It Could Happen Here - The Socialists Who Want 500,000 More Cops Part 1: Lying With Statistics

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

We look at a recent call by two Harvard academics, one of whom is on the editorial board of Jacobin, for 500,000 more cops to end mass incarcerationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's the podcast. It could happen here. It is about something that could happen here, very specifically. Yeah, I'm Christopher Wong. I'm here with James Stout and Garrison Davis. Hello. Hello to you both. Hello.

We all joined the Zoom call. That did happen here. It did. And that's the show, everybody. All right. Okay, so that's the thing that did happen here. Now we're going to talk about something that could happen here. Okay. That specific thing is a call by two Harvard academics to hire 500,000 more cops.

Nope. A call by two Harvard academics to hire 500,000 more cops? Nope. So, okay, I don't know when this is going to go up, but sometime in the past, there was a piece that went viral by a civil rights lawyer and anti-prison activist turned media critic, Alec Karakatanis, about a pair of Harvard academics who wrote this article calling for 500,000 more cops. And this is, okay, like, the fact that we have academics writing position papers, basically, that are calling for 500,000 more cops is terrifying in and of itself. Yeah, but crime is at a record high. Garrison, you are about to see shit. Oh, okay. You are about to see and hear shit that is going to make your fucking ears bleed because it's not shit.

Like, okay, normally these are Harvard academics, right? So you're assuming these are like right-wing Gnatset ghouls, right? Or like the equivalent in the sort of like, you know. These are not. This was written by a socialist. And when I say a socialist, right? Like, I don't mean a sort of like one of the sort of like terminally online desperate cranks trying to hold together like a Maoist micro sect. I'm talking about people who are incredibly well connected inside the mainstream socialist left. So the authors of this call for 500,000 more cops are Christopher Lewis, who is a Harvard law professor who makes me embarrassed to have my own name and more interestingly harvard sociology professor adaner usami so who is adaner usami um he is on the board he's on the editorial board of

catalyst which is a a marxist man i i okay do you do any of you two know what catalyst is yeah besides the sequel to the mirror's edge original game no i don't yeah okay so there's there are a marxist magazine there's supposed to be a more sort of theoretical marxist like magazine founded by a guy named vivek chibber who's a pretty influential sort of like soaked m marxist who could be found literally in any to any of the last like five decades you can find him yelling about the cultural turn in academia and calling for a return to political economy the cultural turn is that a quote yes yes oh yeah he's been yelling about this for decades longer i think he's been yelling about this for longer than i've been alive

oh god like that's how long this has been going on people have definitely been like fetching about the cultural turn for longer than any of us have been alive yeah and and they've been wrong for that entire time yeah and okay chipper is like one of the guys who trained usami in the first place now catalyst's other major founder um is much more famous and that's someone you probably have heard of uh who is one boshkar sankara who is the current president of the nation and also the founder of Jacobin. And this is where it gets fun. Usami, also on the editorial board of Jacobin.

This is the guy caring for 500,000 more cops, right? This isn't coming from the usable sort of like rabid reactionaries. This is coming from people who have of like rabid reactionaries this is coming from people who have serious credentials in the mainstream socialist left and okay so all right i want to talk about what's actually in the paper and the first thing i need everyone to understand about this from the get-go is that this is maybe the worst paper i've ever read like if i had tried to turn this paper in to my like freshman under like it's like my an undergrad lit class i would have failed like when i was in my freshman year in college i had to read biblical analysis written by a

freshman ted cruz supporter who was arguing that there was a problem in the bible where there was no way for god to talk to people, this is worse than that. Let me introduce you to the Quran. How is it worse, Chris? Okay, so let's just start off right. I'm going to start off with a random part in the middle so you understand how just mind-numbingly atrocious this is. Okay, so I'm going to read this. This is an article called, and I'm not kidding about the title of this quote the injustice of under policing in

america uh yeah so we're starting off great we're starting off great so but like actually yeah so so before we get into the actual main argument i'm just going to read this quote which is uh all right let's hear it even if our answers prove unsound we hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy we can oh god we contribute can help eliminate what alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be sound which first off terrible writing science of marxist leninism this is i would prefer the immortal science of marxist leninism this is awful like set this writing terrible send it back to an editor

give them a decade they'll come back with it second off i literally cannot imagine two disciplines i would like rather less apply to the problem of mass incarceration than those like these authors have dared ask the question what if we combined the bone rattling stupidity of analytic philosophy with the sociologist's complete inability to do statistics and the answer is this and when i say complete inability to do statistics, I need people to understand how bad this article is. Right. Like, I viscerally need you to understand. So, okay, here is a quote.

