The Megyn Kelly Show - Crime in American Cities, and Myth of "Red State Murder Problem," with Rafael Mangual and Jennifer Castro | Ep. 410

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Rafael Mangual, author of "Criminal (In)Justice)," to talk about the rise of crime in American cities, the populations who are most affected by the concentrated crime, the dangers for police in today's cities, how Black and Latino communities benefit from good policing, how the media drives false narratives about police, the truth about "use of force" and minorities, the myth of a "red state murder problem" and the reality of blue city crime, lies and spin about the pandemic leading to crime, how decarceration plays into the crisis, awful stories of recent crime in NYC, the real issue of mental health and progressive unintended consequences, and more. Then Jennifer Castro tells the story of her involvement with disc golf, the trans women dominating her and other biological women in the sport, how its affecting the financial security and sponsorships, the lack of "checks" for the trans women, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today, a deep dive into the violence engulfing our nation. Just as we were preparing to go to air, we got word that three SWAT officers have been shot in Philadelphia while serving a murder warrant. The suspect is dead. Fortunately, the officers are expected to survive. But in too many of these cases, it goes the other way. This is just one of many stories that we've seen in America's big cities as of late. And all of this mayhem is increasingly becoming a hot button issue on the campaign trail as we approach the midterms. Republicans label Democrats soft on crime.

Democrats now trying to fight back, saying in reality, there's a red state murder problem. We're going to take a hard look at that one. We have one of the best minds on this topic in America joining us today. Rafael Mangual is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Criminal Injustice, What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most. Rafael, welcome back to the show. Great to have you. So great to be back. Thanks, Megan. So this is the thing out of Philadelphia is horrifying, but I can't say it's entirely surprising.

That is one of the many cities just plagued with crime and increasing murder rates and a DA at the top who doesn't seem all that interested in prosecuting crime. Let's just start there in Philadelphia and what Philadelphia tells us, if anything, about the rest of the nation. Yeah, I mean, well, if you look at Philadelphia, it really is kind of leading the nation in a lot of ways. Every single year since their DA, Larry Krasner, who campaigned and has governed on a platform of decarceration for its own sake, every single year since he's been in office, he's presided over significant homicide increases. And in 2021, Philadelphia set an all time record, aka, meaning that it's the worst it's ever been in that city for homicides, and it is on track to keep pace with that record again this year. So yeah, violence is probably the most massive

it's ever been in that city, as it is in a lot of other American cities. But Philadelphia, in a lot of ways, is really ground zero. Now, with respect to this police shooting, I mean, it's incredibly tragic, but it's also something that's not unaligned with the broader trends. We have seen an increase, not just in crime more broadly, but also in violence directed at police officers. We have seen the policing profession become more dangerous in a multitude of ways, but especially with respect to physical danger. And that's also problematic as cities like Philadelphia and other major cities around the world and country especially struggle to find officers to fill vacant slots. about this, or perhaps really tragic about this, is that I talk a lot about the phenomenon of crime concentration, right? I mean, crime is not a problem that's evenly distributed around the United States. It's not a problem that's evenly distributed around American cities, including Philadelphia. It's very hyper-concentrated. And I harp on that point because I think people all

too often forget about what it's like for the people who are unfortunately living in the pockets of concentrated crime in American cities. But one of the other sort of populations dealing with that disproportionately are police officers who are tasked with going into those pockets of concentrated crime and patrolling on a daily basis. And so in addition to the residents of those high crime communities, police officers are also bearing the brunt of the downside risk associated with the kind of decarceration project that people like Larry Krasner have engaged in since they took office. And the rhetoric about police was so disgusting over the past couple of years. And now the Democrats have realized that the defund the police policies don't work. And in city city after city they're quietly restoring the funding but i haven't seen a an apology for the rhetoric i haven't seen them going out there

and celebrating our police officers as the brave heroes 98 of them are i mean i would say there's two percent bad apple rate like there isn't any profession that give the rest a bad name but i haven't seen that and they these guys need to be built back up and we need to show them our appreciation and affection, given the risks that we ask them to take. And to the contrary, these Democrats won't budge off of their old rhetoric, because I think they understand if you're a member of the squad, that's just going to cost you with your core base. I think that's exactly right. And also for the past decade plus, opposition to the police, opposition to the criminal justice system more broadly has been made a central part of the Democratic Party's brand. I mean, I really don't think there's any way around that reality. Now,

I would welcome any effort on the part of Democrats to walk that back. I think it's important for police officers in major cities to feel appreciated, to feel like they are going to get a fair shake in the unfortunate event that they're involved in the controversial use of force. What we're seeing in the survey data is that police officers don't feel that way. They consistently report believing that they're not going to be treated fairly. And that fear we know, you know, is associated with things like the Ferguson effect and the Minneapolis effect where police officers disengage and they aren't as proactive as they otherwise would be. And that's not out of antipathy for the communities that they're serving.

It's out of, you know, a genuine fear and out of a desire to preserve themselves and their careers and the life that they've built for their families. And I don't think people fully appreciate just what it is that we ask police officers to take on. And not just in terms of the tasks that we ask them to do, but also just the mental burden that we ask them to bear as a result of the things that they see. I mean, you, I, lots of people listening right now, I mean, we are very fortunate in so far as we get to go about our days and kind of live in a way that's insulated from, you know, the really terrible things that happened in this world. Police officers, on the other hand, are dealing with people often on their very worst days and their very worst moments, seeing the very worst of humanity. I mean, they see dead bodies, they respond to deadly car crashes, and, you know, just just terrible problems of familial abuse and

drug addiction. And it's incredibly depressing. It's incredibly psychologically taxing, which is one of the reasons why in addition, you know, to the problem with respect to police being subjected to violence at the hands of criminals. We also see police struggling with mental health and committing suicide at a significantly higher rate than other professions. And it's just something that hasn't made its way into the rhetoric and really should. This is one of the reasons why the narrative about police bothers me so much. I have a brother who's a police officer. He's now just retired, but he became a lieutenant. So he rose all the way up through the ranks in inner city Albany, where I'm from. And he was attacked at one point by a gang of thugs who came after him and really hurt him.

He was in the hospital for a long time. And what did he do when he got better? He went right back out. This is when he was a beat, you know, on foot patrolman, went right back out and kept protecting them and went into house after house. This is a predominantly black neighborhood, house after house, protecting women who are getting beaten and kids who are getting hurt. And, you know, black members of the community who are victims of black on black crime, which is what it tended to be there, and never once said a racist thing. I mean, this is my brother. I know him well. Never once said a racist thing, had a racist thought, just kept going back to protect folks. Was never accused of anything like that. Had a stellar career. And then because of some cop in Minneapolis, he's got the nation pointing at him saying, you're a racist. You're a terrible person.

You're a racist. And you and your fellow cops don't deserve funding for what you do. He's just one example of cops who are like what you know what like this is the thanks that we get and he continued doing his job as did his brethren uh out there serving the community but so many have said forget this forget it why why would i do this yeah well that's the thing i don't think people quite fully appreciate. And it's a real incongruity in the left's critique, right? I mean, the idea that policing is an

institution built on and built for the oppression of low-income minority communities is just incongruous with the reality of policing, which is that police officers are being disproportionately deployed to areas with the largest crime problems, which tend to have disproportionately Black and Latino populations. As a result, when they do their job, the public safety benefits associated with that job, and you're primarily to those very communities. And I like to ask people the rhetorical question, why on earth would an institution allegedly designed and operated for the specific oppression of this particular community so disproportionately benefit that community when the institution achieves its stated ends, as stated by the people at the institution's helm. I mean, ask any police chief in the country, what is it that you want to do? How do you define success? And they say, I want to keep crime under control. I want to get crime down. That's how I define my success. Well, who benefits if crime goes down, right? In the United States of America, the homicide victimization rate for Black men is

