Angry Planet - Looking for Crime in All the Wrong Places

Episode Date: October 29, 2020

Law and order, it’s one of the catchphrases of this election. Crime rates, in some cities in America, are on the rise but crime, in general, is down. But 2020 has been a chaotic year and our news feeds are filled with violent images of militant groups, protestors, riots, burning buildings, and everything in between. The sad fact is that not all crime in America is reported on in the same way, that the protest movement is overwhelmingly peaceful, but not always, and that police militarization has exacerbated all our current problems.Here to help us untangle some of this is Danny Gold. Gold is a Pulitzer Center grantee, a documentary producer whose work has appeared in VICE Nice, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He’s also the host of the new Underworld Podcast—a series about the global criminal underworld.Recorded 10/6/20Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. You have Turks with Trich. There was footage of like, I forget what car was, but like a $250,000 car in Soho as a watch shop was being looted. These aren't protesters. I had, this wasn't reported, but there was a restaurant in the East Village who he was one of maybe six or seven stores to get hit on the same block during the nights of the looting and they skipped over the alcohol, they skipped

everything else, they went right for the safe in the basement. So I mean, that's someone with inside knowledge. That's an insider job. And it was six or seven stores on the same block that were hit. So I do think from what I've seen and people I've spoken to when it comes to Minnesota, when it comes to Portland, when it comes to Seattle, the protest and the looting in New York looked very, very different. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost with impunity, and when it is near to completion, people talk about intervention.

They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. Hello, welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. Law and order, it's one of the catchphrases of this election. Crime rates in some cities in America are on the rise, but crime in general is down. But 2020 has been a chaotic year, and our news feeds are filled with violent images of militant groups, protesters, riots, burning buildings, and everything in between. The sad fact is that not all crime in America is reported on in the same way, that the protest movement is overwhelmingly peaceful, but not always.

and that police militarization has exacerbated all of our current problems. Here to help us untangle some of this is Danny Gold. Gold is a Pulitzer Center grantee, a documentary producer whose work has appeared on Vice News, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He's also the host of the new Underworld podcast, a series about the global criminal underworld. Danny, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, guys. All right, you do a lot of coverage of St. Louis.

I have made a big documentary in St. Louis last year and went back and worked on something else with my characters. And I spent a good deal of time kind of writing about the city, learning about the city and talking to folks there. Why was St. Louis a focus for you? And what is the, like, what is the documentary and the story about? So I think it was the end of 2018. We were looking to do a story on policing and crime in America. and the focus is as always with cities like that is on places like Chicago and Baltimore. But if you look at the numbers, specifically the homicide rate, St. Louis, at that point, it had the highest homicide rate five years in a row. And that's for any city over 100,000. It just had this phenomenally high murder rate. And we wanted to understand why.

Since then it had the highest homicide rate, I believe last year as well. And then this year, it's looking like that's going to be the case because the murder rate there, is just completely out of control. And it's sort of this amalgamation of a lot of the issues you see in America, whether it's segregated communities, poverty, opioid abuse and drug problems, policing issues, loss of jobs. The city itself has gone through it in insane population loss that is higher than Detroit's population loss. So it's just a combination of a lot of the issues, oh, and gun control is practically non-existent there. So it's a combination of all these issues you see, I think, in America right now in one city that's rarely covered. And it just felt like

a place that had a lot of stories that needed to be told. And that would be interesting to look into. And then we went down there and made this hour-long documentary at the time. I've since gone back and followed up with one of the main characters that I followed. He was about to go to jail for fentanyl distribution. So I followed him in his last week of Freedom. He's got two young sons and they kind of touched on all these issues. And that actually film just premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival in the short documentary category. So I guess 2018, you're not talking about the remnants of Ferguson, but I mean, Ferguson was pretty nearby and riled everything up to do, right?

Yeah, I actually had covered Ferguson. And that is the year that the murder rate started rising, was 2014, was the first year in a while that St. Louis had the number one murder rate in the U.S. And the Ferguson effect is a topic of conversation when it comes to policing and rising crime rates. and what a criminologist based in St. Louis found was that there was a Ferguson effect. Ferguson effect is typically referred to as the police sort of backing off and allowing sort of crime, not to flourish, but to rise because they don't want to get too involved in the community because they feel attacked

or they just want people to see what happens when they're not there. But what this criminologist found was that there was a Ferguson effect, and that was that the communities themselves, after seeing all these issues with policing, whether it was the murder, and this happens in the communities across the U.S., whether it's the murder of an unarmed black man or just police murder in general or just protest against police, the communities themselves will back off from calling the police because the level of trust with the community is sort of, it's done away with. They feel even more betrayed, even more like they can't put their trust in the police.

