Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Is New York Over? Part 3 - Crime and the City

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

We’ve had a public health shock, followed by an economic shock, followed by a civic and societal shock. An emerging crisis in public security looms over the Coronavirus era… here in New York City, and in cities across the country.Is the connection between the breakdown in public health and the breakdown in public safety causation or correlation? Was this crime wave inevitable and Covid simply accelerated it? What do we need to do to bring basic safety back to our cities?  

If we're thinking about the future of New York City, we're thinking about how to get growth going. There is no way that happens if you don't have crime go back to where it was before this past year. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. Is New York over? It's a hotly debated question that we will return to from time to time over a number of episodes. In December, we had two back-to-back episodes, one on the future of mass transit post-corona and the other on the future of Broadway post-corona. On today's episode, a look at the role crime will play in slowing or even halting the city's post-corona recovery. We've had a public health shock, followed by an

economic shock, followed by a civic and societal shock. An emerging crisis in public security looms over the coronavirus era here in New York City, but also in cities across the country. To help us understand how we got here and what lies ahead, we're joined by two experts from the Manhattan Institute, the most important urban policy think tank in America. We welcome back Raihan Salam, who's president of the Manhattan Institute. He's also a contributing editor at The Atlantic, at National Review, and National Affairs. Raihan also writes frequently for The Wall Street Journal, and his most recent book on immigration policy is called Melting Pot or Civil War. We also welcome Rafael Menguel, who's Deputy Director of Legal Policy at the Manhattan

Institute and contributing editor at City Journal, one of my favorite policy publications. Rafael is a prolific writer who just this week penned a provocative column for the New York Times titled, The Homicide Spike is Real. Rafael also serves on the New York State Advisory Committee on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Is the connection between the breakdown in public health and the breakdown in public safety causation or correlation? Was this crime wave inevitable and COVID simply accelerated it? What do we need to do to bring basic safety back to our cities? This is Post-Corona.

I'm pleased to welcome back to our podcast, Raihan Salam, who's the president of the Manhattan Institute. He joined us for a terrific episode a few weeks ago in the future of New York City transportation. And Rafael Minguel, who is also from the Manhattan Institute. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you for being part of this conversation. Thanks so much. Thanks for having us. So just to set the stage here, Rafael is in Queens, and Raihan is in Brooklyn.

I'm in Manhattan. All three of us are in our apartments. So you are going to probably hear in the background the beautiful sounds of New York one way or the other, whether it's noise from inside our homes or from outside our homes, which is quite fitting because we are talking about the future of New York. So that is my disclaimer. I want to jump into this conversation. But before we do, just a bigger picture perspective, Raihan.

For a quarter century, really up until the last several years, New York City has had a massive economic expansion. It's included skyrocketing growth, economic expansion, skyrocketing growth in property development, commercial property, residential property, obviously a huge tourism boom. I was just looking at these statistics the other day. According to New York City's tourism agency, in a typical year pre-corona, there are about 66 million visitors to New York City, and that generated about $72 billion in economic activity and something like $7 billion in tax revenue. So you had all this property development. You had a booming tourism scene.

You had massive expansion in the financial services sector, in the media sector, in a range of professional service sectors, and serious economic growth at the same time that crime rates were falling and falling and falling across the board in almost every area of crime. So can you just explain how all of this is connected? In other words, how you get this sort of flywheel effect of lots of human activity in the city, lots of economic growth, and a big drop in crime? They are intimately connected. You do not get the economic boom without dramatic improvements in public safety. You get the dramatic improvements in public safety. The city becomes more attractive to workers, particularly to educated workers.

And those workers then help improve the tax base. You see property values go up significantly. That allows the city to make further investments in the quality of life, including in public safety. So really, they are intimately connected. There is no way this boom happens without crime falling. And when crime goes up, you've seen this in city after city, what happens is that people who have a choice as to where they can

live, people who are making decisions as to where they're going to build businesses, they are going to look elsewhere. Everybody knows that New York City has an absolutely brutal tax climate. That's been true for a very long time. Between 2009 and 2018, New York City added over 800,000 private sector jobs. New York City did this despite the fact that New York City's government in all sorts of ways is obscenely expensive. The cost of living is obscenely high. That still happened because the city was safe.

So if we're thinking about the future of New York City, we're thinking about how to get growth going again, there is no way that happens if you don't have crime go back to where it was before this past year. Because again, once people get shifted out of that equilibrium, they've already been elsewhere. If they're even thinking about coming back to the city, there's no way they're going to do that. If they feel as though their lives are going to be in danger, if their kids are going to

be unsafe, there's just no way that happens. And to be clear, when you talk about private sector jobs, you're not just talking about jobs in the knowledge economy. You're talking about people who are running bodegas, people who are working as service employees at hotels and restaurants. And many of these people rely on public transportation or rely on other people using, whether it's their customers, using public transportation. So this is not just a problem for affluent New Yorkers. You're saying that if there's a lack of public security, it affects all these private sector jobs up and down the economic ladder.

Absolutely. Here's one way to think about it. So if you're thinking about ordinary working class New Yorkers, a lot of those people are people who don't have the wherewithal. They don't have the resources to go elsewhere. And so those are people for whom having a lower crime environment, having a healthy economy, that's the difference between they're being dependent or capable of working their way towards independence. That's the difference between they're being dependent or capable of working their way towards independence. That's the difference between they're having dignity. That's the difference between they're having a job that

can pay just enough for them to kind of start saving money, climb the ladder. For affluent people, that is a zero-one question. That's a question of whether they bother to live in the city at all. So basically, when you're talking about crime, you're talking about human suffering for the people who are really rooted in New York City and who frankly don't have a lot of other options. And then for the affluent population, you know, those are people who do have those choices. So, you know, the crime decrease, it represents a massive, massive boon for those working class New Yorkers. And in terms of the affluent folks, it's the question of whether or not they're going to choose to be in New York City at all.

Before I bring Rafa in, one more question to you, Raihan. There was this phrase we heard over and over and over over the last couple of decades, that New York City was the safest big city in the world. And that was almost like a, I don't know if it was intended to be, but it was almost like a, it wasn't, I don't know if it was intended to be, but it was almost like a branding product or marketing exercise.