10x that of white men, right? In my home city of New York, 95% of all shooting victims every single year, at least, that's a minimum, are either Black or Hispanic. Almost all of them are male, right? So when you look at things like the crime decline, which over the course of the 1990s, what you find is that it disproportionately, in fact, almost exclusively benefited low-income minority communities. Between 1990 and 2014, the decline in homicides added a full year of life expectancy to the average Black man's life. It only added 0.14 years of life expectancy to the average white man's life. Now, the public health equivalent of that, according to a study done by a very liberal criminologist named Patrick Sharkey,

is the elimination of obesity altogether. Now, why on earth would these institutions be okay with providing those kinds of benefits to those communities if it were true that they harbored nothing but racial animus for those communities? It's a glaring incongruity that no one seems keen to explain, but it tells us why policing is such a noble profession. I mean, these are people who are going into communities that are incredibly disadvantaged, and literally risking their lives on a daily basis to make life more livable. And that is something that should be applauded. And instead, it's dedicated. Yeah, I in college, I had a boyfriend whose dad was a New York City cop. He worked in White Plains. And instead it's dead agreed. Every day. This is the 90s in New York and the Bronx. Some some cops never have to draw their gun. Never once. These guys are in such a dangerous area back then. It was. Can you imagine in a in a profession where's a congruence of the media, which in particular, in particular, in an election year, like we saw with George Floyd,

takes a tape like that and puts it on loop and works to elect Democrats with it. And an underlying problem with the cops, which is short of of unjustified shootings. They have been too rough, in particular with black suspects. And that that pops up in the research to even people like Roland Fryer, who are, you know, he did the seminal study showing that there is not a disproportionate rate of cops killing unarmed black men. Short of killing is brutality. And so that so the experience of many black men in America of having been roughed up by cops or pulled over too many times by cops, you know, Tim Scott was talking about, I think it was like 17 times or some ridiculous number. He's been pulled over just in the past 20 years. Me one time one. Right. of black men feeling extra suspect when dealing with cops layered into an agenda-driven media and Democrats, agenda-driven party that represents half the United States,

merging to produce this false narrative of cops, as LeBron James said, like on the hunt to kill black men. Right, right. And, you know, and even with respect to the disproportionality that we see in non-deadly uses of force, such as what was found in Rowland's study, which, you know, it's important to remember that use of force generally is still a very statistically rare outcome of a police-citizen interaction, right? If you look at studies of arrests or police contacts, police use force at about 1% of all arrests that they affect. So it is incredibly reflective of their restraint as a broader profession. And that often gets lost in the media's sort of hyper focus on any evidence that sort of backs up this narrative that we know has huge political implications, which is that, you know, police are part of this sort of broader racist system, you know, that produces inequities that need to be addressed. I mean, you know, there was a study

done, I talk about it in the book, that looked at a million calls for service across three police departments in three different states in Arizona, Louisiana, and North Carolina, over a two year period, that led to 114,000 criminal arrests. And that entire data set a million calls for service 114,000 arrests, there's just one fatal police shooting captured, it was of an armed suspect. And police used force in less than 1% of all of the arrests that they affected. And in 98% of the cases in which they did use force, there was either no injury or mild injury to the suspect. And so that context gets lost in our national conversation. And what that leads to is the sorts of really radical policy interventions that we saw rush through the legislative process since 2020. I mean,

more than 30 states passed in excess of 140 police reform bills just in the year after George Floyd's death in this country. Can you say that again? More than 30 states passed over 140 police reform bills in the year after George Floyd's death. That is an enormous amount of policy movement in a very short period of time. Probably policies enacted with very little thought given to the potential downside risks associated with that. And now I think we're starting to have to grapple with the reality that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to systematically lower the transaction costs of committing a crime and to systematically raise the transaction costs And someone asked the question, you know, why is it that despite crime going up in so many American cities, you know, we haven't seen the kind of backlash that you might expect. And I think the answer to that is a function of where crime concentrates. You know, the vast majority of Americans live in places that are as safe as the safest places in the world. There are just so many degrees of removal between the typical American and the sort of violence

that is currently plaguing the north side of Philadelphia or the west side of Chicago. And so those degrees of removal create a sense of sort of foreignness to that kind of problem. And the lack of understanding, the lack of experience with actual high levels of criminal violence, I think sort of artificially increases a tolerance for a policy agenda that probably shouldn't be tolerated to the degree that it is. You know, the cover of the New York Post today has, it highlights the immigration issue coming to New York, you know, thanks to all these buses that are bringing illegal immigrants here to Manhattan and showing how the New York City public schools are getting overwhelmed, overwhelmed with children who speak no English, who are showing up for school. There's one district has one Spanish speaking teacher.

You know, you've got 100 plus kids who are new sitting there ready to, you know, it's like, what are they going to do? And this is a function of the border state governors trying to show some of these sanctuary cities and sanctuary states what their policies are wreaking down south. And you think about what you just said about the cities versus the burbs and whether there should be a similar busing program for inner city gangs or inner city criminals out to the burbs. So these, they tend to be white liberal women who push these policies on the inner cities, taking away their police funding, getting rid of cash bail and all that would have to actually deal with the consequences. You know, the repeat offenders who never should have been let out now have no bail. How do you want him? How much you want him living next to you, hanging out at your

kid's school? Because that's what has to happen for the residents of Manhattan and Philadelphia and Chicago, who are the victims of these policies, but may not have the time to go protest on the Upper West Side like these other women do all the time. Yeah, I mean, I suspect that has a little something to do with New York's turnaround in the 90s. I mean, you know, for the most part, you know, crime tends to remain very, very sort of concentrated in a lot of American cities. But New York is somewhat unique in that our subway system is very integrated. And so a lot of really highly valued public spaces in the early 90s and late 80s started to suffer. I mean, if you were a stockbroker living on the

Upper East Side, but working on Wall Street, it was more convenient to take the six train to work than it was, you know, to get in a car service and, you know, be stuck on the FDR in traffic. But you couldn't take the subways back then, not without taking your life in your hands, essentially, right, they were covered in graffiti that were gross, they, you know, were very dangerous, lots of robberies, sexual assault, etc. So that was, you know, a major public space that was really valued by, you know, sort of politically active people that they couldn't access because the crime had gotten so bad. You know, if you enjoyed the theater, you know, the area in and around Times Square was incredibly hostile, you know, to tourists and people who were just trying to, you know, enjoy that part of the city. And so, you know, you couldn't really go to a show without being accosted by, you know, prostitutes and drug dealers and pimps. And, you know, there was like porn shops all over the place. And it was, again, it was really gross. If you, you know, had a million dollar mansion on Central Park West, you wanted to be able to go jog in the park in the morning, but you couldn't do that without risking getting robbed or worse. And so as those highly valued public spaces deteriorated more and more, I think that is what

drove the sort of rethinking that led to the revolution that allowed New York to kind of win the war on crime for as long as it did. But that's not going to happen in a lot of other cities where the crime is just, you know, going to remain concentrating in the places where it's always been concentrated. It's starting to change in some places like Chicago, where parts of the loop and the Gold Coast and River North are starting to see shootings at rates that they never saw before. And maybe that'll start to change things there. But in lots of other parts of the country, that's just not going to happen. And so one of the reasons I do the work that I do is to try and bring these stories to

people so that they understand, or at least come closer to understanding what life is like living in a place where that is a sort of everyday occurrence. I mean, you and I remember the DC sniper situation. I mean, people living in and around Virginia and Washington DC back then were losing their minds around the sniper. I mean, they were pumping gas while ducking behind their car. They'd drive past the E on their gas tank at night so as not to have to get out and be targeted. They would zigzag through empty parking lots if they left work late. I mean, these are very rational people living in America's most elite zip codes, taking all of these drastic steps to minimize their risk of being victimized, which, by the way, was on par with being struck by lightning.

And yet the psychological impact was so profound for them. But they don't seem to be able to internalize what life is like in a neighborhood where someone gets shot every week, where gunshots are heard on a near daily basis and where your chances of being victimized by gun violence are actually higher than if you graduating from college on time. Right. I mean, so that is something that I think needs to change. And it's one of the things that really kind of motivates me to bring attention to these issues. We talked about Philadelphia here and there in the first 20 minutes. And Larry Krasner is their soft on crime D.A. George Soros backed. He was interviewed by the first 20 minutes. And Larry Krasner is their soft on crime DA, George Soros-backed. He was interviewed by the local Fox reporters.

I think Mike Jarek is one of the guys in this clip, my old pal from Fox News Channel, and got very defensive and then kind of went on offense in a fascinating clip. Here it is. Watch this, SOT 10. For a reformed district attorney, everybody in the country knows that.

Maybe it's not working. It is working. The reality is there aren't a thousand people killed in 20 months. It is working. The reality is when you look at all these different jurisdictions, we've had a devastating blow from the pandemic and there is absolutely no correlation between being progressive or traditional and the rate of crime. These states in the United States that have a rate of homicide that is 40% higher are MAGA states. They are Trump states. I'll say it again. The rate of homicide in Trump states as compared to Biden states, take all 50 of them,

is 40% higher. Republicans say the opposite. It's all the blue cities. Republicans lie. I mean, let's just get down to it. Republicans lie. That is what they do. Eight of the 10 cities without, not, well, okay, that's right. Not all of them do, but the MAGA ones do. Eight out of 10 of the most violent cities are Trump cities. We got to get real about this. Facts matter. Eight out of 10 of the most violent cities are Trump cities. Is that true or isn't it? I'm going to have to request a citation on that because to my knowledge, that is completely false. And this whole red state murder problem meme is really. Wait, let me pause you on that, because I know I know you've got points on that.