And he coined, I mean, he coined the Ferguson effect, but he later went on to say that that's actually the forgiveness effect of what happened. I think it's a little bit of both, to be honest with you. spoke to some cops in the NYPD, some who have known since I was a child, who I know very well, who said that in the midst of the looting in Manhattan, we're like, look, I am not going to, we're not getting out of our car right now to stop looting. Like, why am I going to stop to protect the store when like all eyes are on me? Anything I do to, any sort of force I use, any restraint I show is going to be videotaped and I'm going to get attacked. Like what, like what purposes is there

for me to get on my car and do something? So I think, You do see a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B in why some of these things, some of these things jump up. Obviously, I think the economy had something to do with as well when it comes to modern times. But yeah, sorry, I'm rambling a bit. But yeah, so Ferguson, I think definitely, I wouldn't say it's the reason. It's hard to really find a singular reason, but I think it definitely contributed to the rise and the murder rate in St. Louis. We're a rambling show, so never feel bad about that. Why do you think we always talk about Chicago and Baltimore and Detroit?

Why do we kind of ignore or just not cover places like St. Louis? Well, Baltimore, I think solely because of the wire. I think it's become people think they know the city well. They think they understand what's going on the city well because of the TV show. Baltimore does have an extremely high murder rate as well, but's often second to St. Louis. So I think that explains Baltimore. Chicago has the highest total amount of murders in the U.S.

well, I think it has for the last few years. Definitely not going back decades, but it's how the highest total murder rate, total murder amounts. So that's, it's become a topic of conversation. It's something that I think the right wing uses a lot to poke at Democrats,

they'll point at a Democratic mayor. When people want to sort of, you know, throw a bit of scorn at Black Lives Matter, they'll be like, why aren't you protesting Chicago, where people are young black men are getting killed at an increasingly high rate.

So I think it's become this sort of, It's been weaponized in a way. A, it's got the highest murder total, and B, it's been weaponized by people acting in bad faith to sort of attack Democrats, people on the left, and Black Lives Matter. All right. When we talk about the murder rate, are these mostly drug and gang-related killings? Is it personal stuff? Like, can you break that down a little bit? Yeah.

I mean, it's, I think, a mixture of all. They say that a lot of people know the person that kills them. situations. If you look at, you know, St. Louis does a wonderful job of updating, of updating their motives and their statistics. You can go on the SLMPD website. I'm actually looking at it right now, and they don't always have motives. I mean, right now you have 160 unknown out of their 205 murders, but the most currently is argument, which is 22, drugs five, and burglary six. Now, obviously, 160 are unknown. You're going to see all sorts of things. Drugs are a huge issue in the city. The kids that I speak to that that are sort of involved in that world, say people get killed

a lot over territorial things. And there's also just like, like crews, not even gangs almost, just crews that fight over reputations. You've got kids now getting killed over Instagram comments over things involving pride and arrogance and things like that. I wouldn't say that's the number one reason for this, but it's definitely something that people on the street will tell you about that you'll see bumped up a notch. Like social media has got into a point where people get violent over it. People die over comments left on Instagram, over Facebook live things. And it's pretty absurd to think about, but it does happen. But yeah, I mean, poverty and drugs are such a huge problem in North St. Louis where the majority of the murders happen that I might be going on a limb,

but I think that's overall generally what you'll see in terms of murder. So in the United States, overall crime rates have dropped for years and especially murder rate, for example. Did you say you were from New York? Yeah. Yeah, me too. And do you remember growing up when the murder rate was over a couple thousand every year? And now we're talking about low hundreds. It's just, I don't know, it's just, it's interesting. Historically, how does St. Louis look? Is it better than it was 20 years ago, or is it worse? So, yeah, I do remember. I mean, I grew up. I grew up. in the suburbs, but I do remember how insane New York was late 70s, a little before my time, but in the early 90s, mid-90s, I mean, the city was insane. You had five or six murders a day

compared to right now where one, maybe two, it was a completely different city. So you've seen a recent increase and people are so used to it going down that now you have a recent increase and people get a bit overwhelmed because they've gotten used to the city being so safe. St. Louis is actually could potentially have the highest murder rate it's ever had this year. it did have more murders and some high rates in the early 90s, I think during the crack war era, but the city had 100,000 more people. So the murder rate was a bit lower. But yeah, the last four or five years, the murders have been lower just because the population decline,

but the rate is sky high. So it is actually getting more violent than it's ever been. This year could potentially, I mean, we're talking this year. Right now it's on path to have a murder rate. in the 80s, which is insane. And one thing I do feel like to point out is New York has a very low murder rate right now. But if you look at European cities, I mean, New York would still be much higher than most European cities, you know?

Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. That's totally fair. So like it just shows like what we're willing to put up with. And obviously the main issue here is guns. But yeah. So St. Louis is just, it is almost. I mean, it's, it's not the, it's an outlier, right?

It's not, it's not the, the trend for most American cities right now. But it is completely just, just blowing things out of the water. It's dire. Does everyone kind of agree what the problems are? Do the police and the community and they have different ideas about what's going on? Or is everyone kind of an agreement that this is like poverty, guns, and drugs? Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of, of, disagreement based on politics and where you are in the community. But yeah, look, with these

issues, you can never find a singular reason, right? But you have to look at the history of the city. You have what's going on there. You have North St. Louis, which is one of the most deprived areas in America. You've got a complete shutdown of jobs there in the past 30 years. You had manufacturing jobs completely leaving. You had a community that was just completely deprived by the city government and the state government in general. You mix in rising opioid rates. You mix in a complete lack of gun control, police and community just relations in the dumps and a lack of opportunity there. Failing school systems, there's just a host of reasons for why this is happening. You're not going to find people who agree on all of it. You're not going to find people who agree on

the solution. The Missouri state government, like, they're not going to tell you that the guns are the problem, right? They're the ones voting to cut back any sort of gun restrictions. So it's a, it's a mixed bag. But I think if you look at the city from from a completely non-political viewpoint, it's hard not to look at poverty, guns, and drugs as the, like, and lack of opportunity as the reasons. Something else I've been interested in this is kind of a story that's been going on my entire career is like how policing has changed, especially in the last 10 years. years. What have you seen in regards to that? I'm thinking especially of like militarization, right, which we've been told, which we've seen as this big problem in the country. Do you think

that that's a part of it too? I don't know if it's a part of St. Louis, but it's a huge problem in the country. I did a dock on police militarization in the 2015, and we went to a suburban New Jersey SWAT team. When these guys have, they are kidded out like military special forces. They're at the range firing hundreds, if not thousands of rounds with automatic weapons. They have a Lenko Bearcat, which I don't know if you've ever seen, but it's a fully armored military vehicle. You have that pipeline from the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War to these police departments, and it's completely unnecessary. I saw the same thing. Actually, no, that was 2014.

I saw the same thing that was Ferguson as well. Like, there's absolutely no need for these police stations to have this equipment. But if you give it to them, they're going to use. use it. And when you have a police officer sticking their head out of an APC with a rifle at members of the community, it's going to further create that divide. I don't think there's a lot of deterrence there when it comes to them having this equipment. I don't think anyone's going to not commit crimes because they know the police have a armored Humvee somewhere in their in their units. Is it helpful probably once a year in some dire situation, maybe? But I remember asking these

guys. They had a little robotic bomb machine. And I asked the guy, so have you guys ever had to use this? And he paused for a second. He was like, nope. So it is extremely strange. And I think it does create this. Again, we've heard a lot about the warrior mentality with police. I think it only feeds into that. And that can lead to, I think, a lot of aggression, hostility, and maybe violence when there doesn't need to be violence. What do the cops say about all the new equipment? Do they generally like it? Yeah, I mean, they love it. It's new toys, right? Who's not going to love having all this equipment and stuff like that on hand? But, you know, there is a thing that you hear a lot from police. I hear it from my friend who's a cop in the South Bronx. You hear it from cops in St. Louis.