And that does contribute to these 66 million people, these visitors to New York City who felt comfortable traveling here. New York wasn't scary. Made a huge, huge difference. You know, another way to think about this is that you had a huge crime decline in cities across the United States between about 1990 and 2000. But then what's unusual about New York City is that between 2000 and 2010, you had another crime decline, another crime decline that was pretty similar magnitude. And you didn't see that in other major US cities. So that's something that really separated New York City from the pack. And that's something that frankly supercharged its attractiveness, not just to tourists, but also to a lot of those high-scale professionals we've been talking about.

Think about NYU and Columbia University. Now Dan, you and I are old enough to remember a time when NYU was a pretty unglamorous commuter school, right? It wasn't a place that everyone in America wanted to go. You know, now New York City is a college town. There are over 600,000 students. And by the way, they're coming from all over the world, all over the country. They're coming from the suburbs. And their moms and dads are no longer telling them, you're going to get stabbed if you move to New York City. This is a huge industry for the city. And it's just one of many examples of how that crime decline mattered in a very narrow dollars and cents kind of way.

Okay, so Rafa, help us understand where we are now. Provide us a snapshot of where the crime situation is now, looking at some of the data you've been analyzing out of 2020? Yeah. So coming off of, as Raihan said, a pretty extended period of constant and significant crime declines, New York over the last couple of years has seen things start to show some signs of erosions. 2020 saw homicides jump by more than 40% and shootings jumped by almost 100%. Shooting victims jumped by more than 100%. What's really interesting is that assaults and robberies were down, but really only slightly, much less so than what you would have expected given the effect of the pandemic, taking people off the street, taking

potential targets off the street, as well as eyes and other things that dissuade that kind of criminal activity. So what New York is finding itself in the middle of is a crime spike of the type that it has not seen in a really long time. I think a lot of the more muted responses to crime have kind of been along the lines of, well, if you look back to 2011 or 2010, our crime numbers are pretty similar to that.

And that's true as far as it goes. But what that fails to account for is that the one year jump that we just saw, the one-year spike that we just came off of, is the biggest such spike that we have seen since the late 1960s, early 1970s. And that last spike in 1968, where crime jumped, I think, about 33% in terms of homicides, we saw basically 25 years of homicides in excess of 1,000 after that. So it really set the stage for a crime wave that we were not able to get under control

in a short amount of time. Meaning once, people don't understand, once the crime rate goes up, it's not like you can anticipate a big drop. It's that a certain set of trends set in, and whatever the new number is becomes the new normal. Right, right. And even to the extent that there is a bit of a rubber band effect where things start to snap back, we don't really have a good reason to expect that they'd snap back completely and permanently, right? Take Chicago, for example, in 2015 and 16, you know, during the protests surrounding Eric Garner and Michael Brown and Laquan McDonald, that city saw homicides jump in 2016 about 58%, which is close to the number that they jumped again this year. They went back

down in 2017, but nowhere near the 2014 levels. And they never got back down to that level. And of course, 2020 came and that city saw another huge spike. So even if you're able to claw some of that back, those excess homicides, those excess shootings, they matter. Those are lives. There's an economic cost to that, but there's also a social cost to that, that people internalize in terms of how they go about their daily lives. And what I worry about New York's crime increase of this last year

is that it comes at a time in which we've essentially eroded the infrastructure that would have been in place to respond aggressively to this. We built up this infrastructure in the late 80s, 90s, even to some degree in the late 70s. You can argue that the Rockefeller drug laws were a part of this response, or at least the beginning of that trend. We've done so much over the last five to 10 years to basically get rid of those mechanisms, which means that we're going to have to depend a lot more on luck and the goodwill of criminal actors who have a different set of incentives in place than they would have had in 1995. Just to better understand the numbers. So on an absolute basis, what were the 2020 homicide numbers, roughly? So in 2020, we saw about 460 homicides. I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but

it was about 460 homicides, which is pretty close to what we got in, you know, in 2010. So it was 463 homicides. And about three times as many shootings. Yeah. So in terms of shootings, we saw something like, it was 1,581 shootings, something like that, which is almost 1, thousand more shooting incidents than we saw the prior year. And we saw more than doubling of shooting victims, which means that you had an increase in the number of multiple victim shootings, which is something that often doesn't get a lot of attention. You hear a lot about mass shootings when it's, you know, sort of a high school or a suburban mall, but the sort of more typical mass shootings, if you're using

the definition of four or more people being wounded in a public place, they tend to be these kind of drive-by gangland sorts of events that drive a lot of the numbers that we saw here in New York and in other cities around the country. Now, this crime wave coincide, at least part of it coincided with the coronavirus, where you had an economic shutdown, you had quarantine lockdowns, were the, it sounds like what you're saying is the trends, the crime trends that you're talking about were in the works before coronavirus. I think that's right. Okay. So was it inevitable and coronavirus just got us there faster, or there was something about

special or unique or exceptional about the coronavirus period that got us there faster? Or there was something about special or unique or exceptional about the coronavirus period that got us to this bad place? I think the coronavirus pandemic played a role in so far as the physical environment is concerned, right? So there's this routine activities theory of crime, which posits that for crime to flourish, you need three things. You need the presence of vulnerable targets, you need the presence of motivated offenders, and you need the absence of capable guardians. Capable guardians can be police, they can be CCTV cameras, they can be just regular citizens on the street. There are a lot of things with respect to population density, for example, that can

actually dissuade people from committing certain kinds of crimes. You don't want to commit a shooting on a crowded street with a lot of witnesses necessarily. You don't want to attempt a robbery on a crowded subway platform where people might jump in and come to the aid of the victim. So by taking so many people off the street, eyes off the street, you had some more opportunity for nefarious behavior. And I think the coronavirus probably interacted with our crime numbers in that way. And just simply put, I mean, just to put it in very practical terms, I mean, I've seen this in my daily life. I walk around neighborhoods that used to be highly trafficked from just people on the street standpoint. I used to ride densely packed subways. Every time I rode the subway, it was densely packed at any hour. So police presence mattered,

but I don't think it mattered, to be honest, as much as just thousands and thousands and thousands of eyes near me at any given moment, you know, basically being an eyewitness to any potential crime, which was a deterrent in and of itself. And I see it now when I walk the streets of my own neighborhood at night, it does have a little bit more of a uncomfortable, some people say menacing feeling to it. Without human beings walking on streets and populating public mass transit, it makes public security a lot harder. It does.

