The Ricochet Podcast - Hullaballoon

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

There’s no other way to put it: the viral video showing Tyre Nichols vicious beating at the hands of Memphis police officers was shocking and despicable. Rafael Mangual — the head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute — joins James, Peter and Steve to explain why activists and politicians are wrong to see this as a vindication of their insistence on... Source

I'm dead serious about that. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips. No new taxes. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman. More than half the women in my cabinet, more than half the people in my cabinet, more than half the women in my administration are women. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson. Stephen Hayward is sitting in for Rob Long. I'm James Lilex, and today we talk to Rafael Manguel about policing and de-policing. So let's have ourselves a podcast. We never get bored!

Welcome. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 628. I'm James Lileks in Minnesota, Minneapolis, where it's a balmy seven degrees below zero. Stephen Hayward is sitting in for Rob Long, who's in Egypt, where it's hot. Stephen, where are you exactly? I'm in California, where we're shivering in 55-degree weather today. Go straight to hell. That's right, yeah. Also in California is Peter Robinson, who'll be with us in a second

as he resolves his connectivity issues. But while we're waiting for Peter, waiting for some sign, the people in Montana saw a sign that they didn't really expect to see this week. They looked up, and there apparently was an orb hanging in place, just floating along. And it turns out that it's a weather balloon from China that slipped its tether or got into the jet stream somehow and now it's terribly lost, and they're terribly sorry about it all.

Or are they? It appears that Bl blinken with his uh entourage of wink and a nod is delaying a trip to china oh that'll show them what is going on with this thing and why can't we shoot it down the idea that somehow it's going to scatter debris over the densely populated areas of montana seems suspect as does the idea that it's a spy balloon because well i've heard that the reason that they want to go low altitude is they can use ground penetrating radar to find out exactly what's down there and where, maybe, or perhaps it's just what it is, a weather balloon. Why do we have to be so suspicious,

Stephen? Why can't we trust the Chinese to say it is what it is? Well, you know, this runs my mind back to one of the comic moments late in the Cold War when you started wondering if the Soviet Union really had its act together. And you may remember this. Mr. Rust. Mr. Rust, Matthias Rust, the German teenager who flew a Cessna, you know, your basic low-cost prop plane, all the way across East Germany, all across Poland, through the threshold of Russia, and landed it successfully in Red Square. Gorbachev, by the way, after that, fired something like 50 senior military officials in the defense ministry, which I think he wanted to do anyway. But what an embarrassment.

And I'm sitting here thinking that we have been wrapped around our axle for the last, I don't know, several years now about Chinese high-tech spying. They're hacking TikTok. The DJI drones that Blue Yeti and I are fond of flying that maybe feed all of our videos straight to China. And all of a sudden, they do an old-fashioned low-tech balloon flight. And all I have to say is, where are those Jewish space lasers when we really need them? They couldn't take it out. It does make you sort of nostalgic for the old days of the Soviet Union when somebody did something wrong and they were fired for it as opposed to falling

out of a window. Now there would be 50 accidents of people tumbling out of their windows with the Putin method of defenestration. You're right. It's low tech and it does the job. But I'm not fond of it. I'm not fond of it. I'm not fond of what appears to be a sort of act of impotence. Does anybody believe, really, that they can't shoot it down? Or do we want to corral it and find out what wonderful stuff it has inside? I think they'd open it up and find a variety of things have been reverse engineered from Western plants that have been set up in China. I've told the story often enough that back in my electric razor days before Harry, I had a Phillips electric razor. Really nice. Really nice. But at some point, I needed another.

I can't remember why. And I bought one from Amazon, of course. And it was an exact, exact duplicate of the Phillips. They had just completely reverse engineered absolutely everything and added this cheery little backstory about your life and your all of these things that just made your blood run cold and you realize they're just stealing everything so the question is then what american manufacturer of weather balloons uh might they be talking to to find out what's on this thing and well we we'll never know i mean it's one of those stories that's just going to vanish and nobody will talk about it again. Just like we have stories of unmanned aerial phenomenon, the Tic Tacs that dive into the ocean and pop up and go away. And they say that they're real and we don't know where they're from.

And nobody really seems to talk about that much either. What are we talking about, though? We're talking about Hunter Biden's laptop. It's real and it's spectacular uh is that the sort of admission that they're making that the fact that he wants it back and he's suing people for having spilled its contents mean that it wasn't russian disinformation after all as those 50 intelligence officers told us yeah yeah peter i'm lost too i thought i thought james was heading into an ad there at some point, but I was wrong. No, you never know with James. We have Peter.

No, it's too early for an ad. I didn't know that Peter was with us. Welcome, Peter. You can join anytime. I'm here, yes. Thank you very much. I just checked, and my iMac is eight years old, and I guess that's the point at which things start. I just couldn't join on time because the Internet wouldn't hook up for some strange reason.

It was like a throwback to the old days when we had technical trouble every single time we recorded the show. On the Chinese spy balloon, if you already discussed this, shoot me down, not the balloon, what difference does it make? Don't we suppose that the Chinese have very, very good satellites, spy satellites monitoring us i mean here in silicon i have a buddy in silicon valley who worked for nasa and discovered to his amazement partly because he'd grown up in the czech republic um where there's memory of the communist days still and where nothing was public information he discovered to his amazement that enormous portions of satellite feeds were actually in the public domain. And so he's one of these people, I think there are three or four quite big companies now, that make available detailed satellite data.