They are around the, I call it cop ring with a friend of mine who has a relative who's a cop, where it's when you're around situations that are hostile day and day out, right? And I want to be clear that I'm not of dissolving them of some of the stuff they do. When you're around these situations day in, day out, it creates a different way of viewing people in situations than I think the average person has when it comes to viewing the way an officer conducts himself on the job. Now, there's no shortage of bad cops out there, but there's, I think, a decent amount of decent cops who are just faced with a lot of very stressful, very aggravating situations where things could really turn on them almost

every day in a situation that they're in a beat cop in a bad neighborhood, especially in a neighborhood like St. Louis, when you're going around the corner of a house and a lot of people are armed there, open carry, just in general, everyone has guns there. So if you're going around the corner of a house and you're chasing a perp and you don't know whether they're carrying a weapon, like think about what that's going to do to your brain as opposed to a city where guns are a lot more heavily regulated like New York. We don't, they're, I get frustrated because I think everyone supports police reform in this country in some way. But leaving gun reform out of the conversation,

like you're not going to have one without the other in terms of really getting that rate of police killings down because as long as guns are freely available in this country, you're going to have cops who feel under threat. And as long as you have cops that feel under threat, you're going to have cops pulling the trigger and pulling guns on people. So the counter argument, just to put out the counter argument, not to argue for it is always that if guns are banned, the only people who have guns will be criminals.

What do you think of that argument? Does that match up with your experience? I enjoy shooting. I really enjoy shooting. I have a place I go Clay Pigeon shooting upstate. I've got friends with guns. I love going shooting with them. But I think, no, because law enforcement will have guns as well.

And this idea that you're going to take on law enforcement in this country, like I guess we've seen the Bundys and the FAC militia. and stuff like that, but no one's really going to war with the police here. It's not going to end well for anyone. And when you look at countries that have high rates of police killings, it's countries like the U.S., like El Salvador, like Brazil, where there are guns everywhere,

where everyone in bad neighborhoods, every gangster has a gun. When you look at police killings in Europe, I mean, there's a reason for that. Do I think police in Europe are less racist than cops in America? Fuck no. Police in Europe are, sure, a lot of them are more racist. Europe is racist as hell. But what Europe does have is,

really severe gun restrictions. So, like, I don't know. I don't claim to have all the answers. I do think it's pretty obvious that if you really want to cut down on hostile police interactions, if you really want serious change with police in the way they conduct themselves, one of the first steps has to be getting there to be less guns in the streets. I think that's right. Because a lot of the arguments I hear for defunding the police center around making sure that they aren't armed, which, fair enough. But again, to your point, that just means if the guns are still freely available to the general populace, then you're just sending police into bad situations. So it's complicated, and it's bizarre, and it's all wrapped up in America's gun culture, right?

Which a lot of other countries just don't have, not in the same way. So what are some of the other major, like, changes you've seen over the past 10 years of covering this stuff, especially in regards to, like, how the police handle things? How have the police changed in the last 10 years? I think the entire way that the culture operates has changed, right? Because you have 15, 20 years ago before cell phones were everywhere, text messaging was everywhere, you had a lot of drug dealing going on in the streets. That's been severely cut back in recent years. You didn't have cameras up everywhere.

One thing I find fascinating about police is that you have these 50 and 6-year-old detectives now who almost their entirety of their job is combing social. media because you have so many street gangs and crews putting all their information out there on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook. People are building big cases. I don't know about RICO cases, but like big conspiracy distributed cases all off social media, which obviously wasn't a thing 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. Why go around doing street bus when you can when you can just go hop on Instagram pretend to be like a 19 year old girl in a bikini and start finding out all this information about all these all these crews are putting up there about the violence that they're

going to commit that they have committed i tell all these probably shouldn't get this involved but i tell i know i speak i i done these these these interviews and these i have sources that are young kids that are out on the streets and i'm like why you guys like what do you think police are thinking when they see you holding a stack of hundred dollar bills on instagram do they think you got that because you're you've been working overtime a lot like you're setting yourself up for disaster and it keeps happening and keeps happening. So I think that has changed a lot in the way that that police do their job. It's also interesting. I mean, I, it's hard to think that this has had an effect because we do still see so many videos of police just wailing on people. But there is definite concern

about getting out there and being videoticked doing something. I think it's in the back of a lot of officers' mind when they get out there and do their job. I think it's frankly a good thing. I think it, we might still see a lot of videos. There's no shortage of videos of police reacting aggressively, of getting violent when there seems to be no need for them to be violence. But I actually think that we'd be seeing that a lot more if they weren't so well aware of the fact that cell phones are going to come out and people are going to be caught doing things they shouldn't be doing. That's kind of a good segue into starting to talk about what's been going on the past year, right? You've been covering the George Floyd protests, right?

We've had a couple different people on from different communities and different cities that have kind of told us what they've been seeing and like what the experience is like. Obviously, Portland is very different from everywhere else in the country. What have you been seeing generally from the George Floyd protests? Are they mostly peaceful? Is there violence? What is that level of violence like? Where specifically have you been reporting on it? So I have covered the protest in New York.