It does. And it, I think, creates a sense, the sense of anonymity that you as a criminal would need to feel in order to feel empowered to commit certain kinds of crime. You know, a lot of people will say that, you know, if you look at where crime is concentrated, it's also where a lot of the people are. Therefore, they conclude that population density is positively associated with crime. And that's true up to a point because you need enough population density to sort of provide that sense of anonymity, right?

If you have, if you live in a small town where everyone knows everyone, it's pretty easy to figure out who did what. Um, so you need enough of a population to sort of allow you to mask yourself within that, um that number. But if you dig into the places where the most serious crime happens, whether New York or a city like Chicago. In Chicago, for example, where I went to law school and lived for several years and where my wife is from, we lived on the north side of the city, which was pretty bustling. A lot of people packed in. But all the crime was if you were to take a shooting map and overlay it with a population density map in the city of Chicago or New York or most other places, what you would find is the shootings are concentrated in the least densely populated parts

of the city, in part because you need to be able to get away, right? So if you're going to commit a drive-by, most of New York is, you know, at least used to be off limits to you at most times a day, just because traffic was a practical impediment. You know, people's eyes on the street was a practical impediment. The number of cameras and operations was a practical impediment. A lot of those things, you know, have been sort of taken out of commission during this pandemic. And so in that sense, I think it played a role. But I also think that the sort of attitude about policing, about crime that was impacted by the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis also had a lot to do with it. Raihan, how do you respond

to the critique that some have made to rationalize the violence? And the rationalization is characterized basically as when people are economically desperate, meaning the economy was mandated to shut down, and people were told to stop doing their jobs, and people are economically desperate, meaning the economy was mandated to shut down and people were told to stop doing their jobs and people are under incredible economic stress, can you really blame them for crime that they are engaging in an act of desperation? This is basically what AOC argued. People are stealing things because peopleOC argued. People are stealing things because people are desperate. People are desperate because of the coronavirus lockdowns.

How can you blame them? How do you respond to that? Well, look, I know that Ralph has thought very deeply about this, but my immediate reaction is that if you're looking at the CARES Act, the federal CARES Act legislation was really extraordinary, unusual in scope, and it redistributed an enormous sum of money. So actually, poverty under the supplemental poverty measure after the CARES Act actually went down relative to where it was before the CARES Act when you had one of the tightest labor markets in modern American history.

So basically the idea that people just simply didn't have enough money to eat, when you think about what happened to unemployment insurance benefits, when you see the various moratoria on evictions, just any number of other measures that if anything would somewhat mitigate that sense of desperation. So then you're talking about a smaller universe of people. Obviously not everyone was eligible for CARES Act payments. Then you're talking about a somewhat smaller number of unauthorized immigrants, let's say. So are you really claiming that the crime spike was driven entirely by unauthorized

people who were not eligible for CARES Act support? That seems a little bit odd, but then there's the even bigger issue, which is that when it comes to property crime, that's not actually the thing that we've seen that's been so alarming. When you're talking about crimes of desperation, you're talking about stealing a loaf of bread. You're talking about stealing formula. You're stealing diapers, just the things that you need to get by when you have no other alternative. You are not talking about shooting people.

That's not typically a great way for you to make ends meet. Again, I could be wrong about that, but that's not my sense of things, right? You'd think that it would actually be stealing stuff, things that you could resell. It's stealing money. It's mugging people. And that's not what you've actually seen. I think that's exactly right. One of the really curious things about Ocasio-Cortez's comments back when she made them in July was

that at the time, petty larceny, grand larceny, robberies were all down by a pretty decent measure. What everyone was talking about was the rise in shootings, was the rise in homicides, and these are not the sort of crimes that tend to be economically motivated. You know, the NYPD used to produce an annual homicide report, and they would actually lay out the reasons, the motivation behind the homicides, at least for the ones where motivation was known. And an outsized number of those homicides were motivated by revenge, by personal slights, disputes, arguments that bubbled over into shootings. Very few of them are related to any kind of economic interest. And the ones that are usually related through the drug trade.

But in New York City, that tends to be a pretty small percentage of that kind of violence so but we did just to be clear we did see some i think in some cities there were maybe new york too some prop some increases in probably i saw one study in los angeles and in philadelphia you know uh car robbery went way up so people were stealing way more cars during the pandemic and obvious and property break-ins there were more break-ins that were easier to do because there was nobody, there were fewer people in these commercial properties, whether they're stores or office buildings. So there is some of that property-related crime going up during the pandemic. I think what you're saying is that the explanation for that is not the same as the explanation for the increase in violent crime. Exactly, exactly.

And a lot of the property crimes that did go up, carjackings, car thefts, commercial burglaries, tend not to be the same sort of crimes of desperation that I think AOC was referring to when she talked about someone stealing a loaf of bread. That tends to be more of the petty or grand larceny type of event, low scale robberies on the street, that kind of thing. So that's an important distinction to draw. Well, and just another thing I want to add here is that when you're looking at the kind of thefts that you've seen, you want to be very, very careful about what's going on here. How closely is it correlating to the state of the labor market and how closely is it correlating to the state of the labor market? And how closely is it correlating to some changes in how different kinds of crimes

are being treated by the criminal justice system? So you mentioned California and California like New York State is in the midst of a really grand experiment There are a variety of strategies that have been used to deter crime, including, for example, the fact that if you're arrested for certain crimes, you will be included in a DNA database. When you say, aha, you will not be included, when you create a situation in which retail chain stores are deciding that they are not going to stop you from robbing the store, there will be no prosecution if it's going up to something like $900. When you have prosecutors who are taking the rules that have already changed on

