The Ricochet Podcast - Phool Around Phind Out

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

Citizens of Philadelphia are the latest victims of "wilding nights," watching helplessly as chortling teens smash storefronts and ransack the goods inside. These aren't unheard of events, but they're becoming more frequent. To sort out the ideologies and policies that got our cities conditioned to this, and the hard work it'll take to get us back in shape, Manhattan Institute's Rafael Mangual — author of Criminal (In)justice returns to the Ricochet Podcast.On theme, James and guest hosts Charles Cooke and Jon Gabriel talk 70s vigilante flicks, and have a few words to say about Dianne Feinstein, John Fetterman's new attire and Wednesday's debate.

It's magnificent. I got the full Wilford Brimley going on. I was going for Tombstone and I got Wilford Brimley. 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. It's the Ricochet Podcast, usually with Peter Robinson and Rob Long, but today I'm James Lylex talking to John Gabriel and Charles C.W. Cook. Our guest, Rafael Mangual, who's going to talk to us about crime, urban disorder, and what can we do? Well, we can have ourselves a podcast. A robbery charge, a burglary charge, a theft charge, a receiving stolen property,

whatever we possibly can apply to this situation, we're going to apply it. The DA and the Justice Department, the courts, need to make sure these people pay a price for what they did. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 660. I'm James Lilacs here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, overcast, dank fall day. Rob and Peter are off on various missions. We'll hear about them later, unless, of course, they're classified. And sitting in, standing in, doing a yeoman's job, doing an excellent job, are our friends John Gabriel and Charles C.W. Cook.

Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you for having me. You've slightly preempted whether or not I do an excellent job. I may not do an excellent job. That's entirely possible. I'm being kind. I have decided to avoid excellence for the next hour or so. All right, now that we've reset our expectations and everybody's adjusted accordingly, we proceed.

News. Dianne Feinstein dead. And I wonder how many of the obituaries are going to say Feinstein, who had a Chinese spy embedded in her organization for 20 years, etc., etc. Do you guys remember that? Oh, yeah. A driver. And the general reaction to having a member of Chinese espionage embedded in her office and driving her around listening to her phone calls for 20 years was, wow. Anyway.

That was it. That was it. That was it. that was it that was it that was it that was it i we were assured that nothing was passed along because apparently the chinese play such a long game that they say no wait two decades before you finally contact us and give us some information uh so your thoughts on the passing she voted yesterday by the way in Senate, apparently they wheeled her in and had her, uh, rubber stamp some more, something. The term elder abuse is being floated around an awful lot. I have two minds on this. I mean, one, my father was incredibly vital and smart up until the age of 93. So I would have trusted him in the Senate.

But on the other hand, you admire, you admire the fact that people are able to be productive in their golden years. But on the other hand, we're seeing the effects of a gerontocracy with its ideas embedded in the great society or a few years afterwards still hanging on this this age of withered remora on the body of the american body politic and you just are kind of glad to see that it may not seem like the permanent rule of old people that it does seem now. And I say that as an old person, I suppose. I think it's an issue we're going to have to deal with more and more in the future, especially as medicine gets better and better, people are living longer,

having many types of cancer is no longer the death sentence it once was, thank God. However, that exposes you to the other issues of the mind when people grow older. Like you said, that's why I'm against term limits or an age limit. Some people are very vital. My grandmother lived to 101, and she was feisty to the end. On the other hand, my father, who had passed away due to Alzheimer's and dementia, he was otherwise completely healthy. And I think more and more that's something that a lot of people in America aren't quite prepared for. More and more we're going to have these people who are just, hey, this person has a good brand.

They can get reelected. They have a last name that people in this district know. Let's run them again. And how, I don't know. As for me, if I make it after a fabled career in D.C., Senate, President, whatever, and make it to 75, I will be pining for a lake house and time with the grandkids and maybe sitting on a dock and fishing and how some of these people um in feinstein's case sadly i think she was being abused much like biden is today but uh you wonder how alluring power must be that these people will not just take the lake house option because uh boy the rest of us i think would yeah charles one of the more interesting things being floated today on twitter which i'll never call x if i ever call it x just slap me uh is that uh gavin newsom is

going to appoint kamala harris as the replacement senator thereby getting her out of the veep slot and allowing uh newsom to slide into the presidential campaign well he's he's not for a couple of reasons, namely that the 25th Amendment requires a replacement vice president to be agreed to by both the House and the Senate. The House is run by Republicans. The Senate is run by Joe Manchin. And there is no way that that combination of power players is going to permit the Democrats to maneuver themselves into a more attractive electoral position by getting rid of the millstone that is Kamala harrison replacing her with someone potentially better and there's a second reason related to that which is that the shenanigans that the republicans would legitimately pull could actually lead to speaker mccarthy because to get to the point at which the house

was asked to acquiesce to joe biden's replacement kamala harris would have to resign she resigned then wasn't replaced and then biden died which is not that remote a possibility either now or in a second term then the automatic constitutionally mandated replacement would be a republican so well that's it's a funny idea but it's not going to happen on the dan feinstein question that you asked john i think there's a good and a bad argument in favor of people staying in politics too long i've heard people say a variation of what john did which is well wouldn't you just want the lake house yes i would i think with diane feinstein a lot of other politicians though this is what they like doing right right so they're never going to voluntarily do something else because this is their idea of fun that being the case i'm not that sad for her in the sense that she died doing what she loved what i find

distasteful about it and sad about it is that she couldn't do it anymore i mean the videos of her that we saw from the senate were just terrifying this was not chuck grassley who's almost that age he's 89 who's sprightly goes to every iowa county when he runs for re-election seems to run around cornfields for fun this is a a woman who was so attached to the one thing she liked in life which was politics that she was being wheeled in to cast votes that she couldn't understand to me that's the tragedy of this and that's where the elder abuse comes in they knew she wanted it they wanted to use her so they did and the rest of this. And that's where the elder abuse comes in. They knew she wanted it. They wanted to use her.

