a definitional problem, like what does that really mean? But I also think it's the case that there are very few parts of the country that haven't been touched by the reform movement. Things like bail reform are not unique to New York.
things like the drop in the number of police on the street is not unique to San Francisco. Things like progressive prosecutors, which now hold power in jurisdictions that house nearly 40 to 50 million Americans, I would estimate. You know, these are not things that are unique to just hyper blue enclaves. Lots of places in red states, lots of red cities and blue states have been touched by a lot of these same dynamics. It's also just
Now, I don't think particularly helpful to just compare a red city to a blue city and say, aha, X, Y or Z, because the reality is, is that what makes a city vulnerable to crime in response to criminal justice or policing policy shifts is very different. Right. Like New York is much more resilient now.
insofar as it has fortified itself against potential crime rises than maybe Indianapolis is. And so it doesn't take as much reform to really upend the crime picture in a place like Indianapolis as it might in a place like New York. And so even though you may not have seen 15, 20 reforms enacted in some red city,
maybe it only took one because that city was just structurally more vulnerable to crime, right? Taking into account things like geography and built environment, right? Like street lighting, vacant lots, all of these things will impact how vulnerable a community is to crime. And so, you know, I just don't find those kinds of top line comparisons particularly helpful. But yeah, I think it is true that there are costs associated with the kind of policing tactics that
that were very popular in the 1990s. But I also think we have to take a step back and actually understand the terms that we're using. We talk about broken windows policing, what are we talking about? We're not talking about arresting people for anything and everything, right? Broken windows, it's a theory of crime rooted in the psychological impact of disorder. Basically what it posits is that when public disorder is engaged in
People who visit those public spaces and are witness to that disorder will process that psychologically in the following way. They will see someone urinating on the subway platform or shooting up on the sidewalk and say, well, wow, this person feels completely comfortable engaging in this completely antisocial behavior in this space. Therefore, they must not believe that there are going to be any consequences, which means no one's in charge of this public space. And if no one's in charge, then anything goes. And if anything goes, then I'm vulnerable. And if I'm vulnerable, I should probably leave.
And people who have the choice do just that. They start to pull back from those public spaces to the extent that they can. Of course, the people that get left behind are those that don't have that option. I mean, you know, a good example of this is, you know, subway crime in New York has gone up a significant degree. As a result, my family got a car and my wife now drives to work in the Bronx rather than taking the subway. You know, we are fortunate enough to have been able to make that choice to minimize that risk.
But lots of people aren't. Now, as you pull away from those public spaces, as pro-social people pull away from those public spaces, they become increasingly more vulnerable, not just to the kind of disorder that caused that initial pullback, but also to more serious kinds of crimes that follow, in part because eyes on the street are actually one of those structural things that can make a place more or less vulnerable to crime, like violence.
you know, foot traffic density, population density, potential capable guardians, if you have to use the language of routine activities theory, which posits that three things need to be present for crime to flourish. One is a motivated offender, two is a vulnerable target, and three is the absence of a capable guardian.
we tend to think of capable guardians really as only police, but it can be police, it can be CCTV cameras, it can be just pro-social people who are willing to assert and defend pro-social norms in public spaces. But when you allow public disorder to fester, that doesn't happen. And so what Broken Windows centers on is addressing community concerns about public disorder. And those concerns are very prominent. If you go to like a precinct community meeting here in New York,
What you will often hear brought to the attention of precinct commanders by residents are things that constitute quality of life offenses. People playing loud music in front of the building, people smoking weed in the lobby. They want that stuff addressed. And, you know, the idea that heavy handed enforcement is part and parcel of broken windows, I think, is something important.
that just misunderstands how the theory was meant to be applied by police. And broken windows does not mean zero tolerance. It does not mean arrest is the primary way to enforce and implement that strategy. Sometimes it just means having a police officer say, "Hey, turn that music down. Hey, knock that off. Hey, put that out." Now, the reason you need to have enforcement mechanisms on the table is because ultimately police have to have an answer to the question of "or what?"