the books and are actually even more lax in how they interpret them, the idea that you're not going to see some kind of response is a little bit crazy, particularly if we assume that criminal actors, they're people, right? They respond to incentives. These are thoughtful, curious people. They're people who belong to networks. They're learning about how other people who've done the same things have been treated. What kind of consequences do they have to bear for committing a crime? So a lot of that stuff was happening in parallel to the COVID crisis. A lot of it predates it. And so that's something that you really have to take into account too. And I would argue, and I suspect Ralph would argue, that that's something that is a much bigger part of the

story that's been neglected. I think it's a huge part of the story. And I'm really glad you brought it up because California has experimented with that sort of stuff. And so has New York, right? We have prosecutors in New York like Eric Gonzalez, who committed to diverting more low level offenders. So Eric Gonzalez is the Brooklyn, just for our listeners, Eric Gonzalez is the Brooklyn district attorney. And he's basically tried to implement a sort of paradoxical agenda for a prosecutor, which is a decriminalization agenda, right? Right. Yeah, I would say it used to be paradoxical. It would have been paradoxical five, 10 years ago, but it really, he is, I think, in the mainstream at this point. I mean,

about 40 million Americans are currently living in jurisdictions with so-called progressive prosecutors. Tons of major cities from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, you know, St. Louis, St. Louis County, San Antonio, Dallas, I mean, Houston, the list goes on. And you've been studying this. And so what generally, using Gonzalez as a model or as a proxy for this trend you're describing in a lot of these cities, just summarize, like what is the, what are they, what is he doing that is in this decriminalization agenda? Yeah, so some of it is basically amounts to a unilateral attempt

to abrogate certain bodies of law, certain kinds of disfavored laws, offenses. You know, for example, he's adopted a policy of non-prosecution for certain low-level offenses like public open container violations, public urination, turnstile jumping, low-level marijuana possession. He's taken a default position of supporting parole bids of those prosecuted by the office, which is something unusual. I actually think it would be silly for the default position to go in either direction, I think, to the extent that the prosecutors are going to get involved in offering advice to the parole board. It ought to be informed by a study of that inmate's record. But that's a new initiative undertaken

by Gonzalez, sort of prioritizing pre-trial diversion and extending those things to not just petty criminals like people charged with larceny or low-level drug possession, but also extending it to gun violators. The New York Times covered a story earlier this year in which the NYPD, or some sources in the NYPD, expressed dismay that Eric Gonzalez's office was basically prosecuting 30% fewer gun offenders by diverting them into these supervised release programs, which is something new and something that sends a message to the criminal population in New York that I think we would be silly not to expect them to internalize. And you've pointed out, including in this excellent New York Times piece that you recently penned that I cited in the introduction, you pointed out that increase in crime in the city

is not equally distributed, that certain parts of the city are disproportionately affected negatively by the crime wave, and Brooklyn happens to be one of those areas. That's exactly right. Brooklyn has really borne the brunt of the crime uptick in New York City, and I think – and really it's – data around that, just so people can understand how deep but also how narrow the impact is of this crime wave when you look at certain geographies in the city? Yeah. So Brooklyn has seen basically about a third of the extra shootings that New York City saw this year.

And really, a lot of that has been concentrated in just three of that borough's precincts, the 73, the 75, and the 77, which encompass Brownsville, East New York, and Crown Heights, or I should say Flatbush and Crown Heights. You've got those three precincts accounting for about half of the additional homicides in Brooklyn and about 40% of the additional shootings last year. That's important to recognize because it allows you to start to explore some of these environmental factors that drive crime. And it gets people to understand that not every part of the city is going to be as vulnerable to crime increases as a different part. It also helps people understand that not every city is going to be as vulnerable to crime increases as a different part. It also

helps people understand that not every city is going to be as vulnerable to crime increases as a different city. So one of the responses to the New York Times piece that you mentioned was that there are some jurisdictions that you can point to that haven't done as much on the criminal justice reform front as New York, but yet still saw pretty significant crime upticks. And the response to that is that I think you have to consider the differences on the ground, the differences in the physical environment, right? During that period of low crime in New York, there was a huge amount of economic investment of- Meaning that quarter century that Ryan was describing, the sort of Giuliani-Bloomberg years. Let's loosely define them

that way. Right. There was so much buildup. I mean, you had a low crime-committing population flood into the city, college students from around the country, college graduates from around the country taking their first jobs in New York. You had more real estate development. You had an expansion into the outer boroughs, into neighborhoods that used to be really dangerous that suddenly became very safe. So basically for 25, 30 years, New York was able to sort of fortify itself such that we, I think, got to a point where we started taking safety for granted. And so it makes sense that New York as a city would have to do a lot more in the way of chipping away at that infrastructure to respond to crime, to see the sort of crime uptick that it saw in 2020 than, say, a city like Chicago or

Baltimore, which doesn't really have those things in place, where that fortification never happened, where the South and West side had basically remained stagnant for the last 25 years. The South and West side of Chicago. Of Chicago, right. Right. And that's something that too often gets left out of this conversation. And we've done it to some extent on this podcast before, but you hear so many people talk about crime as a citywide phenomenon, as a statewide phenomenon. The thing about a citywide homicide rate or a national homicide rate is it doesn't tell you anything really important about where you are at a particular point in time.