So they did. And the rest of us had to watch it and avert our eyes. Indeed. Well, it's prepare yourself for a weekend of pains to her service and the rest of it. And then we'll see who the replacement is going to be, which will be interesting indeed. On to the debates. Chris Christie called Donald Trump Donald Duck. And Steve Martin today on Twitter said today that, no, Donald Duck was a war veteran.

Donald Duck was faithful to Daisy. Donald Duck took great care of it. And he listed off a bunch of wonderful things about Donald Duck, and then said, and you, sir, are. Donald Duck took great care of it. And he listed off a bunch of wonderful things about Donald Duck and then said, and you, sir, are no Donald Duck. Okay, thanks, Steve. That's funny. But as for the rest of it,

I'm not sure what mark it left. People were talking about Vivek's hair, which seemed to grow like a chia pet throughout the whole thing. Burgum did well. You know, I'm always rooting for the North Dakota guys. He's a solid man. Got some feistiness, a lot of talking over everybody else and mostly people complaining about the

questions themselves like why why not why not just hand this over to mother jones of the nation because you're going to get the same sort of questions what were your thoughts winners losers charles am i a winner or a loser in that array? You can choose your own adventure, Charles. Yeah, I think that as ever, all Republican politics and maybe even all politics takes place against the backdrop of the 190-foot golden Donald Trump that towers over everything. And this is no different. I wish it were different. But I saw nothing on that stage that changed the narrative or changed the headlines. And this is why these late attempts to introduce new characters into the show probably are futile as well oh well if only the governor of georgia were up there or the governor of virginia were up there or the

governor of texas were up there well really why are they going to punch donald trump in the face it's not clear what it will take to change it certainly nothing happened at the debate that that did and i i was equally appalled by the questions that the lady from univision asked this is a bizarre moment in our politics where people start sentences with, as somebody who has certain immutable characteristics, it would be really weird if I did that, if I, well, it won't be, but if I were asked to moderate a debate and I just said, as a tall American,

you know, or as a white person, I have must ask, as if that is the way that presidents ought to think. So, you know, from both the question aside and the answer aside, I just didn't think it did much to change anything, which is a problem.

If you would like to see the Republican party move on from Donald Trump. As a member of the beard-having community, I think you should have said. John? Yeah, I think what was frustrating, too, about when they have a reporter asking questions, Univision or Telemundo, one of these networks,

is when they decide, I'm only asking questions about, yes, as a Latinx woman, as let's talk immigration for the fourth time tonight. It reminds me of the typical panel shows on cable news where they have three white men and one black woman. And they ask the white guys about the economy and healthcare and foreign relations. Then they say, now let's get to race. And every head just turns to this poor black woman. And I'm like,

is that all she's good for? She's probably an expert in all sorts of things. And that's what it always feels like. Okay, let's serve this constituency here. It's like, I have the sneaking suspicion living in the Southwest, much like Charles,

I'm sure in Florida, surrounded by Hispanic neighbors. They tend to be interested in the exact same things I am. Well, not so much like Byzantine Empire history, but why is my gas costing so much? Why is my grocery bill so high? They care about things that human beings and Americans care about. And it's just kind of frustrating to see because it's less pandering than it is belittling, it seems, especially at this point.

Totally true. Yes. It's the end result of identity politics, or reduced down to, as Charles said, an immutable characteristic, which is why I was interested the day of the debate. Actually, I didn't watch the debate

because I went to a community forum in my neighborhood to see a debate of sorts between a city council person and the one who wants to unseat her. And this was telling. No Republicans, nobody remotely conservative, because what's the point? There's no point in running anybody in my district. So we had somebody who was sort of kind of moderate of the Democratic Farm and Labor Party. And then the opposition, the person who wanted to unseat her, was the Democratic Socialist Workers of America. Actual socialist.

And it was one of the more entertaining and embarrassing things I'd ever seen. They would ask the person who currently is on the city council, what do we do about crime? What do we do about housing? What do we do, et cetera? And she would come up with a fairly detailed anodyne boilerplate series of ideas that, you know, some work, some don't, and it essentially shows her ability to grasp the issue. They go to the socialist, and you get nothing but bullshit tripe about how, well, it's ridiculous to even answer the question as long as the capitalist system exists right now, because it exploits the workers, it takes

their labor, we need to replace it with power to the people and then read. Right. So in other words, she wouldn't answer any questions like, what's the point of addressing this until we completely undo the capitalist system? So when you're hearing somebody use capitalist and parasite and workers and factory floor and all the rest of it, it's hilarious. And I could not stop laughing in the back of the room. I'm just, I'm like, you can't be serious. And what's more, she was an idiot. She couldn't finish her sentences. She would trail off. She would just say the same thing and was absolutely trounced. So there you have it. It's almost like this parody performance of our politics here in Minneapolis. It's like, well, you can't really say we're crazy lefty because here's the crazy lefty and they don't get elected. No, what gets

elected is the person who says this, asked about whether or not old people are worried about getting, oh, I don't know, pushed out of their homes by taxes. They own their taxes, their homes outright, but the taxes go up and up and they can't pay them and they lose them. They lose them. The state takes their house that they own. And so she said, yeah, it is a concern. So one of the things we're doing is we're starting a commission