And so if someone doesn't stop, then yeah. But it is a very valuable tool for a lot of reasons. And so, you know, I know lots of other things were mentioned, but I'll just quickly, I started making a list of things I wanted to respond to. I mean, yeah, it's true that like in practice, a lot of the more radical defund proposals didn't actually come to fruition, but they did come to fruition in some places that matters. But I also think that there is a disconnect between
say that, yeah, this was just a bad slogan that we didn't really mean. And people who completely embrace that, right? Like I'm thinking of Miriam Kaba's New York Times piece where she headlined it, yes, we mean literally abolish the police. We have to recognize that there is that element, right? Rashida Tlaib, I think it was, and maybe I believe it was her, one of the squad members proposed federal legislation that over 10 years would actually
close every federal prison. Again, that legislation didn't go anywhere, but that doesn't mean that this isn't an increasingly popular thing. I mean, the idea that someone, I mean,
A mainstream member of Congress would propose something like that I think 20 years ago would have been unheard of. But yeah, I mean, I think Lyra touched on a lot of points that get at this argument of whether or not the costs associated with this program of enforcement are worth bearing. Yeah, wrongful convictions is a risk, but it's a risk that's, in my opinion, very minimal, at least fundamentally.
If you're looking at the same data I'm looking at, I mean, Paul Cassell, who's a criminologist at University of Utah, did a study some years back, I think it was in 2018, where he put the rate of false conviction at somewhere between 0.01 to 0.06% of all cases. That's very low. It's not perfect. We tend to do this a lot in public debates about controversial topics where we compare the reality to some ideal that doesn't exist as opposed to
what the available alternatives are. And perfection is just not an available alternative. The question is whether or not this is better, right? Like, yeah, there are some anecdotes that you could point to of extraordinarily high sentences for first-time offenders. But if you look at the data, it doesn't really support that claim as being a systematic outcome. Imprisonment is not even the most common sanction for a state felony conviction. Only 40% of state felony convictions are resulting in post-conviction imprisonment.
Most people, more than 50%, are either getting sentenced to probation or time served in pretrial detention. Yeah, it's possible to get to the point of diminishing returns when you're talking about incarceration, but it's not clear to me that we're at that point.
I mean, there are studies showing that for every additional dollar spent on policing, they're still producing significant returns. As recently as 2010, a 63 percent return on every additional dollar spent on policing. This is according to a study done by Aaron Chalfant and some other criminologists. You know, Morgan Williams, a criminologist, recently did a study looking at the impact of additional police on crime, finding that every additional police officer abated 0.1 homicides.
So for every 10 cops, one homicide over that cop's career. That's significant. Yeah, there are programs like violence interruption programs
that sometimes show promise, but sometimes they don't. The idea that these are viable alternatives, that these are going to produce the same incapacitation benefits that we know will be produced by incarceration, I don't think is supported. I mean, New York City's implementation of a violence interrupter program that was studied a few years ago was done in two neighborhoods. It had a positive effect in one and a null effect in another. In Pittsburgh, a study of violence interruption showed that the treated areas actually saw crime rise
These are not panaceas, you know, cahoots. Again, I've testified about this before Congress. It's a really great way to augment the efforts of police. But the idea that this is a model that can be scaled up across our country of 330 some odd million people is just incongruous with reality, with the number of mental health professionals that actually exist that would be willing to take calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
If you look at the data on cahoots in Oregon, I think they responded to 17 percent of 911 calls. That leaves a lot that they haven't done. And it still costs millions of dollars to administer that program, which, again, is a good thing. And they still called for police backup in a significant subset of those calls to which they responded.
It's also just not the case that we necessarily know which calls can or should be handled by police. There was a study done in Philadelphia by Jerry Ratcliffe looking at whether or not a 911 call could allow you to accurately categorize a call as being one that involved public health or one that required a police response. And I think it was 20 percent of those calls were
You couldn't determine it based on what was reported to the 911 operator and then relayed to the police. These are all really practical difficulties. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't experiment with alternatives and try to find ways to minimize the footprint of potentially costly responses to crime. But until we do that, I think we owe it to affected communities to provide the solutions that we know work. And if you're looking at the typical person in prison and
These are people who have had many second chances, not first-time offenders, with lengthy criminal histories, often convicted of violent offenses, who are almost certain to go on to re-offend. A few things to start. I mean, I think, again, I don't want to get...
swept up with this idea that people who take controversial public positions in high-profile publications are shaping in any meaningful way the debate that we're having. Miriam Kaba asking to abolish or arguing to abolish the police. She is not setting a national or a local agenda. Congresswoman Tlaib wanting to close federal prisons, that idea is a complete non-starter and will never become federal law. Congresspeople say all kinds of things, including that Donald Trump was actually the duly elected president refusing to certify the election result.