But can I just say as a fact check, a compilation of June police data from cities with populations greater than 200,000 shows that so far in 2022, the cities with the highest murder rates are, from top to descending order, New Orleans, Baltimore, Birmingham, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Rochester, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Kansas City. What do all those cities have in common? Democrat mayors. He's just wrong. It's just not true. So that second point, he just said, I'll do him the courtesy of not saying it was a lie, but he doesn't have his facts straight at all. The top 10 cities when it comes to violent crime are Democrat controlled cities, not MAGA Trump cities. I mean, give me a break. Really? Okay. Philadelphia. Is that a Trump MAGA city? Because last I looked, it looked pretty blue to me. Baltimore, New Orleans. All right. Do your homework, sir. Now let's go to the larger point of states, because there are red states that are in the top 10 when it comes to states with the biggest crime problems. Go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, well, it's just kind of a silly point to make. I mean, first off, you know, state murder rates are an aggregation of crime across a geographic area that can't possibly be occupied at the same time, right? So it doesn't really tell us anything about how safe or, you know, at risk we are at any given point in time in any given place within that state. So, you know, to me, those rates are usually pretty useless. But if you look at red states and their murder rates, what you'll find is that their murder rates are almost entirely a function or largely a function of their biggest cities, which are often very blue and often very dangerous, right? So there are a couple of examples that I give in a New York Post piece on this today.

If you look at, you know, Mississippi or Louisiana, in Louisiana, New Orleans, Shreveport, and Baton Rouge, which are all blue cities, if you took those out of the analysis, Louisiana's state murder rate goes down by nearly 30%. In Mississippi, if you just took Jackson, Mississippi out, which is another blue state with a progressive prosecutor, I might add, the state's murder rate goes down by nearly 20%, 18.7%. So, you know, the idea that this sort of red state murder problem is evidence that the, you know, conservative MAGA types, as they put it, are just wrong on crime is a little silly, because there's really no, they're not making an actual connection between policy and outcomes. I mean, the better question to ask is, are we better off for policy decisions that make it more likely that repeat offenders will spend more time on the street? Are we better off? I do want to talk to you about the policies that are driving this. But can I just stop on Larry Krasner for a second? The DA, number one, generally is supposed to be anti-criminal and want to lower the crime rate and be pro fact. That's why we say of our prosecutors, you have an obligation to the truth and to justice. And if you pursue a crime and you figure out that the guy didn't do it or you don't have a good faith belief that you can convict this guy beyond a reasonable doubt, you're supposed to drop the charges on your own without making it go to trial. You have a different obligation than the defense attorney.

This guy is a partisan hack. That's what that soundbite tells me. What he so what Raphael's basically told us is that the only reason he can say that red states, Trump, Trump supporting red states have a higher murder rate than some blue states is because their largest blue Democrat run cities are jacking up the average in these red states. The reason they have a problematic murder rate and homicide and violent crime rate is because of the Democrat run large cities within the red states. Knowing that, can we just listen to that soundbite again and listen to the dishonesty of this man, who's the prosecutor for one of the city's most plagued by homicide and violent crimes in the United States.

Here he is again, Larry Krasner. For a reformed district attorney, everybody in the country knows that. But maybe it's not working. It is working. The reality is there aren't- There's 1,000 people killed in 20 months. It is working.

The reality is when you look at all these different jurisdictions, we've had a devastating blow from the pandemic. And there is absolutely no correlation between being progressive or traditional and the rate of crime. These states in the United States that have a rate of homicide that is 40% higher are MAGA states. They are Trump states. I'll say it again. The rate of homicide in Trump states as compared to Biden states, take all 50 of them, is 40% higher. You know Republicans say the opposite. It's all the blue cities. Republicans lie. I mean, let's just get down to it. Republicans lie. That is what they do.

Eight of the 10 cities without, well, okay, that's right. Not all of them do, but the MAGA ones do. Eight out of 10 of the most violent cities are Trump cities. Like we got to get real about this. Facts matter. This is crazy. Those poor Philadelphians, Raphael, I mean, their murder rate is through the roof. And this is the guy that they're depending on to correct that. And all he seems to want to do is mislead and just deny the facts, never mind address them. Right. This is if Philadelphia cannot say like other cities can that it was worse in the 1990s. No, it is as bad as it has ever been. And that has happened under Larry Krasner's watch. What is it that's where I mean, I suppose he can say it's working insofar as he, you know, campaigned on on releasing a lot more criminals and not prosecuting a lot more criminals and not incarcerating a lot more criminals. So, you know, I guess in some sense it's working, but it's not working for the people on the north side that are dealing with violence levels that have never been seen before in that city. I mean, it really is.

And these people are not going to go pull the stats and do their homework to figure out whether he's lying to them or not. There's there still tends to be a level of trust in our public officials. We used to really respect prosecutors who put bad guys away. Not this one. This guy is an obfuscator and the nerve to be accusing the Republicans of being liars as he lies through his teeth on television. That one was particularly galling. Now, you you have taken a look at how what got us here. I mean, that's the question, right? Is it because the Democrats all say pandemic, pandemic drove people crazy, drove people into the streets. We're still recovering from that. That may be a factor in the

rising crime rate we've seen over the past few years, but it certainly doesn't tell the whole story. So what does? Yeah, well, it's certain the pandemic. I mean, not telling the whole story, I think is a little bit of an understatement. I mean, the pandemic affected the entire world. The entire world did not see violent crime rise the way that the US saw, right? The pandemic affected the entire country. As far as I can tell, violent crime remained as geographically and demographically concentrated as it was before the pandemic in the post-pandemic years. So, you know, if in fact exposure to the pandemic caused people to commit violent crime that otherwise wouldn't commit violent crime, we would have expected to see violent crime become a sort of more widespread problem as opposed to just a

bigger problem in the pockets of concentrated crime where it was already a problem. And so, you know, that that is just, I think, something that really has to get said at the outset. But one of the things that I think we have to open our minds to is the possibility that the broad trend toward decarceration and depolicing has something to do with what we're experiencing right now. And what we're experiencing right now isn't just a function of the post 2020 world. People forget that in 2015 and 2016, the US saw pretty significant increases in the homicide rate across the country. Lots of cities started dealing with much higher rates of crime. Chicago saw something like a 58% increase in homicides in 2016. In 2019, Baltimore set its homicide rate record. So this isn't just a pandemic era phenomenon. Now, what might it have to do with?

I think it might have something to do with the fact that over the last, you know, 15 years, our incarcerated or imprisonment population has gone down by about 20%. You know, the pandemic probably contributed to that to some degree insofar as when the court shut down, we saw a lot fewer people going to jail in the short term and more people being released earlier from prisons. And that probably had an impact on public safety. But just as a matter of policy, we have made it less likely that committing a crime will result in incarceration. We have seen the advent of the progressive prosecutor movement to the extent that now nearly 50 million Americans are living in progressive prosecutor jurisdictions. That would have been unheard of 10 years ago.

We've seen sentencing reforms, bail reforms, juvenile justice reforms, discovery reforms. All of these things have been aimed in one direction. And that is, like I said before, to lower the costs of committing crime, as well as to raise the cost of enforcing the law. And those things have come in the form of new restrictions on prosecutors, you know, new restrictions on police. And we've also seen depolicing as a result of fear on the part of police of being proactive and being treated unfairly and tried and convicted in the court of public opinion for things that were actually completely lawfully done. I mean, I'm thinking here of like the Macaiah. Yeah. I mean, just think about the Macaiah Bryant case. Right. I mean, here is an officer saving the life of of one girl who was about to have a large knife plunged into her abdomen. And he was, you know, plastered all over social media as a racist killer.