I was out when they first kicked off and out there for about two weeks. I did a little stop over in Atlanta for two nights, which were completely different. But mostly in Brooklyn, a little bit of Manhattan. Yeah, the protests themselves were mostly peaceful. Does that mean that there wasn't violence? No, there was definitely violence. A lot of it instigated by the police. But I would watch 16-year-old kids go out there with bricks and heap a brick at a cop.

Bottles thrown, things of that nature. There was, the looting that I've seen was concentrated in Manhattan, and it was not targeting, like, mom-and-pop shops, bodegas, anything. that. It was specifically targeting designer stores, best buys, things, things along those lines. And those, I think a lot of people try to portray that as something that was like part of the protest, but it really wasn't. It was like marauding groups of teenagers, people in the early 20s who specifically, I think, went out there to loot and had targets that they wanted to hit. There was footage of like, I forget what car was, but like a $250,000 car in Soho as a, a

lot shop was being looted. These aren't protesters. I had this wasn't reported, but there was a restaurant over in the East Village who he was one of maybe six or seven stores to get hit on the same block during the, during the nights of the looting. And they skipped over the alcohol, they skipped everything else. They went right for the safe in the basement. So I mean, that's someone with inside knowledge. That's an insider job. And it was six or seven stores on the same block that were hit. So I do think from what I've seen and people I've spoken to when it comes to Minnesota, when it comes to Portland, when it comes to Seattle, the protest and the looting in New York looked very, very different. But, you know, I went on a ton of marches. There was

aggression here and there, but for the most part, this was, it's become a joke, right? People saying, oh, they were mostly peaceful, but they legitimately were mostly peaceful. There were, like I said, aggressors. There were people who wanted to provoke. I think they were in a tiny, tiny minority. and then I separate the looting situations that I saw Manhattan from that as well, because it just seemed like such a separate group of people, as opposed to the ones that were up in protesting and marching. Yeah, just opportunism. I mean, in other words.

Right, exactly, exactly. I mean, I'm sure there was, there was, there was mixing in between both groups, but it just seemed like more chaotic than. I don't think anyone was trying to make a political statement. I don't think there was, there was some people there. who I don't even think went to the protest, just wanted to, like, smash some stuff and grab some stuff.

And how were things different in Atlanta? I arrived in Atlanta after things had been shut down because the National Guard was there. And those protests were centered on the, right out front of the, I believe it was the CNN building, just because it was a gathering area. For the two days I was there, it was probably eight, nine, ten days after George Floyd

stuff kicked off. I mean, they got shut down extremely quick. The National Guard was not playing around. It seemed like it was a much smaller group of people. I think they had already been shut down from the earlier days. There was a bit of looting there. A couple, I think a shoe store got hit at one little strip mall area. But having the National Guard there just really like completely put the kibosh on everything and any sort of chaos that could happen. Like they, they set up relations between the police and the protesters seemed a little more friendly. Atlanta has a very black police force. And there was a lot of

mention of that. There were some selfies taken that I don't think you saw in New York. I think that was before, though, there was an additional shooting in Atlanta. So things could have kicked off again after that. I think, what was it? The guy was shot in the Fast Fuda parking lot. Yeah, he was a, I believe it was a Wendy's and then they burned down

the Wendy's. Right, right. So I was there right before that. Shot in the back, if I recall correctly, as he was fleeing. Right, right. And that's just my, that's my impression as an outsider having been there for two days. But it looked like they were already losing steam when I was there just because the National Guard was not. It was an occupied city. Like you had people in military uniforms and Humvees setting up different checkpoints,

different places, and they enforced their curfew, unlike New York did. And it was, it was, you know, you have to give them credit in that way that they really diffuse the situation. Obviously, I don't want to give them credit for diffusing free speech and shutting everything down. But they seemed, before these protests started, I had this opinion of NYPD as a place that logistically was well-trained and well tuned to handle protests and protesters. That was not the case in New York. What I saw in Atlanta with the National Guard, that was definitely the case. All right, we're going to pause there for a break.

We are on with Danny Gold. You're listening to Angry Planet. Welcome back, Angry Planet listeners. We are talking to Danny Gold about crime, protests, and everything in between. How do people that live in these communities, as you've talked to them, how are they reacting when, you know, their street has a major protest on it? are they happy? Are they angry? Is there mixed feelings? What's going on? I think everyone, to a degree, supports some level of police reform.