And that's probably in higher numbers than Congress people who think that prisons should be entirely abolished. So I just I don't want to get distracted by that. I think that's very much a distraction. I think with respect to what kind of policing is effective, we have to jump ahead and ask this question. If we really are concerned about violent crime, and I think that we can agree that most people who are in prison are in prison for violent crime, it's not the staggering overwhelming majority, but it's higher than 50%.
And if we care about mass incarceration and so we don't want to keep people locked up endlessly,
nor do we want to release people who are going to reoffend. As Raphael said, there is a high rate of recidivism. We have to think ahead. So what is actually happening to people once they're being arrested? Traditionally, what happens to them is they go through the adjudicatory system. The vast majority of them, if their cases are not dismissed, plead guilty, and then they get some kind of prison sentence. And then when they get out of prison...
Often they go back and they're hardened because what they've learned how to do in prison is fight to survive. It's unbelievably violent. It's dangerous. Their health deteriorates. In the meantime, they've not been able to make any money. Their families are fractured. And then they come back, tagged with a felony conviction, unable to work, unable to access benefits or public housing. Surprise, surprise. There's reoffending happening. I think one...
different way of approaching this, and I do want to focus on it for a moment before returning to the wrongful conviction topic, because I do have a few things to say about that, is to look at high crime areas, particularly actually in New York and in Brooklyn. The Kings County District Attorney's Office has
has had a partnership for over a decade now with a nonprofit called Common Justice. And what they do is that when it's mostly young men, mostly young black men, men of color, are accused of serious violent crimes, very serious, stabbings, maimings, beatings, armed robberies, they go to the victim and the victim's family in this case and they say...
Do you want this person who we have arrested to go through the traditional criminal justice system process
Or do you want a restorative justice alternative? And 90% of the time, the victims choose restorative justice. And the question is, why? It's a pragmatic decision. It isn't about feeling merciful or lenient. It's because they know what the traditional system is going to yield, which is people coming out of prison even more criminogenic. And they understand that
RJ programs, like Common Justice, they are in their own way extremely punitive, even though that's not how they're perceived, in that they require the person who committed the harm to actually dig down and communicate with the victim about why they did, to look into their own personal history of offending, to ask hard questions, to go through unbelievable
stringent programming. They had a job to get vocational training to be under constant supervision and surveillance while there's a charge hanging over their head. To ask questions and to do actions to repair harm that are much, much harder than just simply sitting in prison or worse, fighting daily to survive in prison and just becoming more hardened and more violent. I do think the success of common justice and also the very low rate of recidivism for the people who go through it
And this is a population that is at a very high risk of reoffending because what we know is that most violent crime is committed by young men, that most people age out of crime. And so this is the population that's most likely to continue to be dangerous, that they recidivate at a far less rate. I think this is the kind of programming that we need to scale up.
Thank you.
for their own communities because they see it as the best way forward. They know most of the people who get sent upstate are coming home. And so they're asking themselves, rather than engage in the same process, they've been to the movie and they know how it ends, they want to see something different. And so they're embracing this different approach. And I just use that as one example. But I also think when we're talking about
the way in which policing has been conducted in this country, it's really important to understand that yes, of course, crime is concentrated. There are many areas in which crime is concentrated that are non-white and also that police really do treat suspected offenders differently depending on race. And Roland Fryer was mentioned earlier in a study that he did. He did a study on the uses of lethal force and he found two really interesting things. This was a
highly sophisticated regression analysis that fatal shootings he found, there really was not much of a disparity between white people and non-white people who were fatally shot, but there was an enormous disparity in non-lethal uses of force deployed by police against people of color versus white populations. What does that tell you? These interactions are, they are scaling up, they are exploding.
In a way that's not happening when white people are coming into contact with the police. And that's worth stepping back and thinking about. I know that Raphael talked about this importance of eyes on the street. Eyes on the street are important. It's not just about police. It's about people sitting outside on their porches. It's about people going to and from the market with their kids. And one question is, are they going to call and report?
Are they going to do that or are they going to say to themselves, I'm not going to do that because I know that the end effect is going to be even more damaging, even more harmful. And I don't trust the police to approach this person and not beat the crap out of them. Or I don't trust the system to return that person to me as someone who's less likely to cause harm. And so I'm not going to involve.
the authorities. So I think that that is something that we really need to thoughtfully consider rather than simply saying, well, these left-wing radicals have gotten hold of the narrative and now look at the havoc that has resulted.