that's going to look at the programs that we have in this city and see whether or not they're actually working. Which is nice to hear, but you'd like to think that there was something like that in place before. But no, apparently not. Something started, something's funded, must be funded until the last Trump blows. But we're supposed to believe, of course, that when they find something that isn't working, they're going to take that money and apply it directly to the reduction of our taxes, which, of course, they will not. So having assured us that she's concerned about these things, she promptly pivoted on the issue we really care about, climate change, and the necessity of troubling the tax that we are paying on our utilities in order to restart and barrel right through with our green initiatives that will ensure equity in our underserved communities by converting their gas ranges to electrical heat. So in other words, if you're worried about taxes, don't worry. We're actually looking at what we spend. Oh,

and by the way, we're going to tax you three times as much as this so we can perform this nonsense that Minneapolis will reduce its carbon by 0.0001%, which was equal to one day's output of China's latest new factory. Oh, it's enough to keep you up at night. But you know what? I don't keep up at night worrying about these things. I sleep well. I sleep very well. One of the reasons I do is because of a little secret I got I'm going to tell you about. Do you know that poor sleep can cause weight gain and mood issues and poor mental health and lower productivity and all that other stuff? And sleeping less than six to seven hours per night is linked to reduced white blood

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Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of the wonderful City Journal, and a member of the Council on Criminal Justice. He's the author of Criminal Injustice. Welcome, Raphael. Thanks for having me back. Well, this week we had these wonderful videos, everybody gotta eat, of the looting and the looting and the looting and the looting in Philadelphia. footlocker. It's only 18 liquor stores in the rest of it. I remember, well, that's because they aren't there because of the deserts. I remember that happening here in Minneapolis in 2020. And it's terrifying if it's anywhere close to your neighborhood. It's really terrifying if it is your neighborhood. What can you tell us about this Mayhem Night phenomenon and its,

no doubt, intrinsic connection to the injustice that the people had perceived yeah well you know the the mayhem phenomenons these looting incidents these wilding episodes they're they're not particularly new but we do seem to be seeing more of them and we get a closer glimpse now with social media and one of the things that i think the public is finally starting to to understand is that there's an element to these things that's just fun for the people who engage in them. The idea that we're all supposed to accept is that this is a function of deprivation and desperation. But if you watch these videos and you listen to the commentary and you see the smiling faces and hear the laughter, it's just a thrill for them, right? The idea that everybody

got to eat as you, you know, run into a Nike store and run out with sweatsuits. I mean, I don't know how you season something like that, but, you know, it's clearly not about need, you know, and it is, in fact, connected, I think, to the broader direction that our criminal justice system has been taking throughout the country. I mean, over the last, you know, 10 to 20 years, we have seen a pretty marked shift in how we do criminal justice in this country and how we do policing. And that shift has been unidirectional. Every single major policy initiative that's been enacted over the last decade has either lowered the transaction cost of crime or raised the transaction cost of enforcing the law, right? I mean, whether you're talking about more federal interventions in local policing you know things like consent decrees um you know bans on on certain kinds of grappling techniques

you know more unfunded uh paperwork compliance burdens you know and then on the criminal justice side i mean you've got the progressive prosecutor movement which by the way philadelphia is perhaps ground zero for right where you have these elected officials who just say, well, we're not going to prosecute these whole categories of crime or even the categories of crime where we're still going to prosecute, you know, your chances of a jail sentence or a prison sentence are going to be reduced to near zero. And, you know, you're going to see a huge spike in probation, huge spike in diversions, huge spike in, you know, ACDs or adjournments on contemplation of dismissal, which is basically

like, you know, don't get into any trouble for the next six months and your case will go away. You know, all of this communicates something to people who, in fact, are paying attention. And what that communicates is that, hey, there are no longer any real consequences. So is it any surprise that we see this? I don't think so. Hi, Raphael. I have a question about why this is happening. So I often describe myself as a criminal justice squish, but what I mean by that is not that I want to see this sort of behavior, or even that I want short sentences or lenience. I just like the procedural elements. I like trials. I like the exclusionary rule. I like a broad interpretation of the Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment, and so on. I don't understand why it is that we have gone in this direction, especially given that there was this enormous crackdown on the crime of the 1980s and 1990s that worked, that we could see worked.

And now we seem to be doing everything in the other direction. So my question is, is this the product of overconfidence? Did we think that we had fixed crime and therefore could afford to behave like this? Or is there something else going on here? Is this tied in, for example, to our obsession with identity politics and disparate impact? I think it's much more the latter. I think what we're seeing is a deep sense of discomfort with that successful history with respect to the crime decline. Yeah, very few people who are sort of honest brokers, but certainly on the left of this issue, will deny that the uptick in incarceration and the reinvestments in policing throughout the 1980s and 90s helped reduce crime. They may argue about

the degree to which that was the case, but I think everyone who knows anything about this understands that those things really did help in a substantial way. But what we see is, I think, a level of just uneasiness with what that looked like, right? You see this sort of obsession with disparities in terms of arrests, in terms of police use of force, in terms of incarceration, right? We often hear, for example, that a black man in the United States is five times more likely than a white man to be in prison. We often hear that they're more likely to be arrested, that they're even for the same kinds of offenses, etc. And it really just, I think, misses the forest for the trees. I mean, the kind of overall case for the sort of decarceration and