Here is another section of this article. But while firearm availability no doubt has some impact on the level of violence, we think the effect is likely to be small. A large effect would be difficult to square with other patterns across place, persons, and time. Consider, for example, that while the United States has 10 times as many guns as El Salvador, the homicide rate there is roughly 10 times higher than it is here. Now, stats knowers, think for a second about what they just compared right the united states has 10 times as many guns the homicide rate in el salvador is 10 times higher right famous countries with a similar population yeah yeah okay what what does the u.s have more of than el salvador guns that's it no no we have more guns but we also have 50 times the population

the u.s has 331 million people el salvador is 6.5 million people which means again if you're looking at this in terms of guns per capita right yeah all right el salvador's guns per capita is actually five times higher than ours oh wow that's quite impressive yeah and like financial perspective because we have a lot of guns. Yeah, right. Okay, again, if you're going to do basic statistics, right, you would think that these professors at Harvard University would know the difference between a rate of gun ownership

and the pure ownership of guns. They do not. They do not. Do they not, or have they decided that they're going to pretend they do not. They do not. Do they not, or have they decided that they're going to pretend they don't? I don't, I, okay, here's the thing.

Going into this, right, I assumed this was just sort of pure hack shit, and I think a lot of it is. I think they also are genuinely this dumb. Like, I, genuinely, I, I, I, it's, it's really incredible. Like, I mean, again, like, the thing,

like, the thing they've actually demonstrated with their own numbers is precisely the opposite of what they're arguing the thing they've demonstrated with the numbers they have given us is that there is a correlation between gun ownership rates and the homicide rate right like they're trying to they're this entire section is about proving that they're that they that the number of guns doesn't like this isn't even like this isn't me like like i don't like this is not like me yelling about gun control or whatever like this is just to get you to understand the level of statistics these people are on and also i should point this out i tracked down their citation because i wanted to make sure i didn't i wasn't

misunderstanding their argument right so i tracked down their citation on these numbers and i went to the paper they cited and the thing they cited does not have gun ownership numbers for El Salvador. So I have no idea where they're getting any of these numbers. They've apparently, quite possibly, have pulled this out of their ass completely because apparently nobody checked

if their citations actually contain the things that they're supposed to. Yeah, this is what I wanted to talk about. There is a thing that happens when you get tenure or you become a professor at a very established university and that thing is you just say shit and people trust

you. Like we've seen this time and again in the academy, right? That like peer review is not serving its function because like the status hierarchy of people in academia is more important to both the peer reviewers and the people doing the writing

than the actual process of peer review. Yeah. Like, their citations are... This is an interesting... This is... I don't know. They've made the capital letters lighter. They used a small arm survey, I guess, for that. I'm just looking at it.

It doesn't have those numbers. It's amazing. Okay. So, you know, we've, we've established that these people are absolute hacks whose work would have gotten me failed out of an undergrad course. So to be fair, maybe it's actually, it's, it's technically possible that university of Chicago just holds its students to more rigorous standards than Harvard or MIT whose journal published this does their intellectuals. So, you know we you never know this is also i never use jacobin as

a source on this show also because they pay 50 bucks per article and that shit is way yeah jacobin not a cool publication actually not mega based um yeah pay your workers if you're pretending to be socialist yeah if you're trying to be like a laborer yeah yeah but bosh carson cara is on the record talking about the quote his quote petite bourgeois hustle talking about how he made jacobin so you know okay we'll get back to the class aspect of all of this next episode but okay let's go back to this paper and let's take a second to look at what they're actually arguing all right and the first thing i need you to understand about their argument is that their entire the entire substantive argument of this paper hinges on an absolutely enormous lie um let me let me let me let me quote this lie yet it also illustrates the much less well-known