To an earlier point, I do think it's very important to look at how crime is rising in various places. And in many, many cases, it's rising in red states. And I think that is absolutely a relevant point. It's also rising in blue cities where they have more moderate or centrist leaning or even conservative DAs. The whole time that there was relentless focus on so-called rising crime in San Francisco,
the murder and violent crime rates in Sacramento, our capital, were skyrocketing. But nobody was putting that on either the Sacramento police or the Sacramento DA who ran to the far right of our current Attorney General, Rob Bonta, and lost with her tough on crime policies. So I don't think it's sort of fair to say it's all because of these radicals coming in.
Kim Fox, Larry Krasner, they didn't win by accident and then get driven out of office. They got reelected by overwhelming majorities. And so while there's this national narrative about how out of control violence is and how terrible these progressive prosecutors are, the truth of the matter is that's who these communities want because...
they're trying a different approach. I mean, it wasn't even close in either jurisdiction, in either election. They had people running to their right, talking about going back to the 90s and the aughts, and the voters overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly rejected that. After the break, more with Laura and Raphael. Stay with us.
Raphael, I want to know how you think about implicit bias and racism, which we can accept Roland Fryer's study with respect to this question of whether or not racial bias is driving police-involved shootings. There at least seems to be some meaningful question about that. But he does seem to discover that there is racial disparity with respect to...
use of force. And that is something that ought to be disconcerting. How do you think about that? And what qualifications are there, if any? Well, I think, you know, it's certainly disconcerting, right? I mean, what he finds is a very large disparity in non-fatal uses of force between Black and white individuals.
Now, that disparity, it's really important to understand, shrinks substantially once you control for the other relevant factors. And I think what you end up with was somewhere in the range of like a 26 percent difference in the likelihood of being exposed to non-fatal force, which doesn't necessarily mean that.
significant force, right? It could mean something as simple as going hands-on, not striking somebody or tasing them, right? So that's one caveat. The other thing is to understand that this is still a very low probability outcome that is use of force of any kind.
When we're talking about use of force data, I think this is a conversation that's often colored by narratives and anecdotes because in a country as large as ours where everyone's got a cell phone camera and most, not most, but a lot of police officers are wearing body cameras, it's really easy to produce a seemingly shocking video of police misconduct for every single day of the year.
And what gets lost is that we live in a country in which somewhere around 700,000 cops are making 10 million plus arrests, are having well over 100 million interactions, which means that uses of force of any kind are still very, very extremely rare outcomes. So when we're talking about police shootings or fatal uses of force, you're talking about this being –
and somewhere around 0.03% of all arrests. When you're talking about non-fatal uses of force, it's still something that happens around less than 1% of the time when you're looking at arrests as the denominator. The other thing I would just say about that is like when you find...
a disparity that isn't obviously explainable by looking at some other race neutral factor, that doesn't necessarily mean that the disparity is entirely or even in part explained by racial animus on the part of, in this case, the police officers. It just means that we don't have another viable explanation. So it could be something like statistical discrimination where maybe those stops are more likely to happen in higher crime areas where cops are just more on edge and seek to get a subject under control
much faster than they would in a lower crime neighborhood. And so the brain is very much a pattern recognizing mechanism. And sometimes that leads us to act in ways that can very easily be mistaken for the application of racial animus, when in fact it's just unconscious statistical discrimination, which I think
is a distinction that's worth making. But in the broader debate about racism in the criminal justice system, I'm certainly not someone who's going to stand here and tell you that it doesn't exist. But a lot of the presentation of the disparities don't account for the kind of factors that I think you need to control for to actually get to a place where you have a disparity that's not explainable by a race-neutral factor. So we see this when you look at things like sentencing disparities between black and white defendants, you know,
George Soros recently penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal where he lamented the fact that black men are five times more likely to be incarcerated than white men in the United States. And that's true at a top line, but when you control for underlying rates of
criminal victimization, which informs police deployment decisions in terms of the neighborhoods that they spend their time and resources in. And when you control for underlying rates of criminal offending, that disparity shrinks to essentially zero. So what the National Academy of Sciences found in the 2014 analysis was that when you control for race-neutral factors, the disparity in sentencing between Black and white defendants, you know, shrinks to an insubstantial level. You're talking about, you know, maybe a couple months, a few months, which is a weird way for
you know,
racial animus to manifest itself. Like, you know, I'm satisfying my inner racist by giving this guy three more months. Why not a year? Why not? You know, so that's, that's one thing. But I think that this debate just broadly fails to consider the other side of the ledger, right? I mean, if you look at these enforcement statistics, that's not the only output of the criminal justice system, right? When the criminal justice system operates according to its stated ends, which is to say when it achieves its stated ends, as stated by the people at the system's helm,
it produces crime declines and if you look at who benefits from those crime declines it's disproportionately low-income minority communities and so that's something that i think we need to take into consideration when we're actually looking at racial disparities in the system right it matters that the homicide decline that took place between 1990 and 2014
only added 0.14 years of life expectancy to white men in this country while adding a full year of life expectancy to black men in this country. So when you talk to a police commissioner, when you talk to a prosecutor, sort of kind of more traditional law and order prosecutor, and they tell you that what they're out to do is reduce crime, the best way to understand that is to understand that as a mission-driven
to benefit low-income minority neighborhoods because that's where the crime disproportionately occurs and that's who stands to benefit disproportionately if crime goes down. And so that raises a really interesting question, which is why on earth would a system allegedly designed and operated to the specific oppression of low-income minority communities so disproportionately benefit those very same communities when the system achieves its stated ends as stated by the people at the system's helm? And that's not a question that I think we've done a really great job of grappling with in our public debate.