This is the one where MSNBC was saying, oh, it was playful. You know, this is playful. This is what you do when you're growing up. And Gadzad has his amazing video. I'll never forget going. It was just a tickling of the aorta you know like we all used to do when we were growing up it was absurd it really truly is i mean we are living in bizarro world in many ways and so yeah i mean i think all of that in the aggregate

is probably uh explains a big chunk of where we're going and and what we're seeing on the streets i mean you know there's just no real getting around that i mean we know just from from past analyses incarceration works policing works we just haven't invented some other way to produce the same kind of public safety well you know you just know you have these bleeding hearts who are like well incarceration we need to decarcerate because it disproportionately affects black men it's like well the stats show that that is who's committing the majority of violent crime these two things are related um but you're supposed to just feel bad and in the name of racial justice open the prison doors that's a good place to pause it because there's much more to discuss including what's's going on in New York City and these videos that have come out, which

I will show you right after this break as Raphael stays with us. So decarceration has been the big, big push. No, we've got to let people out of the jails because we have a racist criminal justice system. I mean, BLM basically says open the jails, open the jails, let them all out. That was on their policy prescription on their website for a long time. May still be, which is absurd. Of course, you know, you know how many people who black and brown people in particular are going to get killed if we do that. OK, so that's not going to happen. But decarceration and a racist criminal justice system leading to overcrowding of black and brown people in the jails has been something I've heard from people I respect who are not crazed race essentialists like BLM, too. So what do you say to that?

Yeah, I mean, I said we have to understand that just looking at top line disparities doesn't really tell us much about what's going on, right? The overrepresentation of black and brown men in our incarceration rate reflects a punitive disposition on the part of, you know, our nation's criminal justice systems, you know, a systematic failure to provide second chances. And the reality is that can be further from the truth. First of all, you know, post-conviction imprisonment is not even the most likely outcome of a criminal felony case, right? In the state system, only 40% of felony convictions will result in a post-conviction prison sentence. The majority of people are either getting time served in pretrial detention, or they're getting sentences of probation, or they're having their cases, you know, their sentences deferred. So that's number one. Number two is if you look at

the average prisoner, this is someone who has somewhere between 10 and 12 prior arrests and about five prior convictions. These are not people who have been denied second chances. So then the question becomes, well, is it in fact better to release these people out into the community rather than incarcerate them? And I think the answer to that question is obviously no. And the reason I think that is because I've looked at our recidivism data and our recidivism data show consistently that somewhere in the range of 80% of state prisoners will re-offend at least once when they're released. Over a 10-year period, released state prisoners will generate five re-arrests. And that's a lot considering the fact that a good chunk of them will actually find themselves back in prison before that 10-year period is up, which means that they won't be on the street to generate more rearrests. And again, this is a problem that is not going to be evenly distributed.

So if we're going to talk about the overrepresentation of certain racial groups in our incarcerated population, we also have to talk about the disparities with respect to the distribution of the risks associated with decarceration. If crime goes up, we know that it's not going to go up in rich white communities. That's just not the reality. And so I just always ask people who harp on the racial disparities in incarceration, why they aren't equally concerned with the racial disparities in incarceration, why they aren't equally concerned with the racial disparities in victimization. Again, I repeat myself, but the black male homicide victimization rate in this country is 10x that of the white male homicide victimization rate. That is a massive, consistent, and incredibly stark disparity that ought to inform our decisions with respect to whether we should pursue large

scale decarceration, which we simply cannot safely pursue. I mean, you know, the other thing too, is like, if you just look at the top line disparities, yeah, it looks bad because, you know, black and brown men are X percent of the population, but X plus some other number percent of the prison population. And the implication is that, you know, well, this is just a function of racial animus within the system. But that's just not true when you actually look at, you know, at the data and control for race neutral factors that would explain incarceration, the disparity shrinks to almost nothing, right? So when you control for the type of crime committed, the

severity of the crime committed, the age and criminal histories of the offenders, the jurisdiction in which the crime was committed, the disparity in sentencing basically comes down to a matter of weeks, maybe a couple months, which would be a really weird way for judges to manifest their racial animus toward a particular group. And so, you know, it really is one of the more frustrating points that I find myself sort of repeatedly responding to, because, you know, it just continues to commit the same two errors, which is, one, you're not actually controlling for all the relevant factors that might explain the top line disparity that you're harping on. And two, you're assuming that whatever disparity remains after you control for those factors, which we know is very, very small, you're attributing that to racial animus without any real basis for that, right? Just because we haven't identified some obvious factor that

explains a disparity doesn't mean that racism is the only other explanation. Right. Of course, that's exactly the opposite of what Ibram X. Kendi believes. Any disparity means racism. And the only answer is racism against the dominant group. The can we just spend one minute on why did you did you take a look at why? Why? Why do black men disproportionately commit the violent crime? Right. Like that seems like a relevant question. I'm sure Kendi would tell me because of white supremacy. You know, we've set up the system in a way that that gives them no chance in life, and therefore they resort to a life of crime. But what is the actual answer? Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm not sure I have the actual answer. I suspect that culture is a big

explanation. It's a big part of the explanation. If you, you know, look at the arguments of people like Kendi and other, you know, sort of decarceration activists, what they'll say is that, well, you know, the broader economic system is sort of rigged against, you know, black men in particular. But that doesn't seem quite right to me. First off, the majority of blacks in our society don't commit crimes, they're completely law abiding, right? So that, that, that seems an overly broad explanation for a problem that is very hyper concentrated within a subset of that population. But it also is in tension with the sort of lack of, of, of nexus between the sort of socioeconomic indicators

that are being alluded to and the kinds of violence that we're seeing. But if you look at things like poverty rate, unemployment rate, they don't actually provide clear explanations for violent crime. The poverty rate in New York City, for example, has remained essentially steady since the mid-1980s. And yet we've seen a massive decline in homicides over that period. If you look at the Great Recession, we saw the unemployment rate in this nation nearly double. And yet homicides declined 15% during that period. Homicides didn't rise in New York City, didn't rise in Chicago. And so, you know, that just doesn't make a ton of sense. You know, there's also what criminologist Barry Latzer likes to call crime adversity mismatch,

which is that you can actually sort of identify different culturally identifiable groups and, you know, sort of compare them with respect to socioeconomic status. And what you'll see are sort of consistencies in terms of socioeconomic status, but inconsistencies in terms of involvement in violent crime. I mean, so in New York, for example, black New Yorkers experience poverty at a lower rate than Asian New Yorkers and Hispanic New Yorkers, yet are represented in among violent crime suspects at much higher rates than both of those groups. So, you know, the sort of basic claim that the sort of economic system is really at the root of these differences, I don't think holds much water. And that kind of leaves us with a potential argument in favor of a cultural explanation, which does make some sense. I mean, I think there's some really good work that's been done on this in the past. And I'm thinking now, like Elijah Anderson's 1992 book, I want to say, Code of the Street, where he embedded himself in North Philadelphia and sort of identified the

prevailing social mores. And what he found, you know, through this kind of anthropological study was that there was a sort of culture that elevated violence as a legitimate means of respect acquisition and as a legitimate means of dispute resolution. And it's that culture that explains the disparate rates of violent crime in those areas as compared to other areas. And, you know, I do think that it's time, you know, for us to start grappling with the possibility that there's something to that. I know the culture word, you know, makes lots of people really uncomfortable. But, you know, the other explanations just don't seem to sort of fit the problem very well. I did some stories on inner city Chicago a couple of years ago and,

and went right into the heart of, you know, the problem. And it was so, it was such a, there was such despair in the community. I talked to a lot of moms whose sons were in prison, whose husbands were in prison, who live in a in a community where their kid could be shot at any moment for absolutely nothing. And there will be absolutely no criminal penalties nine times out of 10 for the shooter. And it's to the point where, like, you could get shot just for leaving the neighborhood like if you leave the the one neighborhood that's controlled by certain gangs or certain people and cross over say for example the predominantly black neighborhood into the predominantly hispanic neighborhood that can be a a lethal a fatal offense and um you can you can be somebody who's trying to better his life you can be going to a community center trying to you know take extra classes and still get shot in a

drive-by on your walk out like there's no respect for you know what this kid's trying to take extra classes and still get shot in a drive-by on your walkout. There's no respect for, you know what, this kid's trying to get out. This kid's trying to make better of himself and help his mom and do that. No. So I can see how you, and of course, most of these homes are fatherless and so on, but it's like, I can see how you'd be living by a different code that would lead you to say, I don't follow the normal rules and no one's really going to make me and just F this system that doesn't give a shit about me or anybody I love. Yeah. No, I think that the broken homes point is also really important because, you know, one of the things that the research on family structure tells us is that two parents

are generally better than one, assuming that both parents are pro-social in their dispositions. And when you have an absent parent or you have the presence of an antisocial parent, the socialization process for young children becomes much more likely to break down. And when the socialization process breaks down, that's much more likely to result in conduct disorders, which can then metastasize into full blown personality disorders. And one of the things that people don't really talk much about is the fact that in the general male population in this country, something like antisocial personality disorder has a prevalence rate of between two and 4%.