If you're running a hedge fund and you want to know how the Chinese economy is really doing, he'll sell you analysis of satellite data that shows how many ships are leaving singapore today or how many ships are leaving headed into shanghai okay so i have to suppose that weather weather balloons just don't for once the chinese might even be telling the truth that it really was a weather balloon that got blown off course because it seems to me as my understanding of the technology is that there's not much a weather balloon can tell you that you don't already know from your spy satellites am i right speaking about speaking entirely out of my fundament as we were saying before we got here is that what i read on some of my sources is that if you're

down low you can do some analyses of uh you know what's down under the ground, penetrating radar. Oh, okay. A term I just made up. So that there may be something like that that you can't get from way up there. And then you just say it's a weather balloon. But the thing is, if indeed it is a weather balloon, or not a weather balloon,

but something that is interrogating our secret underground bases our layers uh that would be apparent once we shot it down and took a look at the tech exactly okay so that's the other i go now i swing down the other direction first of all i can't see why but but maybe there is stuff that it's observed but what difference does it make whether it's gathering new information or not? It's Chinese. It's over our country. What are they supposed to think about our willingness to defend Taiwan if we can't prick a weather balloon and knock it out of the sky? That just strikes me as madness. It's almost like it's a prank.

I mean, you almost wonder the Chinese don't have a sense of humor with this. Yeah, that's unlikely but yeah not something i ascribe to them exactly yeah obviously we have but am i over am i over reading this steve do you think is this it just seems to me one more sign of sort of foreign policy and national security dementia if you'll excuse the phrase we're just not paying attention, not following through. If a weather balloon from a clearly antagonistic country drifts over our continent, it ought to come down immediately. No questions asked. Bring it down. Is that not right? Yeah. Well, yeah. I don't know. I'm with you. I'm baffled by the whole thing. All right.

We would like to think that we would be able to send up Tom Cruise, cloned times four, who would jump out of the back of a plane. They would have a big net. The four of them would capture the thing, and then they would parachute. They would bring it down to Earth gently so it could be understood. That would be the way it works in the movies. We like to think that we have those capabilities. But even if we did, we obviously like the will, which i think is what everybody sort of agrees about the administration these days capabilities yeah but will is another thing so where else are we then let's shift our eyes domestically peter is there something in the news this week that has piqued you irritated yeah the hunter biden stuff

i've all i have wondered from the get-go what the law is concerning private information on a piece of personal property, that is to say a laptop, that you drop off at a repair shop and then forget to pick up. If the repair shop makes available, I mean, just, I don't have, you'll be relieved to hear, I don't have selfie porn and pictures of myself toking up on my laptop, but I have a lot of emails. If somebody, if I forgot my laptop, dropped it off, and X months later, my emails were available to all the world, I would seek legal redress. And I don't know what my lawyer would tell me. Have you guys looked into this? Do you know what the law is concerning this matter? Well, if you sign a contract that says after six months, the item shall be regarded as abandoned

and become the property of the person who has it. Well, that's true, too, yes. Then that's where it gets interesting. But I find it interesting, also, that we are having this legal discussion now when you know that no matter what, the Washington Post or the New York Times, if they found a laptop that used to belong to Donald J. Trump

or Donald J. Trump Jr. or anybody else who was a political enemy, there would be no conversation whatsoever about the divulge of the contents that would be necessary for the continuation of our democracy. Otherwise, it dies strangled in darkness. And as we've been told from the very beginning, Hunter Biden and his machinations and his dealings are utterly completely irrelevant to anything except him. And we should have sympathy for him. And that's about where it stops. So I find all the protestations about invasion of privacy and the rest of it to be a tad hypocritical.

Yeah, yeah. Well, no, I mean, from the press's point of view, position one, it's not real. Position two, it's a crime against humanity to make it public. Of course, it makes no sense. So, here's the other bit that has struck me in the last week or two. I get the feeling, I couldn't offer a detailed analysis on this, but I offer it to the two of you to see what your feeling is. I get the feeling that Kevin McCarthy's actually doing a pretty good job. He followed through and bounced three reprehensible Democrats off committees. Adam, what's the last name? Schiff, is it?

Adam Schiff, who is clearly a liar, gone, off intel. Eric Swalwell, who was having an affair with a Chinese spy, and the Democrats kept him on the Intel Committee. Kevin McCarthy, you're out of here. Ilhan Omar, what's her name? How does it be? Ilhan. Ilhan.