I do just really quickly want to just run down a couple of things that I think is worth responding to from Lara's last comment, which is the idea that the vast majority of people that are arrested plead guilty and go to prison. Again, this is belied by the fact that post conviction imprisonment is only occurs in 40 percent of state felony convictions. It is not a very common outcome. You know, the other point that I think was interesting was that this idea about prison being criminogenic in part because of how criminalized
unyieldingly violent it is inside. And that is actually an interesting, I don't want to say concession, but acknowledgement because the fact that it's so violent inside tells us a little bit about the risk that we would be imposing on vulnerable communities if we release these very same people. And one of the reasons
that we talk about prison violence is a function of the deeply antisocial dispositions that many prisoners have. If you look at just the general population of men in this country, antisocial personality disorder has a prevalence rate of between two and 4%. In prison settings, it can range between 40 and 70%. I just think it's really interesting for people to just understand the implications of that. But when we're talking about the potentially criminogenic impact of incarceration,
I think this is a claim that goes beyond the scope of what the available data would support. Yes, there are studies that do show that incarceration can have a criminogenic impact on a given offender who's exposed to that treatment, which is to say that someone who goes to prison as opposed to being diverted from prison might come out more likely to commit crimes to the point that actually we might even outweigh the incapacitation benefits that are enjoyed during that term of incarceration.
It does not follow from that that we should decarcerate on some mass scale. And one of the reasons for that is that the reason that we incarcerate or don't incarcerate certain offenders, it's not random. These aren't random decisions, right? There are very good reasons why we send somebody to prison. There are very good reasons why we divert certain people from prison. So when you're trying to assess the impact of prison on someone's future offending, you're
you have to account for that lack of randomness. And so the way that scholars do that is by doing these what are called random judge assignment studies.
Basically, what you do is you look at a population of offenders that are what's called on the margins of incarceration. These are people who are engaged in criminal behavior that is not so serious that prison is the obvious response, but is not so minor that diversion is the obvious response and that they don't have really extensive criminal history such that whether they end up in prison will very much depend on the harshness or the leniency of the judge that they draw, which is a random event.
Now, when you look at those studies, there is there's a mixed bag of evidence. But some of those studies do actually show significant criminogenic impacts of exposure to incarceration. What we fail to do when we're talking about the implications of those studies for public policy is understand that there is a difference between someone who's on the margins of incarceration, i.e. someone for whom the decision to incarcerate is essentially random and the typical person in prison today, right?
which, as was just admitted, is much more violent and a very much a higher risk proposition. Right. There is a gap between the risk level of the median prisoner and the person that is captured by those studies. And so it's important not to overread that and graph that on to a population of offenders that it doesn't actually apply to.
And again, it just doesn't follow that decarceration is the best way to respond, in part because of what Larry mentioned, which is that as offenders get older, yes, their risk of reoffending goes down, which actually supports extending those terms of incarceration into that period at which the risk goes down.
It's also important to note that the risk never really zeroes out. If you look at the Bureau of Justice Statistics recidivism studies, even 40% of released prisoners 65 and over reoffend at least once over a 10-year period. That's not a small percentage. It's not the majority. And the majority of every other age group in five-year increments reoffends at more than 50%. So, you know,
And that it's just really important to keep that in mind. I'll stop there. Raphael, there's something that you've said a couple of times now. It seems like the remedy to this problem, we have to build more prisons, we have to get more cops on the street, and we have to hold people longer.