depolicing that we've been seeing has three parts, right? There are kind of three fundamental claims that undergird a lot of the reform efforts that I was just describing earlier. The one is that we have this kind of mass incarceration problem. We constantly hear these sort of unfavorable international comparisons, right? The US is 5% of the world's population, 25% of its prisoners. This is patently unjust. We're supposed to take this as prima facie evidence, you know, that we incarcerate far more than we should. And a lot of the way that people make that case is by comparing us to other Western European democracies, not controlling for the fact that we have in this country, unfortunately, many, many more pockets of serious crime where it's crime that is going to land you and you should know this, Charles, is that in the UK, the mandatory minimum sentence for illegal firearm possession is five years in prison, you have to serve three and a half years. There's a sort of

truth in sentencing component. Here in the United States, that's an offense that's regularly met with probation. I mean, you see people on the street all the time that have, you know, that are either on probation or parole for firearms offenses where, you know, we're lucky if they served 60 days. So it's not that we're more punitive and it's not that we over-incarcerate. I mean, you know, one of the questions that I like to ask people, I think the true test of whether we have an over-incarceration problem is to ask, can we safely decarcerate to the level that we would need to achieve parity with the other, you know, democracies that we're unfavorably compared to. To do that, we'd have to release about 70% of the people in state prisons. Well, who's in

state prison? I mean, somewhere around two-thirds of the prison population in this country at the state level, which is where about 9 out of every 10 prisoners are held, are there primarily for a violent or weapons-related felony. And that's just the... No, no, wait, hold on. That can't be. I've been led to believe that 70% of them are all extras from The Wire who were simply caught holding a small bag of drugs. That's exactly right. I mean, this is the lie that was, you know, sold to the U.S. and so many people bought it hook, line, and sinker. And it really is frustrating because it's very easily debunkable. You can go into the data, you can go into the statistics, and what they tell you,

again, is that the vast majority of people in prison today are there primarily for violent or weapons-related offenses. Even the ones that are there primarily for a drug offense or some other kind of non-violent property offense, they all have extensive criminal histories which often include violence, which explain why they're in prison for those non-violent convictions. If you look at the typical criminal history of someone in a state prison in the United States today, you're going to find someone who's between 10 and 12 prior arrests and five and six prior convictions. That does not comport with the story that we've all been told, this idea that we systematically deny second chances in the U.S. We have second chance month in this country, right? That is the story. And so what I ask people people is like go through the prison population and tell

me who's been denied a second chance most of these people have been given multiple bites at the apple and every time we give them a bite at the apple we're essentially rolling the dice and rolling the dice with the lives of the people who live in the places where these individuals are going to spend their time when they're not incarcerated and that is in a very small pocket of this country right the vast majority of crime is very, very hyper-concentrated, which kind of takes me to the second plank or the kind of the last plank of this three-part argument. The second part is that, you know, we have this mass incarceration problem, but also this police violence problem, which, you know, I think is

drastically overstated. You know, yes, are police imperfect? Yes. Do they act maliciously? Of course. But when you, you know, contextualize our our police imperfect? Yes. Do they act maliciously? Of course. But when you contextualize our use of force numbers in the context of the fact that we have somewhere around 600,000 officers making 10 million plus arrests a year, a thousand deaths, the vast majority of which involve armed suspects who are violently resisting is not particularly surprising or egregious, right? It doesn't reveal, you know, some out-of-control police force of trigger-happy monsters. But really, the third plank is what I think has given this movement the momentum that it still enjoys today, despite the crime spike. And that is that both the mass incarceration and

police violence problems fall disproportionately on the shoulders of low-income minority communities. And that's true to an extent, because you do see these disparities in enforcement. What I try to get people to understand is that those disparities have to be viewed in their proper context. You can't just look at the enforcement side of the ledger. There is another side that, you know, enforcement is not the only output of the criminal justice system, even though that's what we all pay attention to, right? As Charles kind of alluded to earlier, there were crime declines that were attributable to the buildup of policing and incarceration. We now know who benefited from those crime declines. And we know who will benefit from the crime declines of the

future because we know how crime concentrates. And it concentrates primarily in precisely the areas that the reformers say that they want to help, right? So in New York City, every single year, like clockwork, a minimum of 95% of shooting victims are either black or hispanic almost all of them are male if that kind of disparity existed in any other aspect of american life i mean there would be marches in the street i mean imagine if 95 of covid deaths were black and hispanic males i mean imagine what the policy response to that would have been and yet there's essentially silence when it comes to it what i want people to understand is that you know there is an incongruity between the argument that we're all supposed to buy right

this idea that the criminal justice system is racist because it disproportionately arrests in prisons and uses force against you know black and brown men for the most part if that there's an incongruity between that and the reality that when the criminal justice system achieves its stated ends which is keeping crime under control it disproportionately benefits those very same communities and so you're forced to answer this weird question which is like why would this system that we're supposed to believe is designed and operated you know to oppress these communities so disproportionately benefit those very communities right right i mean the the truly

racist cop just doesn't care right they throw their hands up and they say let them kill each other the person that's proactive right that chases the armed suspect through the dark alley they're the ones that are actually the anti-racist actors in this situation they're the ones subordinating their safety in order to make an arrest that is not going to benefit the vast majority of white america you used a candy term there we're gonna have to ring a bell five point to merit there i have 97 questions in addenda but john wants to say something so i'll formulate what i want to say while john uh strokes his brit his wilford brimley like beard and uh actually it's more of a captain it's more of a captain smith of the titanic thing i think oh thank you thank you that bodes well for my near future um this is john gabriel rafael and thanks again for being on one thing that seems ineffective to fix this at least

from a political angle is you see the the GOP debate the other night, and you will hear pro forma, we got to back the guys in blue. But it seems like the message coming from them isn't going to be as effective as people going on strike in Oakland, voters turning out the district attorney there because he was so soft on crime. Are we seeing more and more community activists in these locations that are suffering from this nonsense? Like you say, people complain about over-incarceration and ethnic disparities in those institutions, but those are the victims too. Those ethnic disparities exist in victims. It's obviously going to be an issue of the people