All right, Ilhan. I can't pronounce the name. And she's clearly anti-Semitic. Off she goes. She's not on foreign policy anymore. Gone. And as far as I can tell, again, I just look at, I pause for a moment when I see him in my Twitter feed, and he's well-spoken in his press

conferences. He conveys a sense of self-confidence in the way he carries himself, cheerful leaving the White House. The other day after talking to President Biden, we don't see eye to eye, but it looks to me as though we're going to be able to find common ground on the debt ceiling, I just think that this man who was pilloried and denounced and his simple intelligence denigrated, honestly, quite a lot by people on our side, is actually pulling off a pretty impressive first couple of weeks with the narrowest of majorities, and Kevin McCarthy is the important man in Washington right now. That strikes me as a pretty remarkable act. You guys? Yeah. I'm in heated agreement with you about that, Peter,

and a lot of division amongst some of my closest friends about McCarthy during all that speakership fight. And I think in particular on the Ilhan Omar question, by the way, James probably follows it since she's your representative, I think, or very close by. Yep. Yeah. You know, she said in an interview last week trying to do damage control, this is almost word for word, gosh,

I didn't realize that there were tropes about Jews and money. And this is the person who three or four years ago let fly with the Jews. It's all about the Benjamins. I mean, you can't hypnotize the Benjamins. Yeah, that's right. And there were some Republicans who were publicly opposed to bouncing her from the committee, and he got them in line. And I think that McCarthy has figured out instinctively or by calculation, it doesn't really matter, that his interest is in keeping the caucus unified and being bold and assertive and not giving in to a few dissidents who will wreck their speech. Okay. So I think in retrospect, the fight over his speakership, I think, and actually thought as it was going on, that this was probably going to be a good thing.

It was going to stiffen his spine. It was a little bit crazy at times and lots of room for criticism for some of the people like Matt Gaetz changing their demands and so forth. But I think that fight overall was quite good. And I'm suddenly, like you, optimistic about McCarthy as speaker. The general take here amongst the liberal community, at least as expressed on Reddit in Minnesota, is that Omar was bounced out because the Republicans hate their Islamophobes and they hate women of color. These are the only possible explanations you can have. And what's more, that this is an application of power the likes of which we've never seen before. That's absolutely unforgivable i mean yeah i mean

it's just it's baffling that you would do something like this you would gain control of an institution and then attempt to shape its constituent members in order to better express what your party stands for i mean just just just this blatant nazism gushing down the pipeline ought to make all of us terrified but then again we're supposed to be terrified by ron desantis as well who is um whose authoritarian instincts when it comes to education are uh ought to be appalling right i mean imagine if he could do for other public institutions of education in the country what he is doing for florida to root out written brandish the uh the ideologies i'm sorry the absolute truths that seem to guide those people yeah um yeah i that's my problem just not as scared as i ought to be

and it just makes me think i'm not paying attention honestly i go ahead steve well i'm just gonna say i'm very close to this whole story it made me about to get closer i'll just say that but what desantis is showing is that the time for playing... You've got to explain that. You can't... That's not just intriguing. That's torture. What do you mean?

Are you about to join some board or what's going on? No, no, no. No, but I mean, all right, for the listeners who don't know the story, there is this little college, new college in Florida. It's small, but it's a public university. And apparently, unlike some of the bigger ones the governor can appoint a majority of the board of trustees and he's put on several killers chris ruffo charles kessler mark bauerlein ryan anderson all friends of ours right and this week they fired

serious people and also also also skilled at media they can write exactly and speak right and handle social media yes well they they fired the president. But beyond all that, I mean, the point is that DeSantis is showing that after really decades of conservatives being on defense about universities, it's time to go on offense. By the way, Peter, it won't surprise you to learn that the last governor who really went on offense about universities was Ronald Reagan in California 60 years ago now. Things weren't anywhere nearly as bad then as now, but he still, when one of his first acts fired the president of the UC system, made a lot of provocative statements about how our universities aren't here just to fulfill intellectual curiosity, and he really rattled the cages. So DeSantis is the first Republican governor since then

who said, we're going to go on attack and not just whine about the problems. So good for him. More to this story. And it's spreading, by the way. I have to say, even I, which is a pompous way to put it, but yes, even I thought, they fired the president? And then my next thought was, they can do that? Of course they can do it. But that shows how, I mean, even in my head, I've been so much on the defensive.

But so Rhonda Sanders says, ladies and gentlemen, may I point out something about a public institution? It was established to serve the public. Not this, It's thrilling. Honestly, I don't want to get carried away because life is miserable and then we all die. But between Elon Musk at Twitter, dropping those Twitter files, showing how rotten the whole arrangement was and putting them on the defensive. You've got Elon Musk, you've got Kevin McCarthy finding his feet and doing a good job. And what is it? It's either sometime next week, they're going to, he's permitting to go to the floor, a vote on replacing the entire tax code of the United States with a new consumption tax. I don't know whether that's

a good idea or a bad idea, but it's Republicans not being the stupid party, but the party of policy and creativity and imagination, the party that's thinking about the republic into the future. And then we've got Ron DeSantis and our friend Charles Kessler, our friend Charles Kessler, who's a Harvard man to his very fingertips, beautifully spoken as beautifully as he is always dressed. And Charles goes down there and fires, joins the board in firing this totally conventional, thoroughly woke president of a public union. Good Lord! I feel as though I'm awaking to hear the first shots of the counter-revolution. It's thrilling. Of course,

I suppose this shows how defensive we've all felt, but it really has been a thrilling 10 days or two weeks. Oh, it's going to get, I read the Chronicle of Higher Education every day for my sins, and they're in total freak out. Are you serious? Every day? Well, just about. And they're in total freak out mode about what's going on there. In a couple other states, you're starting to see the first stirrings of blowback, and they're in total panic mode. It's great. It is. It is. And we haven't even touched on it.