Some people.
of a society. You know, whether your prescription is right or wrong, but there's a moral responsibility of a society, both to its citizens who live in high-crime neighborhoods in terms of getting that crime down, but also being humane to people who we're putting in prison. And the reality is that our prisons are, as Laura described, incredibly dangerous places that are likely to make people worse in certain ways when they get out. So, you know, extending their sentences because we're not good at keeping people in cages is
is something that makes my stomach churn. And I suspect you've wrestled with this. I wonder if you could just say a few words about how you think about our obligation to really fix the way that prisons operate so they are not so deleterious for the people that we are putting there, however much they deserve it.
there is a responsibility that all of us have to them as well. Yeah. I mean, so you used an interesting word there, dessert. I'm not a retributivist at heart. It's really important for listeners to understand that. To me, the main penological end served by incarceration is incapacitation, which you're doing when you incarcerate someone is sparing the community of the crimes that that individual would commit if they weren't incapacitated by their incarceration. I do not believe
that prison should be a terrible experience. We should be investing much more in our carceral system so that we can make it safer and less criminogenic, right? One of the things that we know contributes to the dangerousness within prison walls is overcrowding.
And so one possible solution to that is to actually build out our carceral capacity so that we can thin out the prison population across a greater capacity so that you're not placing people on top of each other in dormitory style settings that we know are much more likely to have violence than single cell occupancy. But it's impossible to do that if proposals to expand carceral capacity continue to get batted down.
You know, based on this claim that if we build it, we'll fill it, which I just don't think is true and is incongruous with the decarceration trend of the last couple decades. So that's that's certainly one thing. It also would allow us to be more strategic in our decisions about how we house certain inmates. Right. Like.
Sometimes, just by virtue, and I actually have some family experience with this, by virtue of a lack of capacity, you have very low-risk offenders that are getting housed with very high-risk populations sometimes. That's a recipe for criminogenic impact. So, Laura, is there any chance that we'll see criminal justice reformers for building more prisons anytime soon in order to try and address some of those concerns? Sure.
No, Camille, there's not. And this whole idea that it's not true that if we build more, we'll fill it is belied by our history of building more and then packing them in. It's true that most people in prison, so over 50% are there for a serious or a violent crime, but some
where around 16% are there for nonviolent crimes. If you took most of those people out and they're not a danger and they don't really belong there and they're subject to filthy, oppressive, hyper-violent conditions that are more likely to make them offend violently when they get out, you bring the prison population down low enough, reducing it by somewhere between 15% and 20% to the point where, no, we would not need to build more prisons so that everyone could have their own private cell. So I don't
think that that is an idea that holds much purchase on the left or even in the middle. And I actually don't think it's a very effective use of taxpayer money. Just to clarify something I said earlier, when I said that most people who go through the system end up in jail or in prison, what I meant is that most people who go through the system and are convicted of a violent crime, that's where they end up. That was what I was saying. And that is the criminal justice system and the way that it works. And the question is, I think, getting back to
Raphael's point is whether this idea that we need to incapacitate people for a very, very long time outweighs the cost of that. And here are a couple of costs. First of all,
This idea that everybody or most people in prison suffer from antisocial personality disorder, that's a diagnosis that changes over time. People age out of offending and they age out of those traits. This idea that the community is so much better off if you remove huge segments of it, especially the young male population.
and you take parents away from their children, you take sons away from their mothers, you decimate these communities, and they're perfectly happy to pay that price regardless of what the safety benefits are. I think when you ask a lot of people in those communities, the answer is no, that's not what they want. They don't want more people locked up for longer periods of time. And
I think what we also fail to see, and it's harder to count this, is what happens when we do decarcerate. The costs of decarceration, of course, are not zero. They will never be zero. And that's why we have, when it leads, it bleeds stories every day splashed on the front of our papers. But the cost of over-incarceration isn't zero either. And I think there's a real...
failure to grapple with that and the fact that the majority of people who get out of prison who have decent reentry plans and community support, they don't reoffend. They do become productive members of the community. We don't hear about them because they're not going on and hurting people. And the media isn't interested in covering a non-story, which is someone living a productive life reintegrated with their family.
What's the most important thing, Laura, that people need to know about wrongful convictions so that we can get you on the record on this? Because this is something you've worked on directly. The most important thing to understand is that this is not an insignificant problem. This is not a problem at the margins. And I hear that a lot from people who are making similar arguments to the arguments that Raphael is making. Oh, it's, you know, 0.0001%.