Nobody is happy with what happened to George Floyd. Nobody is happy that police are unaccountable. Everyone does have some complaints about the police and the way they're handling things, and they think there is a lot of room for improvements. I saw in my community at least, which is primarily West Indian community that's being genderified as we speak, there was a bit of a discrepancy in ages. I would say people older in their 30s and older, especially you get 40s and 50s and 60s, they want the police to do their job. They want more police in their neighborhood.

I remember when I was like a crime report starting out 10 years ago when I'd go to housing projects, It was always very surprising for me to hear people who actually know we want cameras, we want more police because these are communities that have typically been underserved. And they feel like their complaints are neglected, their communities are neglected, their safety is neglected. And I live on a block that's had three shootings in a row at one point this summer, three nights in a row or last summer. And it is not stranger to having shootings.

People want the police here to do their job. they were also not supportive of the looting. Again, this is the older folks, definitely not supportive of the looting, wondering what it's going to accomplish, wondering what the point of it is, thinking that it was opportunistic. Again, this is not a uniform opinion, right? But it wasn't as cut in dry as I think people were made to believe.

A lot of folks were unhappy with the way that was going on. They supported the protest. They were angry about the looting, and they don't want major defunding of the police. I think everyone wants additional mental health care, right? They want better interactions with the police. They want less violence. They want to do away with no knock warrants.

They want less aggression. But they want police in their communities because they don't want violence. They don't want people out there having gun battles in the middle of the street, which is something that happens around here. Can we go back then to St. Louis? Just to ask you, is there much of a police presence there? Do they have an underfunded, understaffed police department, or are they pretty well set up? They're underfunded and understaffed. They're just completely overwhelmed, especially when it comes to their out there,

are homicide detectives. Like, they just don't know. They can't keep up. We're talking about a city of 300,000 people with a tax base that's been pretty, pretty devastated. This is a city that, I think, in the past 50 years, has had a 66% around mid-60s, population population loss, which is higher than Detroit. Huge problem with vacant homes.

And it's got this really divided city and county line, and the county doesn't want to put up money for policing in St. Louis for these communities. So you have a situation where the police don't have enough funding, where they are overwhelmed. And there's a lot of community hostility because the St. Louis police have been engaged in some pretty absurd behavior. There was a situation there, I think, two years ago with Russian roulette, where one officer killed another officer during Russian roulette. I think that says a lot about the program.

They're also very, very standoffish with the media and with the community. They don't even have a, how you can get on the police radio channel here, like in most cities. St. Louis, that's completely blocked off. You know, nobody from the police department would talk to us there. So, like, there are huge issues. You also have, there's a group, a black-led group about, from police officers about a police, what's it called, police ethical?

I want to see P-E-T-A, but that sounds ethical, St. Louis. Ethical Society of Police, the St. Louis group of black police officers who openly talk about how racist the police force there is. So you have undershaft, underfunded, and just a lot of community issues where the trust of police is just completely

gone. And you have a thing where just nobody, you know, you can't self-homisage if the community doesn't want to talk to you. That's not all the police's fault, that there's a sort of stops nitching culture that pervades the whole thing. But if you actively work at completely exacerbating the distrust

the community, that's only going to get worse. And that's sort of what's been happening in that city. It seems like there are all these complex problems where everyone's just stuck. You've got, like you have these communities that are underserved. They want a police presence. But there's also like a snitching culture where people won't talk to the police because they know that bad things will happen if they talk to them or if they're seen talking to them. How do we resolve some of this stuff? Do you have any idea? I mean, I know that's a big, big question. I mean, I look at the way to resolve these things. I've done a lot of reporting on violence in El Salvador as well and other countries.

And the thing is that you have, I think, a number of way of dealing with these things. And I think you do need serious policing, right? You can't just back off. You need serious policing. And that has to be there. You can't let things become a free-for-all. But you need investment in these communities. People who don't have opportunities are going to be drawn to, well, obviously the gun thing as well, but let's forget about that.

that's never going to change. You need investment in these communities because you need resources. The problem with that is that that doesn't win elections because you don't see immediate results from that. That's something that happens five, 10, 15, 20 years down the line. So you're not going to win elections by saying, I want to give more resources to these communities that are violence put. You're going to win elections in this country by saying, in most countries, by saying you want to crack down with an iron fist. That you're not putting up with any of this violence anymore. the gang members don't have the right to the streets. I'm going to put police out there. I'm going to bust heads. That wins elections in this country. That's just reality.