It aggregates crimes that are not experienced in the aggregate. But if you were randomly dropped over a point in the United States, you know, you would likely land in a place with a murder rate of zero or close to zero. It's, you know, our murder rate as a nation, our murder rate in New York City as a city is driven by a relative handful of neighborhoods, you know, where crime is a very large problem compared to the other parts of that jurisdiction, whatever jurisdiction you're talking about. And yeah, I think if we were to sort of take a step back and understand that phenomenon more deeply, we would have a better sense of how to think about crime policy. Just a little number here to illustrate this. In 2015, 25% of all gun homicides took place in 1,200 neighborhoods that represent 1.5%

of the US population. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: This is nationwide you're talking about. Aaron Powell, Jr.: Nationwide. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: 12,000. Aaron Powell, Jr.: Nationwide. And if you're thinking about this idea of effective policing, proactive policing, the idea is essentially if you're going The idea is essentially, if you're going to treat people equally, if you're going to treat people with dignity, you are going to

concentrate those crime-fighting resources in those communities where people are the most vulnerable. There's been a backlash to that recently, which Ralph understands very well. There's been a backlash to the idea that you have over-policing in some communities, and look, there may well be excesses, but when you have that kind of intense concentration of crime in a tiny handful of communities, when one in two of the victims of a gun homicide is a young black man,

then that is where you need to concentrate those resources to keep people safe and to demonstrate that we mean business, that we really care about the lives of all Americans, regardless of their color, regardless of their neighborhood, regardless of their background. So with that, Ralph, can you walk us through some of the reforms that were implemented in New York City. You talked a little bit about what Gonzalez, the Brooklyn DA, has done, but that's really been in the purview of this sort of discretionary purview of his job. I'm talking about actual laws that have been changed in New York City in the pursuit of criminal justice reforms that I think you believe has actually contributed to this escalation in violence. Yeah, yeah, no, I think it most certainly has. And, you know, we've already talked about some of the things that prosecutors like Eric Gonzalez have done, you know, with respect to diversions and non-prosecution policies.

You know, of course, in 2014, when Mayor de Blasio took office, one of the first things that he did was to enter into a consent decree and settle the city's lawsuits with respect to stop and frisk, which really resulted in a super sharp decline in the number of reported stops that the NYPD was conducting. So that's a pretty important institutional change right there, especially since some of the more micro geographical analyses of stop and frisk, particularly the one done in 2014 by David Weisberg, a criminologist at George Mason, showed that in the concentrated areas of crime in New York City, stops were actually having a pretty significant deterrent effect on crime. There was also the city's move to close Rikers Island, which hasn't happened yet. But one of the really interesting things about that and something

that we ought to keep an eye on moving forward is that their plan to close Rikers Island includes a plan to build borough-based jails with a maximum capacity citywide of about 3,500 people. Okay, I want to talk about this. I want to drill down on this because I think it's important and I think there's a lot of misinformation about it. So when was the decision made to shut down Rikers? Last year. Okay. And what was the impulse for that decision? What was the problem that de Blasio claimed to be solving for? So basically, it was a combination of problems. But the main one was that Rikers Island itself had been just a place where inmates were being subjected to maltreatment,

to malnourishment, to a dangerousness that was attributable to the poor design of the island, at least according to current penological standards. And so to make jail a less traumatic experience, we had to completely upend the island to shut it down and move those operations elsewhere. And wasn't part of the problem that Rikers was understaffed? I think that's certainly part of the problem. problem has been the fact that in about 2014, Mayor de Blasio started to roll back the ability of corrections officers to use solitary confinement or punitive segregation as a response to misbehavior behind bars. And what you saw in the wake of that were huge increases in violent incidents on Rikers Island and in city jails. Just to give you some perspective, in 1998, there were more than 17,000 inmates on Rikers Island. 20 years later, you had about 10,000

fewer inmates, but almost double the number of fight and assault infractions in city jails. That is an incredible number. The idea that you could get away with just 6,000 and some change, fight assault infractions in 1998 and jump over 12,000 in 2018 when you've got a much smaller population, I think that tells you that those tools matter, that incapacitation within the system matters. And so that's certainly been a huge problem, especially since that policy was extended from 16 and 17-year-olds up to 18, and now every inmate 21 and under cannot be put in punitive segregation. Okay, so de Blasio decides to shut down Rikers and basically says the place is permanently poisoned.

It's unreformable. But we need prisons. We need prison capacity. So we're going to shut down Rikers and redistribute the prison capacity spread out all over the city. No. I wish that was the case. The problem is that the new system was actually going to cut into our jail capacity significantly. So Rikers Island, like I said, at one point housed 17,000 inmates, or the jail system housed 17,000 inmates, almost all of whom were on Rikers Island. This new system will only be able to house 3,500 inmates across all four boroughs that are going to have jail. Total, in aggregate, five boroughs, 3,500 people. Right. And just to paint a picture, we are still nowhere near that number, despite the impact of bail reform on the city's jail population, violent, high-risk offenders pre-trial

or with jail sentences in order to get down to that 3,500 number. There's just no other way to do it. What's really interesting is that when the city was forced to respond to the increase in violence within city jails, their explanation was that the decarceration that had occurred up to that point had left New York City jails with a population of such concentrated violent criminals that they were more violent and more difficult to manage. And that's why we should have expected violence to go up despite the reduction in the population, which is, you know, I don't think a very good explanation. But what it tells you is that, well, if you can't control those people within an incarcerated setting, why should the city have any confidence that putting half of

them out on the street now is going to result in anything less than a crime uptick? And so, you know, I do think that that's one of the, you know, the reforms that the effect of which is yet to be seen. But if the city moves forward with this plan. So to your point, it's not distributing them or redistributing inmates to other prisons. It's redistributing a lot of them out on the streets. Exactly. Exactly. Just by definition, it would be physically impossible, you know, to get our jail population down to 3,500 without any artificially motivated decisions not to incarcerate people that would have otherwise been incarcerated.

But isn't there also a plan to be building new prison capacity? No. So yeah, they will be building new jails, but those jails will be smaller, and they will have less capacity than Rikers Island currently has, which is why it makes more sense to me to rebuild city jails on Rikers Island, which has plenty of space to do that. And Nicole Gelinas, who I think you had on with Raihan in one of your other shows, she did a really interesting paper on this for the Manhattan Institute, kind of setting out why that's the better option. Well, just to also weigh in here, when you're looking at this plan for borough-based jails, it is honestly so unrealistic that you can't come away from it

without thinking that this is a kind of fig leaf. It's a political gesture to suggest that you're not going to radically decrease the capacity of the city's jails. When you're thinking about the logistical challenges, basically what is being planned with these borough-based jails. When you're thinking about the logistical challenges, basically what is being planned with these borough-based jails is unprecedented. No city in the world has ever attempted to build high-density, high-rise jails. And then when you think about the coordination problems involved in getting people from one facility to another, getting from one courthouse to another, just the complexity is just enormous when you consider the competence of New York City's government, of its bureaucracy, the potential cost overruns in building these new