who are most vulnerable or the most likely to be harmed in these situations. What are you seeing in cities with just communities, everyday folks rising up and saying, this is insane, I've had enough, because Oakland and San Francisco are hardly hardcore right-wing nutjob electorates there. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I do think what happened with the DA in San Francisco was somewhat anomalous, and here's why. For the most part, violence, which is really what a lot of people are particularly worried about when they talk about the crime spike, is very, very hyper-concentrated geographically. The vast majority of Americans just, you know, they can go about their daily lives without really having to come into contact with criminal violence. I mean, you know, just by way of illustration here in New York City, every single year since

at least 2010, somewhere around three and a half percent of our street segments, which would be kind of corner to corner, two sidewalks, see about 50% of all the violent crime. 1% of the street segments see about 25% of all the violent crime. 1% of the street segments see about 25% of all the violent crime. So if you're living on the Upper West Side or Upper East Side, chances are you can kind of avoid that for the most part. What happened in San Francisco, though, was the disorder problem was so widespread that it was at the doorsteps of the politically active and well-to-do, the people who actually help drive outcomes. And that's not something that I think you're going to see replicated in every city across America, although that's certainly not despite the best efforts of a lot of jurisdictions like

Philadelphia, D.C., New York, you know, in terms of the policies that they're enacting to try and get there. So I do think that, you know, what we saw with Chesa Boudin getting ousted is probably not going to happen very much or very often. And I think part of that is because for the most part, these DA races are still pretty low salience elections, often held in off year contests, and they are still characterized by very low turnout. I mean, Larry Krasner won reelection despite presiding over a massive violent crime spike and something like, you know, 17 to 20 percent of eligible voters turned out in that Democratic primary. So I do think that we're still a ways away from kind of seeing the sort of wave that we would need to see to really get this thing under control. But I do think that, you know, one of the benefits of social media is that the voices in the community that have always been there, by the way, are finally starting to get heard. And they're becoming more aggressive and they're making use of these tools at their disposal with more regularity. And I think some of the movement that we're seeing in places like Oakland is very encouraging.

We just need more of it. And we need, I think, the broader public to kind of have the courage to have the tough conversations that are ultimately going to find their way into the waste question. hey, our public schools are really suffering, and I'm glad you have the nice Tony suburb that you're in, and you can contribute to the booster club, and the kids can have the finest stadium they want every five years. But, yeah, hopefully the people will speak up about this. Or you get El Salvador. I mean, do you, Rafael, sometimes wonder whether or not, I mean, I think this is too big a country for that solution.

But a lot of people look to El Salvador, which was run by criminals, and say, bully for that guy. He comes to the president and decides he's going to crack down and doesn't. Just hoovers everybody off the streets and puts them in awful jails. And now they're at the point where people are saying, you know, this is a little bit too far because you can drop a dime on anybody and get them taken off the street and people are settling scores that way. But on the other hand, people seem to be relieved that they no longer have to cower in their houses and that they can actually sleep outdoors in a hammock without having to worry about the fire, gunfire. Like I say, America is too big a country for this to happen, I think. But on a local level, you think, well, it's either going to be the state crack, the government cracks down,

which seems unlikely because they are intellectually and ideologically predicated on a whole series of assumptions that say we can't do that because it's wrong. Or the citizens are going to do something about it, which is what people are always going to say. Oh, look at this TikTok video. Look at this YouTube thing here I found where somebody stepped up and stopped the shoplifter. The tide is turning, but it isn't really. It's not enough of it, and there's not enough people to do that. So we are all then either on our own and or reliant on government. I mean, which way do you see eventually that this is going to shake out? Do you fear that there's, let me put it this way, do you fear, let me actually come up with a question instead of just rambling my gums with a statement. Do you fear vigilantism,

you know, Charles Bronson style 1970s, Bernie gets the rest of it having a resurgence? And if it did, what do you think the reaction to that would be? It's a fear of mine for sure. I don't think it's particularly likely. It's one of the reasons why I like the idea of having a government that is tasked with providing for public order, because the alternative is that there will always be police, right? The question is, who's going to do it and how well are they going to do it? I don't want to live in a world in which, you know, the kind of situation you saw with Bernie Getz becomes an everyday occurrence. I don't want to live in a world in which, you know, every clerk decides to take a baseball bat to everyone who gives them a funny look, you know look in a 7-Eleven, despite how good some of those videos may have made people feel when they feel like thieves are getting their way or getting what they deserve.

So I just don't think we're going to get there, nor do I think we're going to go the El Salvador route, right? In part because we have a constitution in this country, we have laws, we have procedural protections, which I value, you know, as does Charles and as I think everyone else, you know, on this. And the question becomes is, can we learn something from El Salvador? And I think we can, and that is that, you know, we're relearning the lesson of incapacitation, right? When you take criminal actors off the street, they are incapacitated from victimizing society. They cannot do harm outside of those walls. That was the lesson of the 1990s that we seem to have forgotten. And that's always going to be the primary benefit of responding to crime with incarceration. The good news for us is that we don't have to do what El Salvador has done. We don't have to be dragnet and sweeping with our response on this. We have the ability in this country to use data to pinpoint our enforcement resources to identify the relatively tiny share

of our population that's responsible for the most serious crimes and the biggest chunk of those crimes. I mean, you know, the problem analyses that have been done on things like homicide and gun violence consistently show that somewhere around 0.1 to 0.5 percent of a city's population is responsible for more than half of the gun violence in those places. Right. It's not as difficult as we might think it is to identify who those people are. Right. They tend to have significant criminal histories.