So I think you need to find a middle ground there, but it's an incredibly challenging thing to do. And then you have local groups that I think just need more help. One big thing is, let's say you go to jail early, and you go to prison early 17, 18, you get a felony on your record, and you come out at 23. You can't get a job anywhere. What are you going to do if you're a 23-year-old? real black man in San Luis where it's already very hard to get a job. And you've got a felony on your

record. You're going to go back into the streets. So one guy that I work with there is this guy Demetius Johnson, who he has a program where he's connected with construction sites there in the unions. So he takes guys that are in their late 20s, early 30s that have felonies on their record. He gets them apprenticeships in the union, gets the unions to give them leeway because they've never had a regular job before. And he gets people off the streets that way. We need programs like that. grassroots, city-sponsored, state-sponsor, whatever it is, you need programs like that to get people jobs. You need decent jobs for people. That's really the only way you're going to help out. I mean, the young people thing is really challenging, too. I don't know how you get through to 16-year-olds

these days that just get involved in the streets. I would say from my own reporting a couple of years ago talking to people, community centers who run community centers, people who are reaching out. Some people say that universal pre-K is actually where you have to start. Yeah, New York did that. Where just people have to be taught how to get along with each other in the most basic way. Other people believe that it's even before then. And you have the WIC program, which helps mothers deal with their babies, feed them, but also trains how people on how to take care of a kid.

And even that kind of thing can make a big difference in how we all turn out. So it depends on how far back you want to go. Summer job programs. Like we saw summer job programs getting cut in these cities where the violence is going up. I mean, that seems like such an easy solution, right? Like that is, why would you cut a program like that where you're putting 15, 16, 17, 7 year old who could be in the streets all summer with nothing to do? You get them a job, right?

People want to, like you get kids a paycheck. you get them earning something. They're going to be less inclined, I think, to get involved in the streets. That's another usual. There are all these programs that I think we could really benefit from, but you see them being cut. It's the exact opposite of what people should be doing. I want to talk about just a few more things before we let you go.

Does what you're seeing an American now reflect in any way what you've seen in other countries? Are there parallels here, or is it all just, are we just searching for something that even looks remotely like what we're dealing with? American exceptionalism. Yeah, it is, it is, like, it is hard to gauge that, right? I honestly, I don't have a good answer for it. I think it's hard to, in terms of protest, yeah, like you see this in France a lot, right?

You've seen it in the UK. It's not dissimilar. I think our gun situation changes, changes everything. When it comes down to a comparison to Europe, I really think it's, it kind of changes the entire dynamics and everything. People were comparing protests in the U.S. against the government and against the police stuff like in Iraq, which don't do. Those are completely separate situations. You had dozens of Iraqi protesters getting gunned down in the streets by security forces. You have a completely different militia situation there than you have here.

I mean, our militias, don't get me wrong, I'm a little scared of them, but they're not, they're not like Khatib Hezbollah, right? They're not these giant organizations that really will find you in the street and I can kill you if you speak out against them. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, are there some similarities here and there? Yeah, but I really don't think you can compare it to anywhere else, really. I think it is, unfortunately, American exceptionalism. It is, it is unique. It's been working on this big piece for a while now about the possibility of, like, what another civil or insurgent conflict would look like in America. And my editors keep pushing me to go find more historical parallels, and I keep running up against

to that. Like, I keep running up against, like, there are some, some places, but America is so, there are so many X factors here that make this situation so unique and so like anything that has ever happened before. And I think that's right the same for, for how we deal with crime in this country. Like, there's just not really, there's no place to go to, to find answers anywhere in the historical record or in any other country. They're just not comparable. The Gun Thing alone is such a big deal, right? Tune in. To our ancient Rome episode, which is a premium episode, to try to look at some historical parallels.

Oh, really? That's interesting. I want to hear that. I thought you were kidding at first. No, no. $9 a month gets you two extra episodes of Angry Planet. Nice fluid plug. I've seen comparisons to Northern Ireland at times.

People have mentioned that, but again, I don't really see it. People have recently started talking about the years of lead in Italy, which is not a situation that I mean, I've read the Wikipedia article, but that's about it. So I don't feel comfortable really judging that of that comparison. That is the, I talked to a university professor in England about that yesterday. That one is probably the closest, I think, will probably get. There was this time of high tension where nobody trusted anyone else. And the police and other government organizations were collaborating with like different. weird militant political groups to suppress leftist organizations and assassinate people.