facilities in areas that are already high cost to begin with. So what you're seeing happen now is many local politicians saying, I'm against the borough-based jails, but I'm also for shutting down Rikers. Now, what does that mean? What that means is an even- There's a math problem there. Exactly. It's an even more drastic decrease in jail capacity. Now, I want to throw in one more thing, which is that there are some people, the late Mark Kleinman, for example, who said, okay, let's decrease the amount of pretrial detention while also ramping up our surveillance

in other ways by investing resources in probation officers, by using ankle monitoring devices and much else. I'm not saying that that's necessarily a great idea, but that's the right way to think about it. You're not going to save money here. If you want to reduce pretrial detention, there are ways to do it to mitigate some of the risks, but they entail spending far more money on personnel and active surveillance. So what you're dealing with is people who are basically imagining that there's no trade-off

here. These are people who are taking for granted those crime declines that we've had that have halted, by the way, and they're expecting that that is the new law of the universe and that there's no way you can actually see a reversal. And there's just no evidence to support that. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And again, we kind of almost got off track there because the cut in the jail population that would be required to close Rikers and replace it with a borough-based system is really just – it was only just getting into some of the other reform levers that have been pulled in recent years. Can we spend a minute on those? Can you go through a few of those?

The bail reform, discovery reform, both of which have really raised the transaction costs of prosecution and really, you know, lowered the potential incapacitation benefits of incarceration that New Yorkers used to enjoy. Can you just explain briefly how each of those reforms work? Yeah, so bail reform, basically what that piece of legislation did was it led to an increase in the number of pretrial defendants who would be spending the pretrial period outside of jail and on the streets by making far fewer, by narrowing the types of offenses that were eligible for bail. And so New York used to have, basically judges would play a game where if they came across a particularly dangerous defendant,

they would set bail at some amount that was pretty well understood the defendant was going to have a hard time making. And so in the interim, while that defendant tried to scrape together that money, if they could, the city got to enjoy the absence of that criminal's presence on the street. Now, the reason that they had to play that game was because New York's pretrial detention laws did not allow judges to consider public safety risk in making pretrial release decisions. When the bail reform went into effect, when they narrowed the scope of offenses for which bail could be imposed, monetary release conditions could be imposed, they maintained that archaic prohibition on judicial consideration of dangerousness, which means that not only can judges not consider dangerousness and all the effects that that has, but on top of that, they can't play this game anymore, which I actually

don't think they should have been able to play in the first place. I would much rather see a system in which pretrial release decisions are based entirely on someone's danger to the community and their likelihood to appear, such that if you can establish that someone is going to be a flight risk or that someone has a high likelihood of committing some other crime while they're out, you can remand them to pretrial detention. I don't think we ought to jail people pretrial based on their ability to come up with some arbitrary amount of money. But New York didn't do this. It didn't do it the right way. And I think part of what we're seeing in this crime uptake is attributable to that and how that change works in concert with

some of the other things that have gone on, one of which was discovery reform, as you mentioned, which basically requires prosecutors now to acquire a whole host of materials that they normally wouldn't have in their possession and turn them over to the defense team within, it used to be 15 days of arraignment, now it's 20 days of arraignment, which is still a ridiculous amount of time. It goes much farther than any other state that has reformed their discovery practices and really raises the transaction cost of prosecution such that prosecutors are now working significantly longer hours and have to actually triage their prosecution decisions.

They have to choose who they're going to proceed with and in what order in order to maximize the impact of the work that they're doing because they just don't have the resources to keep up with this new demand. And defense attorneys know this. On top of that, prosecutors can no longer dispose of cases by pleading them out quickly without first meeting these requirements, right? So you can't even start that process of booting the really easy case through a plea agreement until you've turned all these things over, which often requires reaching out to the police officers who responded. And if you've got some kind of serious crime, you know, 15 officers responded to the scene, you've got to get 15 officers notebooks. And, you know, that that's a lot of legwork. It really, you know, I think will prove to be an extremely consequential,

you know, change in our criminal justice policy. Governor Cuomo has shuttered more than 17 correctional facilities at the state level, which he's bo shuttered more than 17 correctional facilities at the state level, which he's boasted is more than any governor in history. Of course, the NYPD has made some changes internally, getting rid of its anti-crime teams. So let's talk, I want to talk about some of these force reduction issues with the NYPD. So can you explain, So the anti-crime unit basically is comprised of about 300 plain-clothed police officers, detectives, right? Not all detectives, but a good portion detectives, but police officers. In fact, anti-crime was a great way to make detective. So every precinct had one of these teams where you know was small teams about four

five cops so when you hear the 300 number it's because it's small teams are spread out across precincts right right and and their job was basically to you know blend into the neighborhoods and suss out more serious crime find people carrying guns find people dealing you know drugs find people who are you are driving robberies. These were kind of the sort of more elite level street units. And as I said, it was kind of seen in the department as a trajectory to kind of more longer term investigative roles as a detective. And that entire function has been shut down.

That entire function has been shut down. And that was done just a few months ago, right? Yeah, it was done over the summer. And part of it was because that's where a disproportionate amount of the department's use of force incidents were coming from. But that's exactly what you would expect given the sort of crimes they were sussing out. That's their job. Okay, and then about a billion dollars cut generally from the NYPD budget. Right, and so there's been this huge backlash to the citation of this number

because people say, well, the effective cut was not actually a billion dollars because New York laid out all this money in overtime pay. And roughly how big is the NYPD budget normally? So the MIT budget was about $6 billion before the cut. They cut it down by $1 billion on paper, bringing it down to $5 billion. But of course, they've gone over budget on things like overtime because of the protests and those details that require a lot of manpower.