They tend to be involved in gangs, right? When we come into contact with these individuals through criminal enforcement, it's really just on us through the system to hold them accountable and actually incapacitate them for a meaningful period of time, which is one of the reasons why, you know,

one thing that I do think is a possibility is, you know, kind of resurgence of these habitual offender sentencing enhancements, things like, you know, modified versions of three strikes where it's like, we're going to draw a line in the sand with respect to repeated criminal offending. We're going to say beyond this point, no more, right. We did it once it contributed. We can do it again.

We can do it in a way that's responsive to the critiques of those earlier initiatives, right. Where you can kind of build in incentives to, to incentives to desist from crime. So, you know, maybe if you go five years without a new arrest, you know, you lose a point toward your ultimate strike count or something like that. We can be more intelligent and civil about how we do this. But the further this problem goes down the road, the more, the less sophisticated the response I think is going to be, and it's going to become more of a backlash. That's what I don't want to see. I think the hope is that every time the pendulum kind of swings past the point of equilibrium, it doesn't have to let things deteriorate to the point that they were in the 1980s and 90s. Nor do we have to be as draconian as we were in the 2000s. I know Charles wants to get in here, but I want to say one thing.

And I think that in many senses, it is worse than it was in the 80s and the 90s. You had a lot of street level crime in the 80s and 90s. We all remember what New York was like. We all remember the taxi driver era. We all remember the bad subway. Got it. What we have today, however, thanks to the lenient prosecutors and the legislature saying that, well, you know, stealing $999 from something isn't really shoplifting, stealing. It's not that important. You steal $1,000, we're going to come down on you like a bag of hammers. Maybe, okay, like maybe a bag of pasta or something.

But you can steal up to $999 and we're good. Consequently, you have a combination of organized crime rings that go into Walgreens and CVS and Duane Reads and just put everything in trash bags. And you also have individuals who say, you know, there's no consequences for this. Why would I want to be a fool and pay for it and just walk in and take stuff and walk out again? This level of complete and utter breakdown of the compact between the store and the clients is new. We haven't seen this kind of mass casual unaddressed theft ever i don't think what am i wrong this is this is the new wrinkle and this is one of the things that astonishes people about the new form that urban decay has taken this is something that we didn't have to deal with in the 80s and the 90s i was

there yeah well i think a lot of it has to do with what the expected response is in the 80s and 90s the expectation was that if you were caught even stealing, you were going to be penalized in a serious way. That has changed. And so I do think we're starting to really get a clearer picture of just how thin the line is between order and disorder. And that line has gotten thinner because the sort of frontline keepers of order, the police, are just absolutely decimated in terms of numbers. I mean, one of the least appreciated phenomenon that we're seeing that has characterized the last really 10 years almost is the recruitment and retention crisis that is hitting big city departments across the country where departments cannot recruit enough officers that I mean, where they are budgeted for more slots than they have

filled, right, that people are retiring at significantly higher rates, they're resigning at higher rates, they're leaving big city departments for their suburban counterparts where the perception is is that hey i'll get paid just as well if not better and my chances of being involved in a viral incident are significantly lower because it's a very quaint and quiet place with almost no crime right um then five years five years down the road the only guys got applying are the droogs from Clockwork Orange. Exactly. Which, you know, so over time, what you end up seeing is that the sort of delta between the median cop and the median perp starts to shrink. That's not a world I want to live in

either, but that's the world that we're going to get if we continue to demonize the profession and disincentivize good people from taking that job. I mean, it's going to become the kind of the kind of career path where only people without options take it. And it reverts back to what it was in the 1960s and 70s, which was just, you know, a blue collar city job to take up your time. It wasn't really the kind of profession where motivated people were doing it because they really, truly cared. And they were willing to jump through hoops to do it. Even the departments that are able to kind of backfill these positions at a rate of 100%, you got to remember, they're backfilling with officers that have almost no experience.

So there's a brain drain issue, right? You're losing people with connections on the street, you're losing people with knowledge, with investigatory experience, and you're replacing them with rookies who still have a lot to learn, and or are people who benefited from the lowering of standards that were a relic of the fact that you know these departments were having trouble recruiting in the first place so you know ironically what the reformers are going to get is actually more of the thing that they don't like which you know if i were more cynical than i am you know i might suggest that that's by design right the idea being that you want to sort of starve the system you don't like of the resources that it needs to be effective so that you can point to the ineffectiveness as reason to dismantle it further

i have a final question what are the time scales here two years ago in a different arena economics i was essentially down on my knees begging the president and the congress not to spend more money because i know from having read some history that once you start inflation it is really hard to stop and the response of course was look don't worry about it we haven't had inflation for a long time we have cheap money interest rates are low it's going to be fine and now we're not in a fine place and i think underpinning some of the denial you see in the press and that the apathy you see in the public is this sense that well if it gets bad we'll just find better prosecutors and we'll just change the laws and we'll go back to what we're doing and all this will go away is that true or does this take a long time to fix it's going to take a lot longer to fix than it takes to destroy i mean the analogy i like to use here

is like getting into shape right i mean you know you can work out every day eat well and maybe you get the body that you want in a year. And you have to maintain that effort, you know, if you want to keep that body indefinitely. Two, three months into a pandemic where you're eating donuts, sitting in the house, the gym's closed, you know, there goes your six pack, right? I mean, you can undo that progress a lot quicker than you can build it, right? I mean, you know, the Twin Towers came down in a few hours. It took years to build. That, I think, is a rule that holds across context. And I don't think the criminal justice system is any different. So, yeah, if the idea is that we can continue to experiment and continue down this road,