fact that america is not an all an outlier in its rate of policing the united states has around 212 police officers for every 100 000 total residents which ranks it in the 41st percentile of today's developed world now as alec karakatanas points out uh they've deliberately picked the lowest number of cops they can find any like the lowest reported number of cops in the usa can find anywhere um so they they pick 697 000 from basically like it's they pick this number from an fbi reporting thing but the fbi also says that they don't have all the cops there because it's like it's basically like a voluntary reporting thing so there's a bunch of cops that aren't there and then um here's from caracatadas uh who's a piece about this quote the professors the professor then admitted privately over email

that the u.s census count is actually 1,227,788 police that's 76 percent higher for the number they chose to use in their public article what is the significance of this using this number they admitted to me the united states truthfully has 1.1 times the median rate in rich countries so they've been over email that they have this whole article is based on them lying about how many cops there are in the u.s and it's actually way worse than this because as he points out, right, this number, the number that they're using only tracks public police. So it doesn't count private police. And if you count private police, that number doubles again.

It's not like there's private police in America, though. No, there's no private police, that number doubles again. It's not like there's private police in America, though. No, there's no private cops. And the other thing this doesn't count is this counts zero federal agencies. I was going to say, but it doesn't count federal agencies. Does it count, like, state police even? Sheriff's deputies? Actually, I don't know if it counts sheriff's.

Does it count sheriff's? It might. Because they're not police. They're deputies. They're different. A highway patrol? I mean's who's to say who's all of the research anyway yeah we spend more time on this they have already yeah right right okay like to to get it to get an understanding of this even if you exclude the feds entirely right if? And again, and this is actually a bad idea because, again, we have like a fucking trillion federal agencies.

For example, ICE and the Border Patrol, who, again, run just another police state inside of the American police state. Right. We have that. And obviously, OK, so he's comparing our level of policing to policing in like European countries. Right. our level of policing to policing in European countries, right? And, okay, I don't want to minimize how many

border cops European countries have, but the US has way fucking more border cops than they do. It is not comparable. They do horrible things. I will yell until the end of time about how every Frontex member needs to be redacted,

etc, etc etc parody but like no great great but even even even if you cut that out right the actual number of cops in the u.s is three times higher than the number they've given us actually it might be more yeah yeah so okay i feel like there's a there's anything that we can agree on as a nation is that america kind of has a lot of police That's like what everyone kind of knows That's like people in Europe These people study criminal justice

The place with like the really Like really militarized And heavy policing Like a person who moved to America It is shocking how many cops there are How many different cops there are And how there are cops everywhere all the time it is yep the thing that is very different about america oh god okay so all right i use statista to get that number quite possibly yeah

shit yeah yeah yeah i would uh absolutely uh if one of my students in community college did this Yeah, I would absolutely, if one of my students in community college did this, we'd have a talk. Okay, so do you know what else is based on the myth of under-policing? These adverts for private cops. Yes. Federal Protective Service gets them. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. service get some welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iheart and sonora an anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands,

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All right, we're back. OK, so. All right. We've established that this is this is this argument is built on a pile of lies. However, the actual content of the argument is also really funny and completely incomprehensible. So their argument is that somehow if the U.S. had more cops, right, and if the ratio of cops to people like that the U.S. US had was in line with the European countries, that somehow – and they never have a mechanism for how this would happen. This would somehow lower the incarceration rate. I think the mechanism is line.

Red line. That's what everyone says is that we when you have more police, it lowers incarceration rates. Yeah. The entire argument here is, what if the US was like Sweden? Then there would be 500,000 more cops, but somehow also 1.9 million less prisoners.

Well, the only thing that's different between us and Sweden is the cops. They have more cops. Oh, God. Okay, so why are socialists pushing for this? And especially socialists, and again, these are people who in their article admit that they think the best way to deal with poverty and with crime is welfare programs, not mass incarceration. So, okay, so why are they pushing for this?