Honestly, I don't follow it. Maybe you do, Steve. Governor Abbott in Texas is now campaigning for a voucher initiative that would simply, as I understand it, it would simply deliver some not insignificant thousands of dollars to the parents of every kid in Texas. Spend it where? That's just amazing. It's gaining state by state. And if I were these administrators, I wouldn't be sleeping well at night. But I would caution them that if they wanted to sleep, because you need to sleep, that they should look into better sheets. Oh! You know, this morning it was freezing, and I woke up, and I wasn't freezing, really.

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That's ballandbranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com. Promo code RICOCHET. And we thank Ball and Branch for sponsoring this on the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Ralph Manguel or Raphael. We've been having a five-minute conversation about the name and its many permut permutations uh but whatever you call him he's the contributing editor of city journal and he's serving as a member of the new york state advisory committee of the u.s commission on civil rights and he's the author of criminal injustice what the push for decarceration and de-policing gets wrong and who it hurts the most welcome thanks for joining us today yeah thanks so much

for having me back. Again, please file in the new... I'm sorry, Peter, go ahead. No, I just wanted to say it's a big book, and here's why. It's beautifully written. Rafa is a master of social media, as we're about to learn. He speaks beautifully, he blogs constantly, and his dad was a cop. He knows what he's talking about the other side has found it just impossible to dismiss him as much as they've wished to do so sorry just want to put that little note there yeah well we we have him on today and and blogging constantly is one of those things that i that i approve of as a long-time blogger and it's hard to do and it's

hard to keep up but there's so much in your bailiwick nowadays to talk about. Alas, we have another instance of police brutality, another murder, another death. Guide us through this most recent example. And keep in mind, I'm coming from Minneapolis, which said, you know, in 2020 was the epicenter of the George Floyd movement. Take a look at what happened, what what you see what it tells you about modern policing and uh just in general what we're getting right and what we're getting wrong yeah i mean well what what you see is something that's really difficult to watch i mean you know of course last week uh all the videos um well not all the videos but a good number of videos were released to the public showing the encounter with tyree Nichols and five Memphis police officers,

I almost said Minneapolis there. The police officers were all black. Tyree Nichols is black. That seems to have kind of muted the racial lens through which these cases are normally viewed, although it hasn't necessarily persuaded everyone to leave that particular sub-issue alone here. But basically what happened was there was some kind of traffic stop during which the officers were incredibly aggressive right at the outset. I'm not really sure what, if any, explanation exists for that particular posture that they took. That seems to induce Tyree Nichols into a state of understandable fear, perhaps even justified fear, that causes him to resist arrest. He ends up running away after being pepper sprayed and tased. It looks like from the videos that one of the officers who deployed pepper spray in that initial encounter actually pepper

sprayed himself as well as his partner. That seemed to make him very very upset uh that officer actually then leaves the scene once other cops uh catch up with tyree nichols and goes to join in uh on the beating perhaps out of a sense of revenge but not long after tyree nichols is spotted by other memphis officers uh who gave chase a foot pursuit ensues they tackle him then the beating starts and And it's really, really difficult to watch. There are multiple angles of this, one from a Memphis police camera that's actually above all the action, and then the body cam footage. And it becomes, you know, really hard to push back on the idea that this was really just a beating doled out out of pure rage

and a sense of wanting to get revenge. One of the officers seems to roll his ankle or hurt his leg. He's seen limping around. He's upset about that, takes it out on Mr. Nichols, it looks to me. Another officer gets pepper sprayed during that second encounter. You know, there's one point in the video where Tyree Nichols is being held up by two officers, each of whom has one arm, and he's being punched in the face by a third, and neither one of the two officers holding his arm seems to be trying to put a handcuff on him. And that tells you, you know, a bit about just how brutal this case was, and of course he died of his injuries three days later. Now, the second question you ask is, what does this say about policing? And that's really where the rubber meets the road here, because my answer is not going to satisfy

a lot of advocates. Rafa, before we get to that second question, could I just ask one or two? So, the correct, you've looked at this tape in detail. Honestly, I couldn't stand to watch it. I only glanced at it. It's hard to watch. But the correct conclusion is these, by the time the footage that we have seen, by the time that moment starts, these cops are already just running on adrenaline and testosterone. They are out of control. They are enraged human beings acting on animal instincts. You don't see any semblance of training, self-control, no superior officer giving orders, nothing. So could I just, you mentioned this, but I want to go back to it just to understand as best we can what happened. From the very get-go, once Tyree's car stops, there's no officer going to the window and

tapping the window and saying would you step out of the car please sir may i see your license and register the training is already out the window these guys are already at heart rates of let's assume 150 and that do we have any idea what happened before the footage why are these guys so totally amped the moment we see them yeah yeah I mean so the stop not to excuse anything that happened I just don't understand the incident what was going on so we don't know because we don't have footage from that part uh uh we don't have footage of the lead up to the initial car stop um now we do have in the body cam some overheard talk among the officers about what happened, what preceded the stop. And some of the officers can be heard saying that Tyree Nichols didn't stop when they lit him up, when they got behind him, that he led him on a chase, at one guns drawn and immediately took him out of the car and tried to put him down. Now, I don't know how true that is.