But in prison settings, it has a prevalence rate of between 40 and 70 percent, which is massive. That's a much higher rate even than poverty, right? So antisocial personality disorder is more common among prisoners than poverty. So is substance use disorder, which is another thing that we know is very likely to come from small children who develop diagnosable conduct disorders, And we know that conduct disorders are much more likely to develop if the socialization process breaks down, which is much more likely to break down if you don't have two pro-social parents in the house sort of dedicated to that process. I mean, people kind of think that children are born into the world generally good and that we learn how to be bad. But I think anyone with toddlers knows that that's not true. You know, our sort of natural disposition as, you know,

uncivilized humans is to use violence and our parents and our teachers socialize us out of that. And when that process breaks down, it's problematic. Wow. All right. Up next, we're going to get into some specifics. There have been some horrific crime videos making the rounds in the news. And I have to say, for good reason, because it does seem to speak to a general deterioration in our humanity. So why? Why? And what is the answer? Raphael's got thoughts. That's next. And remember, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. The YouTube channel is on fire right now. Don't miss all the fun happening over there.

If you prefer an audio podcast, follow, download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcast for free. And there you will find our full archives, including the very first time Raphael was on in episode 363. Check it out. Raphael, let's talk about what we're seeing. I mean, of course, I live in the New York area and it's horrendous what's happening here. I lived in New York in the late 1990s. I lived downtown. I rode the sixth train that you mentioned about. This is during the Giuliani era when things started to get better, you know, and then we had Bloomberg. Thanks to Giuliani and Bloomberg, we had a nice long time here in New York where you could live in a neighborhood without having to worry about crime that much.

Boy, how things have changed under our horrific last mayor, the soft on crime DA that we now have now and so on. But there was this one video that really underscored just how we've lost our moral compass. We've we've lost our connection, our humanity. And it happened just the other day. A dead man, a man was run over by a truck in Midtown Manhattan. I think it was 8th Avenue and 44th Street, which is right right in Midtown Manhattan. I think it was 8th Avenue and 44th Street, which is right in Midtown. And the guy was in his young 50s. He was there underneath the wheel of the truck, dead. It's a tragedy. And some guy ran over and pickpocketed him to the point where they couldn't even identify the guy without

checking dental records later because he took his ID. And the worst part of it, maybe, I don't know, it's hard to pick, is he was cheered on. These New Yorkers standing there right in the middle of Midtown New York cheered him. I'm going to play it. You can see it on YouTube later and our listening audience will hear the exuberant cheers as this man picked the pocket of a dead man in Midtown. They loved it. The man's still underneath the enormous wheel of the truck, dead in front. I don't even know what to say. We've lost our humanity. Yeah.

Yeah, there really aren't any words that fully capture just a function of poverty this is just you know someone trying to make ends meet because they're desperate you that that doesn't come with the laughter that doesn't come with the go ahead gangster i mean you know what is that it's i think you're exactly right i think in a lot of ways um too many people are becoming far too desensitized to tragedy and gore and violence and and that's only going to breed more of it. Yeah, and they see it everywhere. They see it in the New York City subway. Former New York governor, Democrat Patterson, came out this week, I think it was,

and said, I have never felt more unsafe in my life in New York City, ever. This is a lifetime record for him. I think a lot of people are feeling that. You cannot take the subway anymore. I would not take the subway. I took the subway. You mentioned the 6th Street.

I took it every day, every day. When I was a young lawyer practicing in Manhattan in 1997 through 1999, every day I took it. I would not take the subway anymore. Hell no. I saw you had a tweet the other day about the murder rate down in the subway and how we're seeing it go up and up and up this year i think it's they've had seven this year seven people get get killed that doesn't count all the people have just been stabbed in the face and stabbed in the shoulder and these are young dads young moms doing nothing nothing wrong um and people say well it's only seven okay well it

it tends to be one one per year seven's a huge increase it's the point you were making and the videos are every day we see another one of people down in the subway harassing people here's just one bizarre one just to show the viewers at home some i think it was women dressed as green goblins took to the subway and committed a crime um this is just a video it was on october 2nd i don't even know what they're doing i don't even know this is like organized crime who think they think it's funny they think it's going to be like a laugh riot to deck themselves out in bizarre neon green body suits brutally attacking and mobbing two 19 year olds where time square time square subway station 2 a.m after one of the victims

committed the sin of apparently bumping into them happens over and over nine times out of 10 rafael though not always it's some homeless person shoving somebody onto the tracks yeah no this is a real problem i mean people try to downplay it and say, oh, well, it's only seven. Yeah, well, it's only seven compared to one or zero, right, in prior years before 2020. And that doesn't even begin to account for the fact that we have significantly lower ridership so that on our best day, we're at about 70% of what our pre-pandemic ridership was. So the rate's even higher when you account for that change. But basically in the last three years, we have seen a decade's worth of subway murders compressed into three years, less than three years, really,

because 2022 isn't over yet. That's a massive change. And it's a change that really matters for the future health of the city, right city. People don't take public transportation out of fear, which is a completely reasonable thing to do. You know, our family got a car recently when my wife took a job in the Bronx because I just didn't want her taking the subway, you know, at six o'clock in the morning by herself and at six o'clock at night by herself. And, you know, I suspect lots of people who can afford to and who are fortunate enough to be in that position are making similar decisions, if not deciding to leave the city altogether on that basis. And that's, that's really, really not good for the future of New York, which depends on a tax base of people that really valued having a 24 seven public transportation system that was safe. I mean, I remember being, you know,

young and in college and, you know, in my young professional life, you know, taking the subway home from a bar at 2.30 in the morning, not thinking twice about, you know, closing my eyes and taking a nap. Now, when I take the subway, I don't even, you know, turn my headphones on. You know, I do feel tense and sometimes afraid. I mean, for the first time in my life, actually, in 2020, I changed cars out of fear of someone who was in the car. I'd never done that. I'd been riding the subway by myself since I'm nine yearss. And I'm telling you, like young women in their 20s are the ones who get attacked. I mean, so it's like, you know, when you're a young woman in your 20s, you're at think that, you know, we see an overrepresentation of people suffering from mental illness among subway attackers. But what's interesting to me about that is that they're not quite so mentally ill as to attack, you know, fit, muscular, 25 year old guy in the prime of his life, they tend to pick on weaker targets, who aren't paying attention who are unsuspecting. And it's just one of the reasons that more has to be done to get the subways under control. Because again, if people

leave that system abruptly, and they already have, right? Again, on our best day, we're at about 70% of pre-pandemic ridership. That system, which is already financially taxed, is going to suffer and be degraded further. And that, I think, spells real trouble for the future health of New York as a city. How has policy led to this? You know, how I'm very curious, you know, from the homelessness that we see everywhere that why are people naked everywhere now? I mean, like a video a day comes out of somebody naked committing a crime, misbehaving with police down in the subway all the time, all the times and early 80s has a lot to do with it.

We have sort of built our mental health system in a way that has moved further and further away from models that prioritize real supervision so that people can actually be forced into compliance with taking medication so that they can be healthy. This idea that people who are suffering from acute mental illness can just be trusted to go out into the world and take care of themselves is incredibly misguided. And I think the misguided nature of that idea is being illustrated for everyone to see. I mean, when I see someone who is naked on the floor of the subway talking to himself, I don't see compassion, right? There's nothing compassionate about that. Again, there were lots of problems with our mental health institutions, which is one of the reasons why there was such a backlash against them. But as is the case with our broader criminal justice policy, the response to a perceived problem cannot be throwing the baby

out with the bathwater because oftentimes the unintended consequences of that kind of policy are worse. And I think we're seeing exactly that. I mean, these are unstable individuals who need to be protected from themselves and who other people need to be protected from as well. We're not doing them any favors by allowing them to roam the subways or to roam the streets, to live unhealthily, to not take medications, to suffer from the psychosis that they're suffering from, and that they're often exacerbating by taking drugs as well, which is another big part of this. And by the way, our mayor in New York, ourA. basically said, I'm not going to go after anybody for jumping the fare. So it's like, welcome. Go on in there, homeless people and

people who are mentally unwell. You're not going to get prosecuted for jumping the turnstile. You don't have to pay your fare way in. This would be a great place for you to hang out. No one's going to bother you is essentially what he said. And guess what? They did it. And they started bothering others in record numbers. Yeah, yeah. I think part of it, too, had to do with the pandemic insofar as the subways were essentially emptied. And, you know, there were no real sort of capable guardians in the system keeping order. And, you know, I think as we see in lots of aspects of life, it's very easy to tear something down and not so easy to build something up. I just think about my own physical experience during the pandemic. I was really in shape going into it. And within two months, I was in the worst shape ever. Torn down. Eat a few donuts and have a couple of cocktails at night

and there goes your beach bod. Well, I think the same can be said for safety in the city. It takes a lot of hard work and vigilance to build up to the point that New York got to. And what we're seeing is a much more rapid deterioration than I think anyone really expected as a result of these kinds of policy approaches. I mean, order maintenance has to be a central part of the mission of the city's criminal justice apparatus. The idea that we can just ignore order maintenance and focus on serious crime is just so wrong in so many ways. And one of the ways is that it ignores the significant overlap between people who commit sort of public order offenses and more serious crime. Just the other day- Explain order maintenance.