And the initial answer is that they think they can reduce crime, specifically homicides, by increasing policing. And they think they can do this. Which, to be fair, is an opinion that I would say, at this point, probably the majority of Americans have. Maybe. I don't know if I buy that. I don't know if that's true. I think you may be a little bit further out of the Overton window. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. A majority of Americans, I think, do believe that if there's a few more cops, maybe we'll have a few less murders. I don't know. We'll see about that. But okay, the other thing, though, that's sort of

amazing about this, right, is that they think – okay, so they think they can cut the homicide rate by hiring more police. They also think that hiring more police will solve the problem with policing because the problem with police is that the police don't do enough, and so we need more of them. I mean this is – And then also, this will make them less violent I mean this is something this is even like the whole like Joe Biden like oh we have to

we can't defund the police we have to fund the police we have to give them more resources Bernie Sanders also made this argument if they have less resources then that means they'll have to use more violence and it's that that style of argument yeah it's it's a near liberal talking point yeah but what's interesting about this again is that these people nominally are socialists and you know in order to justify this right they

they they argue that while being in prison is bad and then they list a bunch of uh consequences of being in prison being in a neighborhood is with high crime is also as bad for the same reason. They are literally arguing that being in a place with crime is basically the same as being in prison. Big time prison understanders, the old Harvard professors.

Like, I, I, look, okay, I, I, there are very few people I would ever say this to. You're still in the panopticon, Garrison. Look, okay, there are very few people I would ever say this to. You're still in the panopticon, Garrison, by the way. Look, I hope these people get to do ethnography

of this one day. Like, I hope. I hope they get to go study what the inside of a prison is like ethnographically. Some participant observation. Yeah, I hope they get to go do this.

Like, there are lines in this article, like, here is a random line I've pulled from this article. They say at one point, quote, in fact, black people seem to be underrepresented among those who report ever having been arrested in their lifetimes. What? Wait, all right. Hold on. That is a direct quote.

Citation needed? What is it? They've done some absolutely insane i'm not even i'm not i'm not actually going to dignify them by laying out the stats bullshit that they've they've attempted to justify this like we have already seen what their stats look like right it's like their stats are trying to compare a rate to a number yeah it's insane it's completely nuts like that's the one thing that that's the one thing that even racist Republicans know. They'll be like, yeah, there's more because I don't like black people. And you're like, that's not why, but whatever.

Yeah, I'm just reading this paragraph now and it is actually pretty bad. So, okay, we have established this is bullshit right i i i want to read a kind of long section that i think gives the game away as to why they're arguing this quote we think in the long run a significant expansion of social policy would reduce crime by addressing its root causes and in turn reduce the need and demand for both policing and imprisonment okay other work yeah this is true i would say probably probably true in other work we argue that any coherent conception of distributive justice or economic efficiency entails that the united states should expand its social policy but a significant expansion of social policy requires significant redistribution

from rich to poor. Redistribution of this magnitude would require the poor to wield some kind of leverage over the rich. Given the collapse of the American labor movement and the electoral fracturing of the American working class, we doubt we will see anything like this soon. Our aim in this essay is to say something useful about what should be done in the non-ideal world in which we live not just in the ideal world in which we would like to live hold on hold on wait let me let me let me read this next sentence it gets worse okay to say something about that question we limit ourselves to options that are revenue neutral ah these are socialists that's so bizarre i think they may have walked outside they've just given up yeah like like

they've they've you know i'll get to this there's okay so there's actually more of this that is also like they're like not it keeps going never have a better world. Yeah. You know what that means? It's that we should instead just have more police. Yeah, no. Here is their defense of this. But why consider only prisons and police? Why couldn't the government redistribute the existing pool of money from prisons and police to social policy? So true.

As many reformers have demanded. We argue in What's Wrong with Mass Incarceration, which is a book that they're going to release that I hope nobody buys. I don't trust them to make a book about mass incarceration now. This is because social policy is bedeviled by what we call the efficiency feasibility paradox. To address the root causes of crime would be meaningfully to change the opportunity structure for the most disadvantaged people in america to do this by expanding untargeted universal social programs who require significant resources since the vast majority of beneficiaries are not america's most disadvantaged people because penal spending is hyper targeted

in a way that social spending is not. It costs about $300 billion a year to run the world's most extensive penal state, but something like $3 trillion to run its most anemic welfare state. We admit there are significant... This is a slightly later paragraph. We admit there are significant obstacles to changing the balance that state and local governments

strike between the arms of law enforcement. There are, after after all reasons that the united states has involved its present-day penal balance but our view is that the first world balance so the first world balance is is the thing they're talking about that like supposedly norway has or some shit where they have more cops but like per capita but less people incarcerated um but our view is that the first world balance is nonetheless substantially more feasible than the kinds of things that reformers tend to demand today. In the highly unequal oligarchic America in which we live at present, calls to reallocate a fixed pool of revenue will meet with less powerful opposition than calls to tax the rich. opposition that calls to tax the rich.