and if things truly, truly get bad, we can always just reverse course and it'll be fine. No, there's going to be a lag between the policy response and the benefits that it produces. You know, these things are not immediate. Just as there was a lag, I think, between the policy shifts that got us to this place and the sort of, you know, situation that we have now with crime. I mean, lots of people pointed to New York City for years saying, well, look, stops and frists are down X percent, and arrests are down X percent, and incarceration is down X percent, and the sky hasn't fallen. It's well give it a minute right i mean momentum is a thing inertia is a thing um and it exists in in various ways and so sometimes it's going to take time and that's why i think you need sophisticated people who are in positions of decision-making power that are not

going to succumb to the narrative of the day. Because that kind of fast response to, you know, kind of sticking your finger in the wind and seeing which way it's blowing is, that's not how you should do policy. Because the reality is, is that, you know, the decisions you make today may have consequences years down the road. Wait a minute. You're advocating for politicians to take the long-term approach to to forswear short-term sugar gains and think about what works best for the society in a structural long-term fashion and work towards that that's what you're asking that's what you're asking of our politicians today well you can find more of that pie in the sky castles in

the air idealism at city journal and in rafael book as well. He's right. He's right, you know. And shucks, we didn't even get to the myth of nonviolent crime, which means we'll have to have you on again. And we hope this time we'll have you on again after there hasn't been some big crime thing that we need to talk about, but just to talk discursively and at length about the idea. Or you folks listening could just go find the work yourself and read it and be smarter for it. Raphael, thanks so much for joining us today.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you all. Appreciate it. Thanks, Rafael. And we have to remember that we're up against the people who have the Fox Butterworth approach. Y'all remember the Fox Butterworth approach? Fox Butterworth wrote a famous piece in the New York Times, which I believe had the headlines, prisons are full, yet crime is down. Or perhaps the other way around, saying,

we don't have so much crime anymore, but yet our prisons are absolutely full. What strange thing is going on here, as if he couldn't see the connection between the two of them. Yes, indeed indeed but what are you going to do i mean there are people you hate this i'm not one of those who say you know what it's all um it's all cloward piven it's all wef it's all intentional it's all a plot to bring things down because that presupposes that these people at these levels of government are smart and i don't particularly think smart and capable and all powerful and i don't particularly think smart and capable and all-powerful and i don't think that's the case at all i think they're guided by lazy unexamined sort of ideology that just lets them wave away things and feel good about themselves and know that political gains will be

will be had but you have to wonder though um the idea somehow that well john for example you were going to ask him another question before we left while I collect my thoughts, and that was going to be what? Because I know you had another one. Why don't you ask us, and then we'll pretend that we know what we're talking about. Yeah, I just think it's kind of been touched on a little bit before, but the entire problem of what I'm concerned about um yes we have this crime going on now but more and more you're seeing people fight back on their own look if no one else is going to stop this i will um i live in an open carry state uh there is no need for um any kind of

restrictions on carrying uh thankfully the vast at least, of owners here and those who carry, very responsible, very well trained. It's kind of a cultural thing with Arizona. It's always been very open in arms policy. However, what I'm concerned about is people are just going to take it into their own hands, and the people trying to stop the crime will be killed or harmed or bystanders will be um someone will eventually enforce the basic common sense rules here and if police don't do it someone else will and frankly i'd rather have a highly trained uh police force uh intervening in these things than some guy like me it's not like somebody's going to run in and shoot it's like oh wait a minute i was in the marines yes i'm 70 now but i'm going to stop this

rapscallion right here a lot of people are going to get hurt because this cannot continue and people have kind of had enough and that's kind of my concern is that you know there are always after effects there's always unintended consequences and we mentioned the bernie gets but a lot of it too is just a grouchy old man and admittedly i am one jumping in to stop a bad situation and more people getting hurt yeah charles do you think i mean this is what I think about too. I mean, there's, there's just the extraordinary quantity of FAO, FAFO tweets on X or X's on tweets on Twitter, uh, people who just love to play all the clips of the crew of the crew getting what's, what's due to him. Half of them are Brazilian off-duty policemen who are shooting all over the place.

And they always seem to be off-duty Brazilian policemen. But when you look at this and you see, okay, it's great that somebody defended that guy, intervened, that the guy with the big cowboy hat and the sunglasses did shoot the robber. It's great that that person did actually use a firearm correctly. It still is not a society that is, well, it's a society in the process of dissolution. I mean, because, A, you don't want those people who are going to be doing those things out there. You want them to be put away. You want to have them dissuaded from doing things because they know that capture and prosecution is nearby certain in incarceration.

It's not a good sign. I mean, occasionally, yeah yeah you like to see the good guy with a gun save somebody but it's not it's dozens and dozens and dozens of videos flowing through your little glowing electronic device every day telling you of the citizens doing things that it does not speak well for a society and its strengths and the reason what is go on yes and no yes and no well that's the kind of nuance sort of wishy-washy approach that i would have it's all right so yes and no i mean go on go on well i think that the response that you're describing the fafo response the sharing of videos is actually a sign of health in much the same way it doesn't bother me i'm not i'm not i'm not prudent no no i'm not necessarily disagreeing with you