You know, like things like enforcing laws against littering, enforcing laws against fare evasion, enforcing laws against public urination and public defecation and open air drug use. All of these things, they have a lot of effects. One of them is that it sends a signal to people that they process in the following way. It's like when I go into the subway and I see someone injecting heroin into their arm on my subway platform, as I saw just very recently, what that tells you is that that person feels completely comfortable engaging in that antisocial behavior in that space. And if they feel comfortable, then it's because no one else is in charge of the space. And if no one is in charge, then anything goes. And if anything goes and anything can happen to me, which means that I'm vulnerable. That's how

people process that psychologically. This is the great innovation of the broken windows theory to recognize the psychological impact of exposure to consistent public disorder. When that happens, people do exactly what they're doing now, which is avoid those public spaces that they see as unsafe in greater numbers, which in turn makes them even more vulnerable to more serious kinds of crime. And then on top of that, I mean, there just really isn't such thing as an exclusively violent criminal, right? This idea that we can just sort of take resources from order maintenance and put them towards violent crime investigations is wrong in the following way, which is that there's no one who says, like, I'm just a violent criminal, right? I don't jump the turnstile. I don't litter. I don't drive past the speed limit. That's not my thing. Right. That just doesn't exist. People who commit serious violent crime are often very antisocial in their dispositions. And that antisocial disposition will manifest itself in a multitude of ways, including in the commission of quality of life offenses,

which is one of the reasons why when Commissioner Bratton took over the transit police in 1990, they had such success in lowering the crime rate underground with respect to their fair evasion program, because one in seven fair evaders had an open warrant and one in something like 20 or 21 were found to be carrying an illegal weapon. So, you know, acknowledging that overlap, I think is kind of step one towards getting back to a system that recognizes the importance of order maintenance. These are not just victimless crimes, right? You may not be able to identify an individual victim, but the victim is the neighborhood. The victim is the public space itself. And that needs to get reintegrated into our broader crime fighting strategy. You know, this is reminding me a bit of, as you know, we left New York because of the

lunacy in the public and the private schools. It's also happening in the public schools, but moved to Connecticut and our kids are in private school out here and our sons are at an all boys school. And I love the head of school. He's he's great on all these issues. And he at our annual dinner the other week was talking about how he was endorsing the broken windows policy of Giuliani and saying, you know, that kind of approach to life works, not only when it comes to crime, but even when it comes to the raising of young men, young boys and men. And he was saying how they take a similar approach in that he was encouraging us to have our children make their beds every day, to have chores that they really have to do, real responsibilities that

they have to live up to. He was saying that's one of the reasons why they have them say the pledge in the lower school every morning. And it reminded me of my older son's complaint that they go outside and they play at recess and they have to, they have to wear their little uniforms, you know, they have a little suit and tie or coat and tie and they play and they run around. And then before they go in for their lunch, they have to tuck in their shirts. They have to fix their ties. They have to make sure their jackets are on. They have to make sure they're not covered in dirt. And my son found it annoying because he just wants to eat, you know, he's hungry and they don't have a lot of time to eat. And the head of school is explaining separately, very, you, very coincidentally,

the same week my son had complained about this to me, that they make them do that too for very good reason. They're trying to instill order in these kids, not by saying like, walk a straight line, shoulders back, no talking, just respect, respect for one's self, for one's environment, for one's elders, for one's elders and a system, you know, that acknowledges the importance of that. Right. That will produce a responsible citizen who takes himself seriously. And those around him, you know, he treats them respectfully. So anyway, it's all connected. It's all connected. And you let them jump the turnstile or urinate on the subway bench. Or the one guy pushed somebody off the subway onto the tracks in the morning just this past two weeks in New York.

And thank God the guy lived. But later that afternoon, did the same thing. He did it to somebody else. It's like one little step over the line leads to a bigger step, leads to a bigger step, and then you're making only big steps. So the small stuff matters. It does. It does. And it reflects on society more broadly, right? If you enforce order, you are communicating what the expectations are. And believe it or not, that does affect how people behave in those public spaces. And if you fail to enforce those rules, those rules essentially go away because, you know, enforcement matters.

It matters that we communicate what it is that we expect of our fellow citizens. And I think we've lost sight of that as a city. I think lots of cities have lost sight of that. But, you know, New York is really kind of the city on a hill. And, you know, as was the case in the 90s, when we were moving in the right direction, as New York goes, so go the rest of the country in a lot of ways. And so, you know, I think this is a real important moment for New York to step up and set an example again. And, you know, I hope we can do that. I think Mayor Adams has his head in the right place. I think the NYPD has its heart in the right place. What I fear is that the broader system, you know, our DAs are, you know, lawmakers in the city council who are incredibly radical. Our lawmakers in Albany are just not on the same page. And until that happens, I think we're going to continue to see things get worse. We have a butted soundbite from Gianna Caldwell of Fox News, whose younger brother, who's just 18, was killed in Chicago. And he's been speaking out about it.

And he's also doing reporting on it. By the way, Chicago, we haven't touched on it this time. We talked about it last time you were here. Chicago is now about to end cash bail entirely. New York and New Jersey passed legislation that largely curtails the use of cash bail. So you basically just write out back on the streets after you get accused of a crime and illinois is going to end it all together though people accused of some of the worst crimes forcible felony stalking and domestic abuse will

be exempt from pre-trial release so they think that that's a reasonable compromise like the worst felons won't won't be getting prerial release, but everybody else will get turned out on the street immediately. Anyway, I mentioned it just because Gianno has been doing good reporting. His brother got killed in Chicago. And now Gianno took a microphone to some of these folks here in New York, like Chuck Schumer, Jerry Nadler. He went they were down in Washington, but some of the lawmakers are from New York and tried to get some accountability from them on what they've done and the policies they've pushed. And it's pretty extraordinary how this went. It was in order of appearance that you hear Jerry Nadler, Chuck Schumer, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, the last two in particular, huge defund the policers.

Take a listen to how that went. Oh, yeah. I can't do it now. I can't talk now. I'm going to be pretty busy. Tomorrow. Is that where? Who should we reach out to in your office, Congressman? You just want to talk about the crime crisis in America.

The elevator door is closed. Any reaction to the crime crisis in America? Crime is up, sir. There's a crisis. You have any reaction? You're a leader. I would think you would have a reaction to what's going on in the country. You supported to defund the police movement. It led to a rise in crime. Do you have any reaction? Any reaction? No reaction? It impacts your citizens. Any reaction to the rise in violent crime across the country, which is impacting students?

Well, I mean, our work on student debt cancellation is a direct response to what I would consider to be policy violence. You mentioned policy violence. I just want to follow up on that. She got your question. She got. Yeah, I know the policy violence. I just wanted to know. Do you feel that the police should still be defunded? Shoot your note. We'll set up.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. But policy. Hurry. Her response. Ayanna Press has been one of the worst on defund the police. Her response is, well, student debt. That's what's leading to all these, this uptick in crime. I don't even know, like, this is going to come arguments as silly as that. I mean, it really is just beyond the pale. I mean, what do you even say to that? It's as if she just, you know, doesn't care about being, you know, called out. And I suspect she doesn't in part because she just sees herself as, you know, a team member and she's going to be loyal to her team, no matter what the facts say. But yeah, this is the problem. This kind of takes us full circle to the beginning of our conversation. This is what the American people are being told now to sort of close their eyes to, to not believe their lying eyes. The Democratic Party has a problem with individuals like this who just are not willing to engage on this issue, at least not in a serious

way. The reality is that we have experimented with the lives of people who live in already distressed communities. It's like walking into a casino and gambling with the 401k of a complete stranger. We're going down a policy road that makes it less likely that crimes will be solved, that makes it less likely that crimes will result in incarcerations, that makes it much harder for police to be proactive. And that's all happening in the midst of a nearly unprecedented crisis. I mean, I say unprecedented not because crime has never been higher, but because in 2020, we saw the single largest year over year increase in homicides that our country has ever seen in recorded history. That should matter. And, you know, it just doesn't seem to be getting the attention that it deserves. And I suspect that's because our broader criminal

justice and policing debates have moved concerns, you know, for people who come into contact with the criminal justice system to the front burner of those debates and move concerns for the potential victims of those individuals to the back burner. And I think that needs to change. We need to rebalance that debate. I mean, you know, these are both important considerations, but I suspect that we have lost sight of the true and first duty of government, which is to provide for the public safety. We have definitely seen this raised in debates for the Senate seats in Ohio, in Wisconsin. It's become a campaign issue in terms of the ads in places like Pennsylvania, certainly in New York now in the gubernatorial race, we're seeing it.