That is why we assume it is infeasible to expect the United States to build a generous welfare state in the mold of the Scandinavian social democracies proposals to use hyper-targeted social policy to adjust the root causes of crime are similarly infeasible. As we have argued to be efficient, a social policy intervention must meaningfully transform the opportunity structures of those most likely to commit crime i mean an intervention that transforms the structures of opportunity only in the in only those in this position will upend the effective incentive structure of unequal societies thus gumming up the economy and eliciting political opposition i mean here's here's the

thing is that in some ways i agree that the United States won't get better by making social policies within my lifetime. But my solution to this is a legalist lifestylism, not hiring more cops. Well, don't worry. There is a significant section of this where they shit on anarchism. Oh, yeah.

We'll get to that. We'll get to that. Okay, good. This is what fucking happens when all your friends are also harvard professors you give up on real fucking people because you don't fucking talk to them and they're like oh well they'll never they'll it's obviously written by somebody who's currently like well off like it's they're currently doing well which is why because they because they don't think the world's

going to turn into a socialist utopia but they're personally doing okay the way to make the world feel better for them is maybe more police will make me feel safer like that's that's what that's what they're doing is because they're already well off and they're like well social change isn't coming i want to live a happier life maybe police will keep the bad people away from me yeah because they see poverty as an issue of poverty is upstream of crime and crime is a fucking annoyance to them because someone might steal their fucking bmw well it's worse again crime living in a place with crime is the same as being in prison because you cannot conceive because it's a socialism without fucking empathy or experience

of fucking poverty right so you can make these ludicrous statements and all your friends in the smoking room at harvard will agree with you go ho hum yes uh yeah ah and i mean i mean this is the thing very frustrating like they they fundamentally like when bernie lost the election these people gave up on politics right like that's what's happening they're arguing that like not even is not even just like the class struggle is unwinnable they're arguing that basic liberal politics is impossible yes right like taxing the rich like is a thing that that's not like a radical thing that's like like the basic that's like a basic democratic party thing and they're arguing that it's so impossible that anyone who has a plan to change anything has to pre-means test it

to be compliant with a non-existent balanced budget amendment to get the right to support it like liz trust here shit like this is this was written by one of the people on the editorial board of Jacobin. Yeah, well, that doesn't shock me. It is very funny to look at their citations, which are like 80% people being like, this article is horse shit. And then like cop publications. Yeah.

Yeah, let's go. So, okay. So having actually, well's go. So, okay. So having... Okay, so before we do, we should do another ad thing. Do you know who else has completely abandoned the idea that there's any possibility of social change in the world?

The Conservative Party and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Yeah. Who we are sponsored by, I guess, now. We're going to take their money and give it to the IRA. For us. Thank you, Rishi Sunak. and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Yeah. Do they sponsor the show? I guess now we're going to take their money and give it to the IRA. Yep, yep. Thank you, Rishi Sunak. Welcome.

I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHe fire and dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by I Heart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace,

wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse

and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get

rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. And, okay, we're back. So having abandoned politics in favor of complete capitulation to the forces of reaction, they turn towards a cost-benefit analysis of having more cops. The benefit, they argue, is less crime. And this is bullshit.

There is no statistical evidence that having more cop reduces crime i i have done like i there are other reasons why this is bullshit i have done i have done entire series about there there is a lot of writing on this topic and how this how this correlation is not actually effective um but yeah and it's also like a very important thing here is it this is this is a this is a thing that's about what kind of crime you care about right like i i have written an entire series about why my about you know the times when my police department was literally being run by multiple drug cartels at the same time when they strapped dudes to

fucking radiators and attached the balls to car batteries they shot children into the street they disappeared people to be tortured into fucking black sites and then they went to fucking Iraq to teach the CIA how to do it like these people the cops are they are rapists they are kidnappers they are extortionists they are thieves they are torturers they are murderers a lot of them are in literal

neo-nazi gangs who run their own serial killer competitions none of this apply like appears in any of the analysis that these dipshits have compiled and it's you don't want the old cultural turn to get involved yeah look at the material conditions here yeah yeah the material conditions apparently are cop go up crime go down which yep it's also important like i think it's important to note that there's a really good article i i think it was by Mplusone, called Raise the Crime Rate. This was from 2006. But they have this point, which is that the reductions in the crime rate that we see insofar as they happen are not actually reductions in the amount of crime going on. Are not actually reductions in the amount of crime going on.