He cited Paul Cassell. Paul Cassell's many things, a conviction expert. He is not. He is not an expert on wrongful convictions. And the people who are deeply steeped in this literature will tell you that the numbers are somewhere between 2% and 10%, which is absolutely staggering. And it's a huge undercount, and I'll tell you why.
The ones that we know about are the ones where people had a trial and went to prison and then later were able to unearth some errors. But most people plead guilty. And most people plead guilty under great pressure because they're locked up pretrial. And they will do anything to get out of there. They will do anything not to lose their job, not to lose their house, not to lose their children. There are many, many people who plead guilty simply to just get it over with and because there's the promise that they'll either serve a shorter term or no term at all.
those people are dramatically undercounted. False drug convictions, dramatically undercounted. And that's because organizations that are designed to free wrongfully convicted people, they don't focus on people who are serving shorter sentences. They don't focus on people who are out of prison because the need for the people who are inside is so absolutely overwhelming. And just to give you kind of one small piece of what I'm talking about,
I've litigated these cases for over 10 years now. And what I can tell you is that the misconduct that is present in a single case, that is often one or two or five detectives doing it hundreds and hundreds of times.
We have a case right now where it turns out that the detective's pattern in practice was to withhold all of his handwritten notes because he said they were his work product, which isn't a thing constitutionally. Police don't have a work product. They have to turn it over. My point is this is someone who investigated dozens and dozens of violent crimes, including murders, and every single time that's what happened.
And that's just a single human being. When you look at, for example, the scandals in Baltimore with the police and how so many of those detectives were really lionized in shows like Homicide and The Wire, even having characters named after them.
Those very same real-life detectives were doing the same thing. They weren't turning over their notes. They were berating kids. They were forcing false confessions. And so what we actually know about these wrongful convictions, it is the tip of the iceberg. And more alarmingly, the number of wrongful convictions, it isn't going down. You would think that it would be because we're running out of DNA cases, for example, since we're doing DNA on the front end. We have fewer of these on the back end.
But no, from 2017 through the present, the number has gone up by 70%. We're just uncovering more and more and more of them. That is a cost, I can just tell you from my own personal experience with my clients, that is absolutely devastating. And when I tell you it is devastating for them and their families, it is equally devastating for the victims. It is horrific what they go through because they are told a series of terrible lies.
that this thing that happened to them or to their murdered loved one, that that person was caught and justice was done. And then they find out 10, 20, 30 years later, not only was it the wrong person, but they testified. And so now they're complicit in some terrible way. The damage that we inflict has this massive ripple effect. And so when I hear people say, this is really a rounding era and don't worry about this and it's not a real thing and no system is perfect.
I just, it makes my head want to explode because I know from my own experience, not just litigating, but as a scholar being deeply steeped in this literature, that that's just not true. And I think I've said that once already before, but one thing I do want to emphasize here is
As we're having this conversation, I'm watching your faces and having talked to you both about these issues separately. Like, I know how much we all care about this. Like, we care about communities being safer. We care about humane treatment of people who are caught up in the criminal justice system. And we, I think, jointly, like, all recognize that these problems are not nearly as straightforward as most people might imagine.
One thing, though, that does need to be addressed is just the lack of trust and confidence that some people have in law enforcement. I wonder if you both could say just a couple of words about that.
what's required to start rebuilding trust? Well, I mean, I think at first it's important to understand that while the credibility problem is real, it is largely, I think, overstated in our public debate. The vast majority of people in communities across the country continue to rate polices among the highest respected institutions. While that number has suffered a little bit, it's still, I think, in the top three most respected institutions in the country in every community across every demographic group.
Although we hate most institutions these days. Yeah. That doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't things the police should be doing. I think one thing that would really help is just kind of going back to the model of being responsive to community concerns about crime in a really proactive way. But that's something that our ability to do will be continually diminished in a world where
with research and crime because police will be spending increasingly more amounts of their time just responding to calls the way that they were in the 1970s and 80s and early 90s. And so that actually highlights one of the real reasons it's so important to get serious crime under control, because that gives police more time and ability to become to be more proactive in ways that are more responsive to community concerns. And, you know,
You know, the recruitment and retention crisis that police departments across the country are experiencing is, I think, at the root of this and is only going to exacerbate the trust problem, because as those resources become more and more constrained, their ability to clear cases, their ability to be proactive and suss out crime that they are themselves discovering, as opposed to crimes that are being reported to them by 911 callers, goes down. And, you know, to me, one of the best things that ever happened to the institution of policing was...
the crime decline, which allowed for its professionalization, which allowed for its growth and which created, you know, a lot of the respect that we see, you know, even maintained today. And so that's that's just, you know, I think a big key for it. But I think we also have to do a better job of telling the positive story. I mean, police have changed in a lot of really important ways.
that are good. If you look at use of force, those numbers have gone through the floor over the last several decades. In 1971, when the NYPD started keeping track, they shot 220 some odd people. Now that number is regularly around 12. Body-worn cameras, oversight commissions, all of this stuff exists.