So on and on, these Republicans are starting to get on message and remind people of how we got to this place. It wasn't accidental. It didn't have to happen. And it can be undone. Rafael Manguel, thank you so much for all the great, great work you've done on this criminal injustice is the book. Check it out.

Thank you. work you've done in this criminal injustice is the book check it out thank you coming up a new story of a trans woman dominating over biological women in a women's sport uh and the people who run the sport couldn't care less one of the biological women is here in a moment to speak out this is another leah thomas speak out. This is another Leah Thomas situation. So this woman is brave to come on and tell us what's happening. That's up next in a Megyn Kelly show exclusive. Don't go away. The world of sports continues to navigate through the inclusion of trans players in gender specific leagues and always to the disadvantage of biological women.

Professional disc golf is experiencing its own Leah Thomas moment right now with trans women winning top awards and monetary prizes at the expense of the biological women. Some female disc golfers are now speaking out, including our next guest, Jennifer Castro. She's here to share why she is concerned about the position the Professional Disc Golf Association is taking on trans players. Jennifer, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for being here. So just explain for our audience what disc golf is, because not everybody knows that sport. Disc golf is basically playing golf, but instead of a hole in the ground, there's a basket and we're throwing Frisbees. We say discs now, but older generations still say Frisbee. Okay. Okay. Got it. And this is actually, I mean, it's got a very devoted following and there are people who've been working on this for decades of their lives.

And as you move up in the rankings and the competitions become more professional, you can make some good money as a winner or competitor in these competitions. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And we're sponsors alone are paying lots of money to have players represent them. So it's there's a lot of money to be made in the sport. And like most sports, there's a men's league and a women's league. Yes. Okay. So you actually, let me correct you. It's not men's, it's a mixed league. So it's primarily men that play in that division, but it's not considered men's. It's now mixed. So a trans man can play against the biological men.

Correct. Yeah. Which of course, I mean, it never works the other way. You know, it's like, that's fine. They can say that's fine, but they'll never win. So is it a situation where a man's physical advantages over a woman could be helpful to like a trans woman is a biological man. So like in the Leah Thomas situation, we could see that this, this man, biological man had physical advantages over the other swimmers. Is this the same situation?

Oh yeah, definitely. We are absolutely seeing that across the board. Recently, Natalie Ryan just won the distance competition and through 458 feet. The average woman is about 250. So that makes it a big advantage for these transgender players. This is Natalie Ryan that we're showing on the screen right now.

So you're saying that the trans women like Natalie can throw the Frisbee much farther than the biological women can. Okay. Absolutely. And that's obviously an advantage because you want to make the Frisbee and the hole in as few throws as possible. Precisely. Okay. So you're an amateur player, right? You're not a professional player.

Correct. And what was the first you noticed trans women are coming into this sport and they're starting to crush the biological women? Honestly, when I started playing about three years ago locally to where I was at at the time, there was a transgender player. But however, she was playing in the mixed division. So I have a lot of respect for her because she knows what her talent level is and that she can handle her own. And so she played plays in the mixed division. But then we started seeing a bunch of transgenders in the female divisions and I'm watching it on TV and I'm just seeing all these biological women just being crushed and having their financial security basically at risk the entire time yeah their financial security exactly because they're not going to win that's your point like yeah in most of these competitions they're going to lose to the trans women all right so then there

was an event at um you tell me how you how you pronounce this i'd see it as deglo um which is a big elite event when was that and what happened uh that was back in july july um and natalie ryan took first place in that it was the first time uh she had won a major event um and took such a prize purse from the biological females. How much did Natalie win? I don't have the exact number offhand. I believe it was six. Actually, it was six grand. Six thousand bucks. That's how much it was. Six thousand, yes. And how often do these competitions come along? Oh, they're all the time.

These pros are touring all the time. Locally, I have one about every weekend, sometimes two. So you could really support yourself doing this if you're good at it. Yes. If you're pro, yes. And how long has Natalie Ryan, this trans woman, been playing disc golf? Do you know? Three years. Three years as a woman, been playing disc golf? Do you know? Three years.

Three years as a woman or just three years total? Three years total. She's been playing about as long as I have. And so she goes up against biological women who've been playing the sport for 10 plus years. And how's that going? Honestly, it's kind of defeating because a lot of the females work day in and day night, day in and day out, you know, to make sure that their game is to a level where they can, you know, get the furthest distance and be the best in their

fields. Cause females, if you're not one of the best, you're not going to get a sponsorship, you know, worth, worth it financially. So they're doing the best, you're not going to get a sponsorship worth it financially. So they're doing the best they can and they can't keep up with these men. And so the spotlight is in essence being taken away from them. And instead of them being celebrated like they should be, they're basically being forgotten. Or the opposite, which is happening now, it's the transgender is getting all of the limelight and it's kind of almost negative. Negative to be a biological woman, like you're not the fun, sexy, exciting new thing. Exactly.

We're not even we're like a blip now because the transgender in disc golf happens to be the big story. Wow. And it's not just Natalie Ryan. It looks like there's a couple of trans players, one of whom I know you raised this issue, Chloe Alice. We have on camera admitting that Chloe sometimes forgets to take Chloe's, quote, pretty pills, which is what Chloe needs to take to transition from male to female. Chloe's talking about, I guess, estrogen and whatever Chloe has to take to appear and seem, I guess, I don't know how to say it, more female than Chloe actually is because Chloe's a biological man. Here's that soundbite. It's number 12. They give me medicine. I'm supposed to take it twice a day, every day. They're called my pretty pills. I forget to take these a lot. You know, just the medicine that's solely responsible for

creating a lot of what I am today. Just forget, whatever. It's whatever. Three days will go by and I'll like remember, oh, I haven't taken my pills. If I stop taking these for an extended period of time, I will start reverting back, like transitioning back to how my natural testosterone works. And okay, so there may be a lot of people out there saying, well, if the testosterone spiked up, disc golf would tell this person, Chloe, you may no longer compete because your testosterone rose to a level that was not appropriate for the women's division. But is that true? Not at all. We recently found out that they don't do any testing whatsoever. So you found this out because you decided as an amateur player, which I have to tip my hat to you because it's pretty ballsy, to do a little experiment on

whether they were actually doing any enforcement to make sure testosterone levels were at a certain place or that these are not just, you know, completely biological men claiming that they're women and overnight playing in the women's league. And tell us about how that went. Back in August, August 30th, I decided to set up an email account because I kind of wanted to know how it was working from the ground up to get some kind of answers. So I set up this email and I messaged the board and asked them, I did an inquiry asking them, as a transgender woman, do I need to document or show any documentation, prove that I had the surgery, et cetera. And I was told that a medical committee

member would get back in touch with me. And the person who reached back out to me happened to be Elaine King, who is big in the disc golf world and very respectable woman in the FPO field. So she was the one that messaged me back, basically letting me know that one, they don't test, they don't look for, I don't need to have the surgery. All I had to do was basically read the criteria. And if I felt that I met the criteria, then I could definitely join as a female. And what about testosterone levels? Would they ever be checked? No. testosterone levels, would they ever be checked? No, the only time anything ever gets checked is

when they started off this golf as a man and decided that they wanted to transition. In that case, they would have to show 12 months straight of being under 10 nano nanomoles per liter of testosterone to make it acceptable and fair, or they have to have the surgery, the reassignment surgery. And Chloe is one that has neither. So in essence, she is a man playing against women. Chloe came on the scene as a trans player, like Chloe wasn't Clyde. Chloe actually started as Chloe did did start as a man and she took two years off but the way um we've looked at it it's nothing if they're not being asked for anything she didn't supply anything we highly doubt the the pdga is definitely not letting us know whether anybody

has submitted anything and we can't do anything we We can't challenge it. We can't, you know, show anything. The only time we can challenge it is if we have actual evidence. And the only evidence that'll work is if a doctor breaks HIPAA and gives us the documentation we need. And they're not going to do that. So you can't just say we want Chloe tested because Chloe looks exactly like a man and is the size of a man and was playing as a man very recently. So we want the testosterone tested because to keep it fair, you can't do that. You need somebody to actually leak to you a test or some sort of documentation that you could bring to them. Yeah, we need to have medical documentation to prove it or else the medical committee will just throw out the challenge,

is what I was told. So they're basically encouraging you to commit a crime to investigate this issue. From what I was told is the PDHA is not big enough yet to be able to do the medical testing. So they've got it written in their bylaws that this is what they have to do in order to play as a female. But they've openly admitted they don't have the money to make sure that the testing is being carried out. So they just expect nobody to challenge it.