Like, what's happening is that, like, we put people in prison and then the crime happens to them there. Right? Like, even if you reduce the homicide rate outside of prison, there's still the homicide rate inside of prison, which nobody fucking gives a shit about. And, you know, because, again again this crime doesn't go away all that happens is that it gets it gets you know intensified and inflicted on a group of people the american public doesn't give a shit about so you know all of the violence all of the all of the rape all the fucking murder all of the theft all of the shit we normally throw people in prison for in theory is just happening to people inside of prisons it's just that academics can stop pretending to give a shit about it when they don't have to see it. Yeah.

Like, where I live, right, we just re-elected a sheriff who has overseen, like, 19 deaths in jail this year in San Diego, right? But that is not seen as an issue, evidently, to the people who voted for her, to the Democratic Party who endorsed her. And instead, like, they would much rather have that because they're presumably

worried that the person who ran against her in the primaries would be too soft on crime and therefore you know their teslas might get keyed yeah so okay let's look at the supposed benefits let's i guess i'm sorry those are the benefits let's look at the let's look at the costs quote okay finally consider finally consider the cost of policing on the one hand a world of more policing would perhaps unsurprisingly be a world of more arrests based on recent work by chafflin our best guess is that the first world balance would be a world of almost 7.8 million arrests on the other hand for some for okay this is a direct quote by the way i need everyone to understand i am directly quoting them when i say this on the other hand for the somewhat speculative reasons we gave earlier we guess that a world

of more policing would be one of less police violence about 900 fewer people killed by the police based on what the miracle occurs that's what that that's how james a miracle occurs yeah yeah well more cops they do less violence yep yeah this you know you you could if you were for example a social scientist right at all you could look at all of the all of the other times the u.s has gotten more cops and tried to see if that like increased or decreased the amount of violence the police do now and you know but they don't draw the line they've drawn a line it's all good they're just i do want your attention to figure one where they have exactly one data point yeah and then they've just drawn a line to it from where the axes intersect to the data point like this whole thing is just sort of like like you know okay so even if somehow right by some

miracle this occurred unless people were killed by the police like were killed by police violence because there was more cops which this is the kind of thing that for for the purposes of this thought experiment right we are allowing people to believe this like for the same reason that we allow children to believe in the easter bunny so assuming assuming this is real hold up i kids don't believe in the easter bunny i i i have i have met kids who believed in the easter bunny i understand believing in santa but do people actually believe in the Easter Bunny? Not many. Not many, but also most people don't believe the police will be more violent if you have – will be less violent if you have more of them. How about the Tooth Fairy?

The Tooth Fairy was semi-real. Yeah, let's let them believe this, right? This entire argument hinges on the theory that incarceration and arrest are distinct outcomes of policing right they're arguing that there's going to be more arrest but that's okay because there will be less people in prison now there is one tiny problem here that you may have seen which is that when you arrest people, it leads to people going to prison. Nowhere in this entire article have these two Harvard professors

at any point considered the fact that when you arrest someone, they sometimes go to prison and that arresting more people will mean more people go to prison because that's what happens when you arrest someone. They've never considered this. And in fact, happens when you arrest someone they've never considered

this and in fact in fact not only have they never considered this they seem to believe that there is an inverse correlation between the number of people getting arrested and how many people go to prison they think that 7 million 800 000 more arrests will somehow lead to 1.2 million people less in prison. What the fuck? What? People in this country die in between arrest and their hearing, right? Like, in between arrest and having a fair trial. Like, yeah, to ignore that, it's not just, like, it's not just wrong. It's callously cruel also like

they appear to have not looked at any point at the opportunity cost of having all these cops right yeah we pay cops a metric shit ton of money because they're the only unions that apparently the state cares about and like we could do something useful with that money right like well the thing the thing they claim they're doing is that they're going to fund less prisons and fund more cops. And this will lead to less people being in prison. Now, if this doesn't make any sense to you, that's because it doesn't make any sense at all.