what i'm saying is that i think that the in a similar vein the rise in vigilante movies in the 1970s and 80s the putting of dirty harry on a pedestal were healthy instincts providing that the means by which that instinct is channeled is criminal justice reform and not the establishment of vigilante militias so i i suppose we all agree on this i'm not at all bothered by this feeling of righteous indignation that manifests itself in john wick movies or what you are i just don't want people to confuse that for real life i i say this not to argue with you james or john but because i do see some of the same people who are the architects of this progressive prosecution disaster looking down on those who write fafo on twitter and saying oh no you shouldn't think that well

actually no you've got to choose one you've got to choose one if you don't want people to lionize bernie gets then put police on the subway you can't not do all of the things that people expect from the government and then say to them and also you're not allowed to fantasize about doing it yourself that's just a completely unsustainable position i know it's not your position but that actually is the logical endpoint of some of the people who say defund the police and end incarceration i mean there are unfortunately they're relatively influential within elite culture if not the country at large there are people out there who write essays in the nation saying we should have no prisons we should have no courts we should have no laws

in effect because these are all tools of imperialism or of capitalist and that's what i was getting into yeah when i say that there's no cloward piven, there's no grand strategy, and the rest of it, they're not that smart, they're not that capable. What they are is holding to a whole bunch of ideas that is grounded in root causism. That the idea that, well, you can't really punish people

for these things because it's a reflection of certain realities in this country, in its country's founding, And it's very marrow. And that until those things are addressed and structurally reformed and structurally root and branch everything's taken out, you can't do anything. You ought not to do something. You can, but you shouldn't. Because the real problem is America, with however many Ks you want to spell it. And so, I mean, that's an idea they've held unmolested in their head since they were 17, they were 18, you know, taking the first hit out the bog.

And they regarded this as the sign of an intellectually enlightened person, you know, a nice, wonderful, transnational, hand-holding, kumbaya person who would guide us all to the Davos paradise around the corner. But unfortunately, it's nonsense it's absolute nonsense and you and you're you're right so what but you mentioned the john wick movies which are you know gratuitous and uh blood-stirring and all the rest of it but when you go back to clint eastwood and you go back to charles bronson and you go back to all those 70s urban fantasies they were movies and they were not very good movies i mean i took a look at

death wish the other day i started watching it it's just awful do you remember who one of the criminals is who comes in and terrorizes the family of charles bronson yeah i know charles bronson who's an architect by the way and only in 1970 whatever could somebody with those lapels and that mustache be an architect instead of a camel cigarette spokesman or a porn star? Okay, so John knows this one. We'll see if Charles does. One of the, because these movies always have the punks that you just want to see get it. Because they're just awful.

They used to be the beat daddy-o guys in the late 50s and 60s. Like, hey, man. And they'd be taunting and all the rest of it. You just wanted them dead. And it was the 70s punks, the switchblading, you know, creepy, pervy types who were just there to take your womenfolk. Who was the bad rapist in Death Wish? Arch criminal Jeff Goldblum. Arch criminal Jeff Goldblum. He was the bad rapist in Death Wish. Arch criminal Jeff Goldblum. Arch criminal Jeff Goldblum.

He was the thug. I'm glad he was not typecast in that way. He was a very hesitant thug, but, yeah, urbane, sophisticated, but, yes, he was the rabble. Speaking of urbane and sophisticated, right, speaking of urbane and sophisticated, last, before we go, Charles, how do you feel about the restoration of the dress code in the Senate

that we no longer have to be, we have to have schlump chic? I'm all in favor of a dress code in the Senate because I think that clothes are a classic time and place issue. I am not somebody who spends most of my days dressed to the nines. I live on the beach and I dress accordingly,

but I wouldn't wear the clothes that I wear to the beach to a funeral. And I wouldn't wear them if I were in the military. And I don't think I should wear them in the U S Senate either, or if I were president of the United States. And the other observation I have of this, which is not mine is Yuval Levin's, but I'm stealing it, is that this is a classic example of somebody who has gone into an institution that is much bigger than him, that predates him by hundreds of years. And instead

of saying, well, I wished to become a part of this, therefore I will be a part of it has said my wants and needs are superior and this institution must change for no obvious reason it's not as if and I know this will sound a little bit churlish but it's not as if John Fetterman can certainly process audio properly if he puts on a hoodie and there is no good reason for this at all it's pure want so i think it's excellent that the senate has pushed back it's given me a little bit of faith actually in the system to say no excellent john your last thoughts on the matter you're wearing a shirt and i'm tired of seeing um senator grew from uh he just reminds you of grew from uh despicable me with the uh his legs are holding up a lot of they are the real heroes here john Me. His legs are holding up a lot.

They are the real heroes here, John Fetterman's legs holding up that frame. But it's not about fashion. It's about respect. Respect for the institution, as Charles says. Respect for other people. I had the experience of being at one of these crazy fantasy pools at a resort with my kids, and I hadn't been to a place like that in quite a while. And I'm looking around, and I remember muttering to my wife,

people really need to wear more clothes. It wasn't like anything they were wearing was scandalous. It's just like, I don't need that kind of gentleman of my age wearing silver Speedos, maybe reel it back in a little bit. Show deference to the organization. Show respect to your colleagues and the people you are at least claiming to serve. I agree. But at a resort, you know, it is a place where it's hot and there's water. And frankly, if you can carry it off when you're 62, more power to you. And I say that, and I'm going to quit now before anybody demands some sort of photographic proof, which I would have to provide. And we all know how the yellow tank top went. This podcast brought to you by Beam.

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decade and belong there. It's a decade like John F. Kennedy talking about the moon. That's it. Maybe Peter and Rob will be back next week. If not, we'll have John and Charlie, which is always fun. And thank you guys for showing up. It's been a great podcast. Great to talk to you again and see you again. And we will see everybody in the comments at Ricochet.

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