A List Of Crime Spikes In Cities That Defunded The Police

Over 20 major cities across the U.S. have either cut or shifted police budget funds since the death of George Floyd in May 2020. As a result

Upward News

Over 20 major cities across the U.S. have either cut or shifted police budget funds since the death of George Floyd in May 2020. As a result, 2020 likely saw the largest homicide increase in American history, with high crime rates continuing into 2021.

New York: During the summer of 2020, New York cut $1 billion from its police funds. In June 2020, the city experienced a 130 percent increase in shootings in one month. Killings in August 2021 were up 50 percent.

Chicago: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot claimed to be opposed to defunding the police while quietly cutting 400 police officers positions during 2020. Chicago saw 87 shootings over the 2020 4th of July weekend. The same year, carjackings were up 135 percent.

Los Angeles: Los Angeles cut $150 million from its LAPD budget last July. As of late November 2020, LA recorded 300 homicides. Killings were reportedly up 25 percent since 2019, and shootings were up more than 32 percent. Shootings in South LA rose 742 percent in the first two weeks of January.

Milwaukee: After cutting 60 police positions in 2020, Milwaukee proposed a budget to cut 120 police positions in 2021, cutting a total of $430,000 from the overall budget. Milwaukee experienced a 95 percent increase of local murders in 2020.

Louisville: Rather than directly defunding its police, Louisville voted to use portions of its funds for "recruiting a more diverse force" and "behavioral health professionals" to assist officers. They also boasted of sending millions to "disadvantaged and disinvested" communities. The city saw a 78 percent increase in 2020 homicides.

Seattle: Seattle reduced its police budget by 20 percent and saw a 74 percent homicide increase in 2020.

Minneapolis: Minneapolis cut $8 million from its police budget and saw a 72 percent increase in local murders during the 2020 year.

New Orleans: In 2020, despite seeing a 62 percent increase in 2020 homicides, New Orleans proposed a $16 million budget cut for 2021. It has now experienced an 11 percent increase from 2020 and 79% increase compared to 2019.

Atlanta: In 2020, Atlanta reallocated 50 percent of the corrections budget to social services and community enhancement initiatives and saw a 58 percent increase in 2020 homicides.

Portland: In 2020, Portland cut $15 million and disbanded a gun violence reduction unit, after which Portland saw an 83 percent increase in homicides in 2020. Source

Baltimore: Baltimore cut $22 million from its police budget in 2020 and has experienced a 17 percent increase in homicides compared to the same time last year. Thirty-seven businesses have requested a crackdown on low-level crimes. ​​Baltimore surpassed 300 killings for the seventh consecutive year.

Oakland: Oakland cut its police budget by $14.6 million in 2020. Homicides were up 500 percent, and shootings were up 126 percent in the first two weeks of January 2021.

Washington DC: Washington DC cut its police budget by $15 million, ending 2020 with a 19 percent increase in violent crime compared to 2019. In November, 2021 DC recorded its 200th homicide, a benchmark not reached since 2003.

Philadelphia: Philadelphia cut police funding by $33 million in 2021.  Since Jan 2020, 500 people were killed, and more than 2,240 were shot, 40 percent more than the police have ever recorded. In 2021, Philadelphia saw killings at a higher rate than in 2020. By September, killings were up 18% from the same time last year. In November 2021, Philadelphia reached 497 killings,13 percent higher than this time last year.

Hartford: After Hartford cut $1 million from its $4 million budget, it has experienced 20 murders through the first six months of 2021, The city experienced almost as many homicides in half a year as in each of the past three years.

Salt Lake City: Salt Lake City reduced its police budget by $5.3 million in 2020. By December, 2020 violent crime and property crime had increased more than 20 percent.

Austin: Austin cut its police budget by a third in 2020. By December 2020, murder was up 54 percent over the previous year, and aggravated assault was up 13 percent.

Dallas: Dallas cut $7 million from the $24 million overtime budget for police and by November 2020 surpassed 2019’s homicide rate, the highest on record since 1991. The city even experienced seven murders over a period of 24 hours.

Denver: The mayor of Denver claimed to be against defunding the police. However, the city's policies require healthcare workers to respond to domestic mental health calls instead of police. In 2020, the city recorded the highest number of homicides since 1981, a 51 percent increase.