There were a couple of things said during the course. We just plain don't know for sure. Exactly. We don't have the footage of that car chase to have said on that sort of debrief period that's captured on camera that aren't necessarily backed up by what we saw. One of the officers talks about Tyree Nichols grabbing his gun, although parts of the video are really hard to see. We did not see that in the footage that I reviewed, nor did you hear any officer in the footage that I reviewed saying he's grabbing my gun. So I'm not sure what to make of that accusation. But you know, it's exactly right. I mean, from the very outset of the encounter,

the temperature is well over 100 degrees. And I think that explains why the reaction to this case has been so universal in its denunciation of what the video depicts so universal in its condemnation of the conduct uh that was engaged in by those officers i mean you know police departments uh through their commissioners and chiefs and elected sheriffs and police unions like the fop have all come out and said like this was horrible this was disgraceful this is not what policing is. And that actually, you know, leads us a little bit into the second question, which is what does this say about policing writ large? And I think that's where we tend to get into trouble as a

society. You know, it's an understandable instinct to see something terrible and want to have a good answer and want to be able to say like, okay, well, we've got a solution here. But, you know, sometimes the lesson is just that bad people exist. Sometimes those bad people are going to have police uniforms on. That doesn't necessarily mean that this is representative of policing as an institution. And that's, I think, the fatal flaw of the reform movement is that it pretends as if these, what are statistically isolated incidents sort of represent the, the, the common type of encounter that you're likely to have with American police. And that just couldn't be further from the truth. And we have lots of

data on this, you know, data that I've, I've run through with, with you all before just, you know, but, you know, to update that, I mean, if you just look at the nypd for example in 2021 our officers fielded 6.4 million calls for service they made 166 000 arrests 4 300 gun arrests they only recorded a total of 5 000 uses of force total and most of those uses of forces like 90 were just level one uses of force which is just a takedown if you look at um memphis which is where the tyree nichols case happened between 2013 and 2021 police in that city made uh almost uh 300 000 arrests they only killed 25 people almost all 25 course, were justifiably killed

because they posed a deadly threat to the officers. And so, again, that comes out to less than a hundredth of a percent, you know, sort of death rate. And this is something that I think, you know, is important context that often gets left out of the conversation. The fact of the matter is, is that deadly police use of force and really police use of force of any kind is not a particularly likely outcome of a police-citizen interaction. You know, police make hundreds of thousands, if not millions, actually millions of arrests on the national level, about 10 million arrests a year. They don't use force anywhere close to a majority of that. They use force somewhere around 2% to 3% of the time. in some cases in some departments it's even less than that those that statistic that that deep you know the the likelihood of a violent encounter is irrelevant

uh to the people who want de-policing and it's it's it's uh it's not helpful here in minnesota minneapolis we have a problem with the light rail systems becoming overrun with people who are doing drugs and behaving poorly and passing out and just acting out in criminal ways. And there's a actual movement to maybe get some officers onto the trains to kick the people off. precisely the problem that any encounter with the police is likely to go south and that it is a systemic and a systemic offense that has disproportionate impact and therefore we cannot clean up our subway they had our trains they have to just roll on in the field of condition that they are uh how do we get around that i mean the statistics that you quote would seem to clarify matters for some people but they're they're downplayed at every time. And we're told that the opposite is the case.

Yeah, well, they're downplayed because I think ultimatelyrive the system of resources through defunding or through new unfunded mandates for reporting or some other kind of compliance requirement that limits the capacity of the system to do what it does. And, you know, that discourages, you know, for example, high quality candidates becoming cops. And this is something that I think might turn out to be particularly relevant in this Memphis case, because as I understand it, all of the police officers involved were not particularly experienced. I think the most experienced officer involved had less than five years on the job. And that department, in order to make it more representative of the community and to kind of deal with the recruitment and the retention crisis that it's been going through along with police departments around the country recently lowered standards a couple years ago.

And that, you know, again, I've said this on multiple occasions in prior venues, but, you know, if you make policing the kind of job that, you know, good-hearted, highly motivated, highly intelligent people who are psychologically stable don't want to do in increasing numbers. What you're going to end up with is a police force that looks a lot more like the perps that are being asked to police than they might have in the past. And that's a really bad thing. And one of the reasons why I feel confident in saying that I'm not convinced that the reform movement really cares about results is that all the things that

they allegedly care about have been moving in the right direction in recent years. I mean, in 1971, the NYPD started reporting on use of force data. They shot and wounded over 220 people. They killed almost 100. Today, those numbers are down to about two dozen people shot by the police and less than 10 people killed by police, and all of them, you know, are justifiably subjected to deadly force. And so, you know, that's an enormous amount of improvement, even if we're not yet at the point of perfection, and yet none of that gets recognized. Even as the city has become demonstrably safer in those years. Well, until a year to go.

Hi, Ralph. It's Steve Hayward out in California, also shivering with Peter and 55-degree weather. That's a cold way for us, right? It is. I want to ask you a couple of specific questions about this training question. But I do want to share with listeners just a very quick story. You'll remember that, John, you and I had you out to Berkeley Law in the fall, and we did it with the Federal Society. And the format is always to pair a speaker with someone from the opposing point of view. In this case, we had two people to match up with Ralph.