And again, we have to come back to the question, what do you think happens to people who get arrested? Do these people think they get sent on vacation to Tahiti? I know none of the people writing this have been arrested, but like, you can't be this stupid. Like, there's no way. Right.

Ugh. God. So, okay. I'm going to close on some stuff here, which I'm going to close on the sort of anarchist stuff that they're ranting about. I'm going to read another quote from this. that they're ranting about. I'm going to read another quote from this. Some civil libertarians might prefer radical decarceration without any increase or perhaps even some reduction

in police force size on the grounds that state-imposed violence or harm is morally different from, and worse than, interpersonal violence committed by private individuals. An extreme version of this position would hold that no amount of interpersonal violence could ever justify the use of coercive force by the state. But any state completely lacking in coercive power would be unable to enforce tax law and policy and thus unable to collect revenue. Without revenue, the government could not provide public goods or a social safety net.

Which also, by the way, I want to stop here and point out they like in any other context none of these people believe this because like these people are all deal charter lists like they're all nmt people and so they don't actually believe that money that they they in any other context except this one they understand that money is something created by the state except here where they have to justify police uh without revenue governments cannot provide public goods or a social safety net so this extreme version extreme version of civil libertarianism is essentially a kind of political anarchism. And we doubt many are in fact committed to this brand of anarchism. So, okay, let's unpack this a second.

When they say civil libertarianism here, what they say is that anyone who proposes to defund the police or reduce the number of people in prison, right? is to defund the police or reduce the number of people in prison right in the next paragraph they argue that anyone who wants to do those things uh is actually in favor of increasing the homicide rate because when there's less when there's less cops then quote serious crime runs unchecked in poor neighborhoods which leaves you with two choices right you can be an anarch quote-unquote anarchist and let the crime happen because you supported decreasing the number of cops or you can support having more cops yeah it's yeah it's just an absurd extrapolation of a position well but it's not just that they've get what they're doing here is they're giving their entire game away right what they've admitted is that their ideal society

requires and this is what they are saying about the state's need for coercive power, right? With their own arguments, the coercive power they need is the police. And so what they are saying is that their politics requires an entire class of rapist neo-Nazi murderers to enforce their vision of the welfare state. In order for there to be a welfare state, there have to be a bunch of people who can fucking walk into your door and shoot you, right? There have to be a welfare state, there have to be a bunch of people who can fucking walk into your door and shoot you. There have to be a group of people who can fucking stand there, grab your child, smash their head into a wall 15 times, and then fucking grab you and throw you through a window. This is what they are arguing. And this begs the question, okay, so why do these people want more cops?

And the caricature they offer up is that without cops, everyone will just murder each other, and so we need neo-Nazi death squads to stop us all from murdering each other. But okay, that's stupid, right? Self-evidently, police are not that old. They've only been around for like 200 years. So we know that's not true. So why do they actually want more cops? more cops and you know something something that's very interesting given that this is an article about the police that is written by people who are on the editorial board of socialist magazines nowhere in this article does it mention the fact that the cops exist to protect private property right this is this is a huge part of what their existence right their job is to ensure that there is one class of people who owns the factories and the fields and the grocery stores and the fast food chains and the fucking car dealerships and that there is another class who was forced to work for them and have their labor stolen every day of their lives and of course these sort of like faux pro-cop these pro-cop like faux social democrats will never mention it right but these people's version of quote-unquote socialism is one in which

all that shit all the stuff that makes things like all the businesses all the corporations all of the all that shit is owned by capitalists and not the working class they need those cops specifically to protect the property of the ruling class from you right like that that that is ultimately what this is about the specter of crime and and this is true whether it's coming from socialists or whether it's coming from the most unbelievably deranged Blue Lives Matter cop freak it is about stopping you from

taking what is yours and that's the end of part one in part two we're gonna look at the whole sort of background ideology that's running all of this and it also sucks so yay come back tomorrow for That's running all of this. And it also sucks. So, yay.

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