It's all very complicated and not the same. Not the same as it is here, but there are at least residences that make more sense than something like the troubles. And again, like again talking to, I think David Kilcullen, who I think we're going to have on the show, Jason, was talking about Northern Ireland. And he was like, the big difference there is again the guns. like the IRA only had so many active members in any one time and they didn't have a lot of weapons really. There's this idea in our head that they did, but they really didn't, not especially compared to when you see like the NFAC walking around the streets here, everyone heavily armed. They're not the only group, right? There's all of these militias that are heavily armed.

It's just, it's very weird here, very different and unlike anything we've seen. It is a strange country. But yeah, and that's another thing too. I read that about the other year. have led and you look at it and if Biden wins, right? And he's running the DOJ. I can't see them collaborating with, you know, white nationalist

groups like openly, well, not openly, but like on a major level. If Trump wins, I mean, everything's out the window. Who knows what the hell is going to happen? But hopefully we won't have to see the city fall into civil war and deal with all that. I think it would be, I mean, this would be a whole different conversation, but I don't think it'll be, it'll be something weirder and more distributed.

And I think it'll be, it'll be, put it would be in specific cities. It won't be like a traditional civil war. But that's a whole other conversation. I hear you've got a podcast that's really good. I do. Thank you for sliding that in there. I just started a couple months ago,

something called the Underworld Podcast. It's an independent production between me and Sean Williams, who's a great crime reporter. I think his last story was for GQ, and it was about tracking down a billion dollar meth lab in the jungle of Myanmar. And every week, we take the audience through another crazy transnational organized crime story.

We've done one on Arcon, the Serbian Mafiosa warlord who used to be a hitman and bank robber. We've done stuff on the Lebanese Kurdish clans that run Berlin. I just have an episode up today about the only mass hole white guy to rise to the top of the Chinese triads in Boston's Chinatown, which is a fascinating episode. So we're just kind of diving. I have so many questions. Did you say Lebanese Kurdish criminal organization?

in charge of Berlin? Yeah. If you look into this amazing show called Four Blocks about it. But Berlin has these. They took in, I think, a lot of refugees from Lebanon in the 70s. Among them, like a Lebanese Kurdish diaspora. I think that used to be from Mardin, the area in Turkey that had fled at one point or another. And there's a number of crime gangs there, crime families that are of Lebanese curse origin.

And they control a fair bit of drug trafficking and drug distribution in the city and a bunch of other crimes. they've been involved with some bank robberies and things of that nature, and the German police are a little overwhelmed in trying to shut them down. So it's a fascinating story just because Berlin's also such a great city. Yeah, it is. And how does a mass hole rise in the ranks of the Chinese criminal underworld? So this guy is like take any supporting character in a Ben Affleck movie. I mean, like he could be played by Mark Wahlberg in a movie.

He's this guy, John Willis, working as a bartender at a bar near Fenway, 16, says he's 18, he's like an orphan, he breaks up a bar fight one night between, they had Asian night at the bar, what his manager called it, and a lot of gangsters used to go. And he breaks up a bar fight between two guys, one of whom is like a really small, rod-stort-looking Chinese guy, and the guy's like, hey, I owe you one. You ever need anything. Give me a call. Right. Every 16-year-old's you're in, you break up a bar fight, and then all of a sudden you're in the Chinese mafia. And a couple a couple of nights later. He's like kind of on his last dollar, call off the guy. They take him into a house. He ends up living with these guys and sort of apprenticing in these weird triad affiliate gangs in Chinatowns. And he just kind of rises to the top by being really good at what he does. And also just being a brawler, helps him with extortion, drug dealing, all that sort of stuff before he got busted for running an oxycodone ring in 2011. Now he's serving 20 years.

And where can the find people listen to this wonderful podcast? I mean, it's everywhere. You're going to look, Spotify, iTunes, SoundCloud. Our website is underworldpod.com, and you can kind of find all your links over there. And give it a listen. I think your listeners particularly will enjoy it. Yeah, absolutely. Danny Gold, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this complicated topic. Thanks for having me.

I really appreciate it, guys. That's it for this week, Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, you can follow us on Twitter at Angry Planet Pod. We are also on Instagram and Facebook. Just look up the Angry Planet podcast. If you like the show, please leave us a comment, rate us on iTunes.

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Why are people's Armenian uncles posting strange and minion memes? You can find out for just $9 a month. You get instant access. That's at angryplanet.substack.com forward slash subscribe. Again, that's angryplanet. com.substack.com forward slash subscribe. The election is next week. Vote.

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