And, you know, I was the moderator, and you were at the end of the table. One of them was a very radical defund the police and the carceral state leftist and i don't know if you could could sense this ralph but i was standing next to him he was visibly unnerved by because you ran circles around both of them he was visibly unnerved by your capacities and command of the facts and figures and arguments about it i mean he was almost shaking i was really stunned by it standing next to him and so that listeners is, is how good Ralph is on this. Very kind. Well, you deserve it.

This training question, you know, we know after Ferguson, after George Floyd, the police morale plummeted. A lot of reluctance to go into high crime areas. What Memphis, I think, obviously did was put together a task force that had a name with the Scorpion Unit or something like that. And they probably, I'm guessing at some point, the civic leadership said, we need to have black police officers assigned to these high crime black areas, because if you send it, imagine where we'd be today if it had been five white police officers who did this. It would be George Floyd riots times five. The country would be on fire. Absolutely. And now the problem is, we know that what's going to happen is crime is going to get

worse in those neighborhoods because they're going to pull back further. I don't know what all the answers are, but if Ralph were going to be police commissioner in Memphis or some other city where morale is bad, where recruitment is bad, where retention is a crisis, what are the two top changes that you would suggest for the system and for police training and recruitment? I mean, I hope this doesn't seem like a cop-out, but I think the single most important thing to do is to inject the system with a massive amount of funding to overcome those challenges. You know, one of the best ways to convince somebody who's on the fence about becoming a cop, particularly if that person's of the sort of quality that he or she has options in the

marketplace, is pay him. Pay him a lot. I don't think that's a cop-out at all, Ralph. I think it's entirely sensible. Well, I do think it's funny because this is like one of the one areas in which it's more common to hear a conservative say that the answer to a public policy problem is to spend money on it. Exactly. We do believe in public spending, but only on things the government really ought to do. And if there's one thing the government ought to do, it's keep us safe in our homes and communities. That's where the money should go. cops should be well paid thorough professionals heavily trained exactly in my opinion anyway so so that's number one so number one is massive increase in funding that will allow the department to attract the higher end kind of recruits people who you know might otherwise go the federal route route and take a position as an FBI special agent or, you know, within one of the other agencies, or someone who might decide to

move to a bigger city with more cachet like LA or New York, where, you know, they're going to be in a department that has TV shows written about it, et cetera, right? So you have to make the job in those locales particularly attractive, and that's going to cost a significant amount of money. But then to counter the potential downside risk associated with the reform movement and the demonization of the institution, I think it's really important to make sure that the departments have the resources that they need to use data intelligently to deploy their officers and to strategically use the people and the money that they have at their disposal. And what that means is keeping very close track of the sort of micro geographic spaces where crime concentrates and actually working to identify who are the tiny social networks

of people that are driving the bulk of the crime in those places. If you can do that well, what that means is that you can disrupt criminal offending patterns substantially without being so dragnet. And that, I think, is the best way to kind of keep the critics at bay while still producing good results, although I don't think the critics will ever be satisfied. But one more particular question about what's lost in the public debate about all this. I know that I've heard you write and speak about a poll, I think by debate about all this. I know that I've heard you write and speak about a poll, I think by Gallup a couple years ago, that also caught my eye.

And it shows that people can have two conflicting ideas in their head at one time. And I think you know it. It was a poll where a majority of Blacks responded that they distrust the police. Okay, we're told this, right? But an even larger majority of Blacks in that same survey said we want more police presence in our communities. And that last fact gets completely lost. How do we get that message to break through to all of our civic leaders that, in fact, the people that they say they're concerned about want more police protection. Right. I think it's just, you know, reminding the public that, you know, they don't actually speak for these communities. And there's a disconnect, there's a discontinuity between what the dominant narrative posits and what low-income minority communities say they want

when asked, right? You know, of course, everyone wants better, more equitable, fairer policing. But if the choice is between the policing you have now or nothing or significantly less, it's a very, very easy choice that people will make seven days out of seven and twice on Sunday, right? And so we have to keep that in mind. And one of the reasons that that's so is because these are the very same communities that are currently shouldering the vast majority of the burden associated with crime, which is why I just found the sort of racialization of the burden associated with crime, which is why, like, I just found, you know, the sort of racialization of the Tyree Nichols case so preposterous, because the argument is that, well, even though these officers were Black individuals, they're part of a broader system, and the racism is cooked into that system's history, etc. And we're just supposed to take

for granted that these institutions are, you know, producing racially disparate results. That's actually just not the case if you parse the data correctly. Rafa, back to Memphis, really, to this specific incident. The five officers involved in the beating were fired. If I recall correctly, another officer or two who were close to that unit but not involved in the meeting have also been dismissed, then the special unit of which all these officers were members has been disbanded. Question. Well, the overall question is, did the police department do the right thing in moving so quickly, firing these people and disbanding the unit. But the sub-question in that is, from the point of view of policing, did they do the right thing or did they say to themselves, get together with the mayor and say to themselves, look,

the first thing we're going to make sure of is that this town doesn't burn. Get rid of these guys. We're going to do something dramatic and we're going to do it fast because after George Floyd, we know that these kinds of situations can get out of control. Innocent people can be killed. Hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage, it can happen. We're going to shut that down right now. I think I might've supported that. If that were their thinking, I think I might've been in favor of it. But there are sort of two different motivations that could have gone into this. I'm just wondering what you make of it. Did they do what they needed to do? And did they do it for the right reasons? I think with respect to firing the officers and how quickly that decision

was made, based on the video footage that I've seen, is obviously the right answer. Just from a policy matter, from an institutional perspective. I think that's one of the reasons why you haven't seen any outrage among even the most vocal police union groups, you know, sort of speaking out about this. I mean, even in the Derek Chauvin case, there was still some... Nobody wants to defend these guys. Right. No one wants to defend these guys because what they did is seemingly indefensible, right?