And that's expensive when you're paying overtime to that many officers. But my problem with that critique is that it's really meaningless. The fact that the effective budget cut hasn't risen to $1 billion isn't really what should concern us. What should concern us is what the budget cut caused. And that caused the cutting of the July Academy class, which would have replenished a lot

of the officers that the NYPD has lost over the last year. Retirements have really soared through the roof. And so the fact that the budget cut was in effect less than a billion dollars does not change the fact that the uses for that money have shifted to things that are much less likely to reduce crime. And that matters, right? And the number of officers on the street matters more than anything else, perhaps. And in terms of police force reduction, I mean, size reduction, so you have retirements, we lost an academy class, is that right? We lost two academy classes. One academy class was cut precisely because of the budget cut,

and another one was cut because of COVID. And how many officers typically come up through an academy class? It depends. The July academy class, I think, tends to be bigger. But all in all, you're talking anywhere from 1,200 to 1,500 officers across those two classes. Wow. So we lost that. And there's no obvious goal in sight to make up for those numbers. Right. Yeah. I mean, there was a new academy class put in in October, but that's just replacing the one that was cut because of COVID. So we're still down one academy class on net. And then, you know, we've seen a 7% reduction in the size of the force through retirements. And are some officers taking early retirement? They're just like, I'm done?

Yeah, I think some officers are taking early retirement. Some officers have been eligible for retirement for a while, but probably would not have retired if not for the sort of change in the dynamic on the ground. One of the other things too is that there was a big buildup in police forces in 1994 and 95 because of the 94 crime bill, which set aside all this funding for localities to hire more cops. Those cops are now coming up on 20, 25 years of service, which means that for the last few years, we've really started to see the effect of that as these officers reach the age of retirement and leave the job. And they've done that at a time in which policing has become an increasingly unpopular profession, increasingly risky profession in terms of not just danger,

you know, physical danger of being harmed by a suspect, but also, you know, of becoming the object of legal scorn, right? I mean, prosecutors, especially the progressive prosecutor movement, they really have their sights set on upping their numbers of cops being prosecuted. You've got a lot of, you know, civil rights attorneys, you know, doing their best to maximize legal exposure for cops, you know, big push to get rid of qualified immunity, etc. And so all that, you know, creates the perception on the force that, you know, that they're a target and, you know, that this is a more risky job than it perhaps was in the 90s when they became cops. And so it was time to leave for them.

On that note, someone put it to me this way from inside the NYPD, that the incentives have flipped over the last, you know, this period of time we're talking about, the last year, the last couple years whereas the the for your own career advancement the the safer more risk averse thing to do is to just stay in the car or stay in the station it's not actually to go out and confront what you what an officer may think is a criminal it's just because it's just there are huge problems not just the physical risk of confronting a criminal, but all these other potential blowback issues that may affect that officer. And so a lot of cops these days are just thinking, what do I need this for? The safest thing to do is just to pull back. That's exactly right.

I mean, I had a police officer I know tell me the other day that, you know, my proactive days are behind me. I've got five years left, there's no reason for me to take this risk. You know, especially if, you know, there are all these new limits on the, you know, the type of grappling techniques I can use if someone violently resists. There's all this new scrutiny. And, you know, it feels like for a lot of officers on the force that there is a prize on their head, that there is an incentive in place, you know, to bring them to a prosecutor on a platter, to bring them before some judicial body on a platter. And, you know, I think it would be silly for us not to think that that would have an effect on how they did their jobs. Raihan, the debate in the U.S. right now about policing, it seems like it's impossible to untether any aspect of issues related to policing from issues related to racial justice. How do you think about getting to a world in which we can have a serious discussion

about making cities safe without it being perceived as being at the expense of racial justice? I really believe that people need to understand. They need to better understand the patterns when it comes to victimization. Crime victims are not perfectly representative of the country as a whole. They are disproportionately, they are, honestly, it's more than disproportionate. It's overwhelmingly the case that victims of the most violent crimes live in lower-income neighborhoods. They are far more likely to be African-American. They are far more likely to be young men. This is an unusually vulnerable group of people. Now, when it comes to policing, there is absolutely a conversation to be had about how can we enhance the legitimacy of policing? How can we make sure that police

are better trained? Ralph was just laying out so many of the complexities involved here. If you are going to have police officers who are disciplined, who are capable, who are able to build real relationships in their communities, who are able to be proactive, who are able to help prevent crime from getting out of control before that happens, rather than just be purely reactive, the simple truth is that that's not going to be cheap. That's not going to involve disinvestment in policing and incarceration. It's actually going to involve increasing investment in those domains. That's difficult because look, budgets are going to be constrained, but you have to think about your priorities.

When you're thinking about making a system fairer, making a system more responsive, creating police departments that look more like their communities, that communities can really believe in, that's going to require meaningful investment. So I think that that's one thing we've got to put out there in a really aggressive straightforward way. We cannot cheap out when it comes to building police forces that neighborhoods can actually believe in. And if you're looking at the success that New York City had in particular,

it's because New York City actually made those investments. So the argument for defunding the police is actually something that I would argue goes directly against this project of moving towards the direction of racial justice and racial equity when it comes to providing equal protection for the people who are most vulnerable to becoming the victims of violent crime. Yeah, that's so important. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it really is important to underscore that because, you know, I'm old enough to remember that when the main critique against police on the race question was that they were not responsive enough to crime in minority neighborhoods, right? And you still kind of hear this thing. You hear it in rap music all the time, right? You know, that there's, you know, you call 911 in a white neighborhood, you get a much faster response than in a minority neighborhood.

Of course, now that's the opposite is true. And this has now become the new sort of basis for the accusation that, that the institution of policing is, is, is, is racially insensitive, if not, you know, one that harbors lots of racial animus toward, toward minority communities. But, you know, one of the other things to keep in mind is that, you know, the disparities that they are so stark. In New York City, 95% of shooting victims have been either black or Hispanic for more than a decade straight. That's as long as the NYPD has been reporting this, since at least 2008. That's crazy. If that kind of disparity existed in any other context, people would lose their minds. And what this tells you is that when we talk about crime declines, when we talk about the criminal justice system and its impact on American society, we have to understand that the people at the helm of that system have consistently cited crime declines as the rationale for things like the uptick in incarceration, as the rationale for things like the buildup of police forces, the increases of attention to the low-income minority neighborhoods where crime was concentrated.