And I mean, I don't know if this would be sufficient to you, but could they go back to Chloe and say, you need to prove it. You need to submit your testing to us on your own dime. I would hope so. Plenty of people have put in challenges, but we're getting a copy and paste response on it. So I highly doubt that they're doing anything. What's the copy and paste response? It's basically saying that the subcommittee and the medical committee are meeting soon, which happened to be last night, to take a vote on it and submit their results to the board of directors

on what they think should be done as far as transgender is playing with females. So do you think they're reevaluating it? Do you think there's a chance that this Chloe and Natalie Ryan, and I know there's a couple of others might get booted out of the women's league uh i would certainly hope so but we're not holding our breath every everything that's been thrown out there proven has been combated with uh very uh a very lack response they're they're not helping out in any way, shape or form. And the currently the BOD sits where there's four who are biased leaning towards this happening and two who aren't. So

we're kind of the only way we can make a change is if it gets out there. And unfortunately, sponsors aren't letting the pros speak and the pros are the ones that need to be able to speak. So the PDGA sees that there's an issue I want to talk about the pros I want to talk about them yeah I'm just an amateur let me yeah so you've got more freedom but what that four two makeup on the board that's going to decide this um do we know anything about those folks and what their leanings are you say you think it's you know four who want the trans people to compete against the women and two who might not. Like, I mean, because I only ask because we've seen this happen time and time again, where the entire board making the decision is men or trans women.

And there's no biological woman on the board representing them who are the ones who are going to suffer if it goes the wrong way yeah we have uh two men that are definitely for it uh we have a transgender who's obviously for it and then we have a doctor who specializes in uh that field so she is also very for it of course uh like i'm telling you there's no hope you can take it to the bank so i know i read the quillette piece which they which is how i found you and i thought it was really interesting and they were saying that when you got your receipt your response email from this elaine king who's the head of the medical community or committee um she she informed you that no proof this is when she thought you were a trans woman versus on your

based on your email no proof of gender reassignment surgery is needed testing is not done to make sure testosterone level is at the proper levels nothing will be monitored uh once you are a member of the group and allowed to play no one can challenge a trans woman based on looks or ability, even though, I mean, it's so obvious when we show that video of Natalie Ryan throwing the disc. I mean, this is clearly a man. With all due respect, I understand that this person identifies as trans, but this is clearly a biological man who's made actually very little effort to appear female. In order to challenge, we must have proof. This is what you were just pointing out. You can't get proof without a doctor breaking HIPAA and that all you would have to do is read the criteria for playing in the women's league. And if you felt you met the criteria, that was all that was needed to register as a female in the gender protected division. I mean, this is no protection at all. This is basically a middle finger to the biological women competing as amateurs or pros. Exactly.

So have you heard from the pros? Have any of the pros who feel less able to speak out spoken to you off the record behind the scenes? I've spoken to some behind the scenes and I have yet to speak to one who is actually for it. Not one. And I, I truly invite them to message me or get in contact with me. Cause I'd love to hear a different point of view, but we have science on our side and they need to go off a science on this

because we fought for years to get this protected with division. And just to go back and undo it it's basically two mixed divisions again two mixed divisions right where i see so you fought to get a female league so that you can get your own sponsorships and prize money and so on exactly so it'd be financially feasible for women to be able to be professional athletes in this field. So what are the women saying? You say you've spoken to a couple of them. How are they feeling? Some of them don't feel that their form is very great. A lot of these females, transgenders that are playing as female, they haven't been in the game very long.

And for them to be in the game and automatically be conquering in the sport, it's just baffling. And we're just dumbfounded by it. And we just feel like we're being robbed here. Nobody is listening. robbed here and nobody's listening um i have made an effort to like look everybody's individuals um pdga records like for example chloe alice who we were looking at before before she did her transition she was playing in men's advance amateur league she wasn't even professional she was an amateur so she was playing for plastic so for her to go and do this transition and come back and professionally play in the female league and winning and taking money from women it's like if you hadn't gone through this transition you

would still be playing for a disc and even even when she was playing advanced, she wasn't placing to even get free discs. So it's clearly an advantage here. It's just like the Leah Thomas situation where when Leah Thomas was Will Thomas, he was placing 500th plus in the league. That's where he was ranked. And then as soon as he said he was a woman, he was number one and winning tournaments,

including at the NCAA. So I understand as they reevaluate what they want their policy to be, they sent out some survey to all the professional disc golf association members last week. And it's causing some outrage. Why is that? the survey that was sent out, we were informed through email from the PDGA on an official letterhead that it was going to be through a university. They didn't tell us which one at the time, but it was supposed to help the board make a decision on what they should do about transgenders playing in the female divisions. And so when the email went out the very next day, and we all looked at it, it took about five minutes for everybody to get on social media outlets with just rage because

all about two questions had anything to do with the topic at all. The rest was, should my child be well-behaved or obedient? Or is it more on becoming for a woman to be pushy or for a man to be pushy? Are you left leaning on a scale from zero to seven? Or are you right leaning? It's like what? What? It had nothing to do with the topic on hand. So what like, are they just looking for cover? I don't understand. Like, why would they go through the effort? Because I think there's at least a couple of transgender questions on that survey. What's the point? What are the care whether you're left leaning or right leaning?

We couldn't quite understand it because nothing was like even out as far as like who was doing the survey university and stuff i actually saw in the um link that was sent to us that it was wd so i looked it up and i called western carolina university and i asked them hey who's responsible for doing this survey because a lot of us stop disc golfers have questions on it and he asked me to send him the link i did and when he received it and looked it up on his end he was like oh it's, it's associate professor Justin McKinney. I'm going to mess with this thing. McKinney? McKinney?

Anyway, he happens to be the old president of the Professional Disc Golf Association. So they were hiding this survey through the university without saying, hey, it's actually the board giving you this survey. It sounds agenda driven. I mean, that's the bottom line. It really is. So what happens to you as an amateur player aspiring to move up? I imagine what if they say transgender players can continue on as is no proof of anything required. What will you do? Myself and a whole lot of females that are playing right now, as well as men have decided

they're not going to re-up their membership with the professional disc golf association. If they don't make this right, it's just not fair. There's no point in us paying registration fees to get into these are not cheap. So we're putting our money into something in the hopes that we're going to get something back and when we don't because we have no Chance because there's a man playing in our division. Then there's really no point in registering whatsoever So a lot of people are just like i'm just not going to pay for men another membership this year How do the trans women react when they win and they beat all the biological women? Well, I can tell you, Natalie, Ryan definitely thinks that she is a ambassador for the sport now for transgender women and has a very almost cocky attitude about how great she is and she doesn't need to practice all that often and women are just like we're working in day in and day out to be able to beat that and for her

to be able to it's like it's no big deal it's like ouch you know it's just like leah thomas all over again who's completely unsympathetic to the plight of the women whose titles and trophies Leah has now taken. Jennifer, it is brave of you to speak out on this, but you're in the you're in the moral right. I think you know that. And we're going to continue to follow this. This is it's not right what's happening to you and to the other women in your sport. So please keep us keep us informed. OK, we'll do a follow-up when you get a ruling. I will do. Thank you so much. And we look forward to naming names

of the people who issue that ruling. Jennifer, all the best. Remember we talked about that story on the documentary focused on reformed terrorists that the left seemed to love until they decided it was somehow racist and turned against it? That filmmaker will be here exclusively tomorrow.

I just watched it. It's extraordinary. Don't miss it. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.