I watched all of those videos many times over. I could not find a single redeeming thing that was depicted there where it was like, okay, I can defend that. Now, with respect to the disbanding of the Scorpion unit, I think there's two potential reasons why that might not have been a good idea. We know that proactive units are important to an overall policing strategy, and they can have an outsized impact. so that might indicate someone like me to be pretty suspicious of that move and i think that move was political in nature in a way that firing the officers wasn't necessarily now it might still be a good move if the following is

true which is a big if can the scorpion unit be put to its mission responsibly, which is to say, are there enough qualified officers who should be doing that kind of work that can be properly staffed with supervisors that it's worth continuing? If we can do that well, then there's no reason to disband the unit. I think disbanding the anti-crime units here in New York City in the wake of George Floyd's murder was a mistake. But New York City has the capacity and the capability and the experience to put really good, high-quality officers into those units with supervisors to make sure that they're doing their job well and having a big impact. I don't know if that's true in Memphis.

One more. So you just raised New York. This is my last question, and time being time, this is a podcast, not a three-part series. So, can you just give a grade, A, B, or C, to the NYPD right now? You mentioned in the old days, in the 70s, they were shooting up the town and crime was still out of control. And as far as I can tell, the great policing story in America, it's important to the whole country that the gains in New York, that New York became the safest big town in the country because Bratton and Giuliani and Murphy, these guys were smart

and they were tough. There were things they could do and they did them and it worked. It's really important for those gains to be consolidated and not lost under the new mayor. I think somewhere between a B plus and an A minus, and here's why. I think the NYPD is still an incredible department doing an incredible job. I think that it has also been hit pretty hard, however, by the recruitment and retention crisis. The MIPD lost 4,000 officers last year, only replaced slightly more than half of them. The department is now the smallest it's been in years. And the overall quality of the median officer, I think, has gone down, not necessarily because we're just not getting the

cream of the crop, but the level of experience for the median officer has gone down because the people who are leaving are people who had that lengthy time. So there's been a big brain drain problem. I think that's going to manifest itself in some ways. And I think the department could probably do better in adjusting to the kind of reforms that have been enacted, particularly the discovery reform, which is a whole other can of worms to open. But new burdens that prosecutors have to meet to turn over evidence to defense attorneys, one of the challenges is getting good communication and cooperation from the police department to help those prosecutors do that. Again, that takes money, however.

So this isn't entirely the department's fault. I think the more important grade to give here, though, is to the criminal justice system more broadly in New York City, because the cops are still doing a really good job like rape or murder or armed robbery, it inevitably turns out to be the case that they have a lengthy arrest history. And so what that tells us is that the MIPD is doing well, but the rest of the criminal justice system really needs to start picking up the slack. And, you know, part of that means changing some of the reforms that have been enacted in recent years. Part of that means electing people who have a different disposition. But I think we have to be careful not to look at institutions like police in isolation because they are part of a broader system that's going to affect how effective they are. Right. A system put in place that generally is supposed to reflect the desires of the people who live there.

So if they want a system in which people are spun through revolving doors, then let them have it good and hard. When you talk about the quality of the officers, I remember watching Clockwork Orange back in the 70s and thinking, boy, taking the crooks and making them into the cops. There's a dystopian world that I hope I never have to live in, and here we are. But Raphael, thank you so much for joining us today. We'll have you back again at some other point. I hope it's a long time because I don't want these cases to happen, frankly. We're all tired of them and we wish that this issue would be solved. But, human nature being what it is, not likely in the near run.

Thanks for joining us and we'll talk to you down the road. Thank you. And I know what I just said there was the usual inevitable banalities used to close these things up, but... Well, it is. You know, there are different ways to say it, and I wish that I could, but you just have to mealy mouth your way through these things and say, you know, this is horrible. It happened. I wish it hadn't. It's going to happen again. justice system here in Minnesota, where an enlightened and progressive regime has given it, not regime, not regime, an enlightened and progressive government has given us reduced standards and the desire to not put people in prison because it's mean and the rest of it.

And consequently, we have a situation markedly different than we were before. Puts you off your appetite, frankly. But not me. Not me, no, because my appetite is strong. Because when it's 13 below, you get hungry. And when you work out like I do, you get hungry too. So let me ask you this, if you're working out, or if you just have a goal in mind, like not to freeze to death, you got goals. Well, Factor is here to help you achieve each and every one of your goals.

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the ricochet podcast before we go gentlemen we should tell you that there are real life meetups coming up around the country phoenix new orleans stillwater minnesota ricochet.com you'll find there in the sidebar the place where you can go and meet Ricochet people. And if you're not a member, be a member. And that way you can have your own meetup too. And people will come to you and you can join the Ricochet community in real actual life. So before we go, gentlemen, Nikki Haley announced a bid. It's going to shake things up.