And if you look at the crime decline that took place, the one that all these people cite, who benefited from that? It was disproportionately black and brown communities. I mean, Patrick Sharkey, who I disagree with a lot on policy, had this really great book called Uneasy Peace. And in it, he actually does this analysis where he looks at what the public health benefit of the homicide drop over the 1990s was to black America. For black men, it was the equivalent of eliminating obesity altogether in terms of lives. I mean, that is an enormous benefit. And so the question that I think some people would have a hard time answering is why would

a system that is allegedly designed to discriminate against and oppress these minority groups benefit those same minority groups to such a great extent when that system operates in a way that it achieves its stated goals, as stated by the people at the system's helm? That's really important. And it's something that I think gets lost in this conversation. If we would just clawed that back, we would get somewhere, I think. I was struck by a Gallup poll I saw a few months ago that was conducted from June 23rd to July 6th. And it was surveying more than 36,000 adults, including many black Americans. And the poll found, so it was a massive sample size. This was not, this was, you know, I don't want to say it's representative data, but it was a vast amount of data.

It found that 61% of black Americans said they'd like police to spend the same amount of time in their neighborhood or in their community, and 20% answered they'd like to see more policing. So a total of 81% of the blacks surveyed in that survey said they want at least as much police presence or more. So why this discrepancy between what the political elites are saying is best for those communities and what we see in this kind of polling? I do think that there's another element to this disparity in public opinion that you've identified, Dan, which is that when you're looking at highly educated constituencies, regardless of their race, by the way, these are people who tend to be much more ideological in how they see the world. Whereas when you're looking at people who are, you know, they're not necessarily professionals, these are working and middle class people, they just tend to be a bit more moderate in their views, they tend to be a bit more pragmatic, and they tend to be a bit more responsive

to what they're seeing around them. So I think that that is part of what you're seeing in public opinion. You're seeing a gap between those who are thinking in a very abstract sense, and sometimes they have the luxury to do so because they're more educated, they're typically more affluent, and therefore they're more insulated from the realities of violent crime that you see in some communities. The way that I think about this is the classic Biden voter. You know, when you look at the Democratic primaries that we just saw, you just saw that, you know, lo and behold, this guy comes out of nowhere, this guy who was known for his

support of the crime bill, someone who had been around enough middle and working class African American communities where, you know, he doesn't necessarily have the views that I have or that Ralph has, but he certainly was not willing to embrace the language of defund the police. And the reason is because he had his finger on the pulse of a lot of ordinary working and middle class Democrats who just are not willing to go where the more ideologically minded folks are willing to go. But those more ideologically minded folks, they have a much bigger platform. They're the ones who are the newspaper columnists. They're the ones who show up on platform. They're the ones who are the newspaper columnists. They're the ones who show up on television. They're the ones who have voice.

And that disconnect is a huge, huge problem, despite the fact that the kind of policies that Ralph is talking about, they're actually a way to reconcile that disconnect. They're a way to say that you can care about racial equity and fairness. The way you care about them is making the investments in policies that are going to have lifelong benefits, lifelong benefits for labor market outcomes, lifelong benefits for whether or not kids growing up in these neighborhoods are actually able to learn or not. There was an estimate a couple of years back about the cost of crime in the United States

and all sorts of complicated ways you do this. But if you're looking at the direct cost, if you're doing it in a bottom-up way, you're looking at a number like $300, $350 billion or about 2% of US GDP. But that's actually a little bit too narrow. If you're looking at the indirect costs, the amount that we spend trying to avoid crime, the fact that there are people who are moving to a different community, not because they want to, not because it's the best place for their employees, but because they feel they need to because they're afraid, that number is more like over a trillion dollars. That is just staggering.

When you think about violent crime and the gains that we made in places like New York City, that just changed people's lives in a deep and durable way, particularly lower income folks from minority backgrounds who, in a sense, their potential would have otherwise been squandered. And the idea that we're seeing backsliding here is tragic, particularly for anyone who cares about building a society where everyone has an equal shot at getting ahead. A good barometer for this, and probably a lagging indicator, is the Reverend Al Sharpton, who, by the way, this is the only time I suspect you'll hear me quote the Reverend Al Sharpton on this podcast, but even he, after the Labor Day weekend, Labor Day of 2020, Labor Day weekend of 2020, when there was just this spate of shootings, I think six people were killed in Brooklyn over the Labor Day weekend in 2020, including a one-year-old. I mean, there were stray bullets flying. Rolf, you may have the specific data.

And Sharpton was being interviewed following those shootings, and he was asked about these proposals to dramatically reduce the size of police forces and these very aggressive restrictions put on policing. And he said that these, he characterized these ideas, and I quote, these are ideas of a latte liberal, which he said these latte liberals may go for as they sit around the Hamptons discussing this as some academic program. But the people on the ground need proper policing. So this is Al Sharpton, who's been a fierce critic of police over decades, even acknowledging

this point. Well, it's amazing. And one way to think about that is because Sharpton is listening to people. Right. If he's not speaking for a constituency, then he's not going to have that visibility and prominence. So that's very telling. Raihan and Rafa, I want to thank you both for helping us understand a very, very complex issue.

Obviously, we don't fully understand it because it's layers and layers and layers deep. So I have a feeling this is not the first time. Sorry, I have a feeling this is not the last time that we'll be calling on you to join this conversation. But you have helped clear a number of issues up and hopefully lay out a way to think about this issue as we get through what is a very difficult period in our public health situation, in our economic situation, in our societal situation. So it's going to be a rough period ahead, but you've really helped inform us on how to think about how to get out of it. So I want to thank you both for joining this conversation. Thanks for having us.

That's our show for today. If you want to follow Raihan Salam's work on Twitter, he's at Raihan, R-E-I-H-A-N. And to follow Raphael, he's at Rafa underscore Manguel, R-A-F-A underscore M-A-N-G-U-E-L. You should also visit the Manhattan Institute website, which is manhattan-institute.org, and subscribe to City Journal. If you have questions or ideas for future episodes, tweet at me, Dan Senor.

Post-Corona is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.