And we're moving in that direction. And yet all of that progress does not seem to be reflected at all in the tenor of our public discourse. You know, I mean, I was walking around New York in 2020 and just hearing people chant, no cops, no KKK, no racist USA, and, you know, hands up, don't shoot, and all of these things that, you know, are blind to the significant progress that's been made. And we have to do a better job of telling those stories, of reintroducing the nuance into our conversations today.
about these topics, including conversations about when police get it wrong, which they will do, right? You know, the risk associated with decarceration will never be zero. The risk associated with having a robust law enforcement mechanism will never be zero. I just think that those risks are worth the rewards, especially for the people most affected by crime.
I think to get people to trust the police, two things have to be true. The first one is that people need to believe that they will be treated equally. They will need to believe that the police response to whatever they're reporting isn't going to turn on the neighborhood they live in or the race or gender that they are. And we talked about studies that show how police tend to react differently depending on the communities that they're policing. So I think
until those numbers start to change in a meaningful way, or at least the perception changes in a meaningful way, there's going to be a big trust problem.
I think that Raphael's right in the same way that I think I'm right when I say that nobody covers the positive stories. I was talking about people who are released from prison and go on to lead law-abiding lives. Nobody writes a story about the time that the police officer handled the 911 call competently and everybody walked away unharmed, right? And this is a huge problem with how we cover crime in this country. We are attracted to, getting back to the beginning of our discussion, these very dramatic, bloodthirsty,
bloody stories. And that's what we want to talk about. We don't want to talk about all the times the plane landed safely. We want to talk about the plane crash. And worse, in real life, when we have these plane crashes, what we have is a sentinel events review where everything is objectively analyzed by people who are really interested in understanding, well, why did the plane go down?
When the proverbial plane goes down in the crime context, all we're interested in doing is pointing fingers and screaming at each other and talking about how one side just wants to lock everybody up and the other side has an inner racist that's just dying to come out. And so part of it is just the public discourse. And that's actually a huge reason why I really wanted to participate today.
today and talk to Raphael and talk to you, Camille, because I do think there are areas of agreement. And more than that, I think there are areas of disagreement where it's really important for us to disagree in a respectful way that isn't personally attacking the other side for having an opinion that's different than ours. I find a lot of these spaces to be quite frankly exhausting on both sides because it's
Too few of these conversations happen. And I guess the final thing I will say as a San Francisco resident is that you have to believe the police are going to be competent. Our police are wildly, grossly incompetent. They are more police per square inch in the city than there are in the rest of the state. And their response to almost everything, in my humble opinion as a longtime resident, is just...
is grossly disappointing. And so what we also need is a real sense that they're going to respond appropriately. But what I really wanted to end by saying is, thanks to both of you, because it's really...
heartening and affirming to be able to talk across divides. Nothing will ever meaningfully change unless we do. And to the extent that these discussions are siloed, I find them so stale and suffocating. And so I appreciate, Raphael, that you would want to be in conversation with me. And Camille, as always, I appreciate your willingness to engage and also how you
much you prepared to moderate today. So thank you. And allow me to reciprocate by extending my thanks to you for doing this and for agreeing to engage with me. And yeah, I agree. This was just a wonderful conversation, one that I hope will serve as an example to other people as really the only way to move forward in a positive direction. So I appreciate it and I hope we get to do it again one day. There's a heck of a lot more for us to talk about. So hopefully we can do this again soon.
Thanks to Rafael and Lara for being here. And thanks to all of you for listening. Did you learn something from this conversation? Did you find any of your assumptions challenged? Did you hear anything that you disagreed with? I hope so. That is the goal. And if so, I hope you'll start a conversation with friends, share this conversation with them and other members of your community, and have an honest debate. And if you want to support Honestly, subscribe to Barry Weiss's newsletter at commonsense.news.
I'm Camille Foster. Hope to speak with you again soon.