Do you think exactly are we in that phase where all of a sudden everybody starts pouring in? I am torn. On the one hand, I'm done with Donald Trump. And he's, who knows, maybe he'll be a reformed man and a new kind of candidate and romp through the primary. I doubt it, but because I'm done with Donald Trump, I want primaries that produce a strong candidate other than Donald Trump. And that seems to suggest that I would like fewer rather than more candidates. And I don't see what Nikki Haley has to offer that Ron DeSantis couldn't provide. So on the one hand, I think to myself, oh, please, don't you get in.

And then half a dozen others will get in and it'll just be a mess. On the other hand, she's impressive. She's well-spoken. Ron DeSantis has not run a national campaign before. My underlying impulse is always let a thousand flowers blossom. Let them all go into the primaries and let voters take a look at them and we'll see how it all shakes out so i have to admit i am of two minds but the man is not going to tell me which mind i should favor it's interesting we use that phrase let a thousand flowers bloom because the man who said it of course was not interested in anything of the sort would confiscate 500 of the flowers kill the people who grew them and then reserve two for the anyway steven go ahead uh i like nicki haley fine i've met her a

few times i don't see what her theory is or what her issues are i she's kind of running on reputation by the way i will just say this about ron de santos hasn't run a national campaign true literally speaking he did raise over $200 million for his governor's race, which he then spread around to the statewide victory for the party. Those are presidential-level numbers. And you better believe all those names. So Pompeo may get in, and other people are talking about it. So at this point, it's early. I can remember, well, I've read the history of it. People were scandalized in 1960 when John F. Kennedy announced he was running for president in January of 1960. That, remember, that changed in the 70s. I also remember at the beginning of 1968, I found this in my historical research, the head of the Democratic National Committee said, boy, the Republicans have a big

problem. You know, we've got our nominee. It's going to be Lyndon Johnson. He's going to run again. He's going to win another landslide. The Republicans are fighting each other because remember at the end of 1967, Governor George Romney, the former governor of Michigan, was running ahead of Nixon in the polls. That was before he... Oh, that I had forgotten. That was right around the time he professed to having been brainwashed in Vietnam, which brought that great, great observation of Gene McCarthy from James's home state saying that Romney didn't need a brainwashing. All he needed was a light rinse. Anyway, we know how that story played out. That's all preface for saying I still think the drama of the next presidential cycle, I mean,

yeah, there could be a big fight between Trump and DeSantis, and it'll be high drama, and it'll be rough and all the rest of that. Or if Trump doesn't, well, okay. I still think the big surprise and big drama of the next cycles may well be on the democratic side because i think that biden's inability and the vice president in waiting who's obviously not up to the job and you see hints of this places like the new york times that doubts about both people i still think that's going to be the emerging storyline so the big surprise. Steve, may I follow up on that one very briefly? You and I, the three of us can sit here and name

half a dozen plausible Republican candidates without any trouble. We've done it already. There's Trump, like him or dislike him, he's plausible. DeSantis, Pompeo, Nikki Haley, who has announced, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, if he wanted to get in. On it goes. On the Democratic side, there's Joe Biden, plausible only because he happens to hold the office, but he does. There's Kamala Harris, plausible again because she happens to be vice president. And then there's Gavin Newsom. And I don't know where you go from there.

Oh, I do. Well, I say I do. Well, that's what I'm hoping that you... Well, remember that governors tend to make better candidates than senators. The two Democratic governors I think to keep your eye on is not Newsom. It's Jared Polis in Colorado and the new governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. They have both tacked to the... Shapiro's only been in office, what, a month or something, but he's tacked

to the middle in ways that are surprising. He appointed four Republicans to his cabinet. He dissented. Yes, that's a relative question. No, I believe, I think he's on the left

and this is a relative scale. He has, I think, approved expanding charter schools, going against the wishes of the teachers' union. He's doing things that suggest that if he's interested in running, he knows that you win in the center and not on the far left of the party. Let Gavin Newsom do the identity politics lane that he knows. So keep your eye on him. And then Polis has been kind of a surprise in Colorado. He's pretty far to the left. He's gay. He'd be our first openly gay candidate for president. But you talk to conservatives in Colorado and they say, you know, on the COVID stuff, he was a lot better than

Whitmer and Hochul and some of the others in resisting some of the lockdown mentality. And he's been somewhat pro-business. So on the relative scale democrats those are two moderate looking uh democratic governors so okay that's impressive i hadn't i honestly neither one of them i had paid no attention to either thank you as usual you give me an education it's my job peter and it's our job to entertain you and to enlighten you and the rest of it. And also tell you about such wonderful things as factor and Bowling Branch. Support them for supporting us and join Ricochet today. Why don't you, gentlemen?

And before we go, I have to note one thing here that begin. We begin the show talking about the Chinese balloon. Something that has just occurred on Twitter that people were discussing was the fact that it's a dry run. It's a dry run for something else. And somebody said, how do we know that this isn't exactly not the dry run that happened before, but this is China's way of sending over their EMP. And I think that that's absolutely rid... End the show right there. No music out. Just do a Sopranos last episode.

And end it right there. Steve, Steve, I never heard Sinatra in person. I missed Michelangelo. But I watched James Lilac's work. Yeah. Oh, right. You're very kind.

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