San Francisco: San Francisco's mayor revealed her plan to  redirect $120 million into "health workers and workforce training.” San Francisco saw a double increase in shootings in the first half of 2021 compared to the past two years and a rise in aggravated assault.

• In December, San Francisco Mayor, London Breed, launched an emergency police intervention in the downtown Tenderloin neighborhood. The mayor said, “it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement. More aggressive with the changes in our policies and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”

San Diego: After San Diego cut $4.3 million from its police overtime funds, the city saw a “disturbing” increase in violent crime with a 129 percent increase in gang-related shootings since Jan 1.

Lack of policing

1. Replacing police with unarmed civilians such as social workers.
2. Reducing or reallocating funds affects police activity. The Law Enforcement legal Defense Fund found that police activity such as arrests, stops, and searches declined by 48 percent since last June. In New York, for example, there were 40,000 fewer arrests made by July 2020. Consequently, during June of that year, murder was up 30 percent; burglaries were up 118 percent.; thefts were up 51 percent.
3. Police voluntarily leaving the force. In 2020, the NYPD saw a 75 percent increase in quitting or retirement. After George Floyd’s death in May 2020, close to 200 officers had left the Minneapolis police force by May 2021.

Lowered morale and hesitancy to police

1. The continuous narrative is that it is racist to enforce laws, particularly lower-level offenses.
2. Hostile rhetoric against police.
3. A lack of trust between police and prosecutors. Police go through the process of arresting criminals for them to be released and shortly re-offend.

Change in societal standards

1. The mass media continually downplayed and politicized the violence that took place during the summer of 2021. This sent a message of tolerance for violence, justification of vandalism, and explicit messages that law and order were not a societal priority.

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. -- Rob Henderson

Interracial Crime and “Perspective”

Why you sometimes need to tell uncomfortable truths

richardhanania.com

The topic of black crime has taken over Twitter. It all started when Elon Musk responded sympathetically to a Tweet that presented data showing black-on-white crime is the most common form of interracial violence. The original tweet was completely correct, and you can see Noah Carl for some of the sophistry that has been used to try to deny or obfuscate on the underlying facts.

I personally don’t have the patience for taking part in these kinds of arguments, at least in the way that Noah is engaging here. It’s like the people who spend all their time arguing with trans and feminists by pointing to *scientific studies* showing that boys have penises and girls have vaginas. Men have more grip strength. Scientists just proved it! I guess someone has to do it, and I’ve run into some actual human beings (on the internet anyway) who tell me that they accepted the blank slate view of sex until they looked at the data. This makes me sad. But since the data does convince some people, I guess I’m glad someone is providing it.

Race and crime is similar. The numbers are there if you need them. I suppose foreigners might. But I grew up just outside of Chicago, and data on black criminality is to me just as unnecessary as sex comparisons of grip strength. Chicago is about a third black. Like many midwestern cities, it is extremely violent, with nearly all of the crime concentrated in black neighborhoods. When crime does spill over into the nicer areas, it’s committed by the people from those neighborhoods.

I knew many family friends who were Middle Eastern immigrants and store owners in the city. Every now and then, some distant relation or acquaintance would get their store looted or, in at least one instance I remember, shot and killed. Michael Jordan’s greatness was much appreciated and respected but its consequences used to fill the community with fear, because another championship tended to create another possibility that stores would go up in flames. The Arabs would speak in shorthand. “What happened to Walid’s store?” “You know, the blacks…” “Ah.” Actually, they would say “the slaves,” if you want to really know how Arabs talk.

Here’s the thing: while only immigrants and white proles explicitly discuss this aspect of their reality, every single person within the orbit of the city behaves as if they know the truth. No matter who you are, unless you’re one of the residents of those communities, your life is organized around avoiding the pathologies of the inner city. If you’re a desperate immigrant, you might open up a store, put up a “We Take EBT” sign, and take the risk of being shot. White Americans are less inclined to do this, so they instead just flee black neighborhoods and do what they can to get their kids out of black schools. They’ll make any commute or pay whatever tuition is necessary. No one is confused about this — liberals are correct that entire swaths of a major city don’t end up with zero white people by accident. They just attribute this to “racism” rather than the desire not to be sexually assaulted or physically harmed.

I’ve been talking about Chicago, but the same things are true for Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Baltimore, and countless other major cities. It’s also true for the cities where American elites and policymakers live like Washington, DC, which is why I’m always amused by theories that say they are actually acting in their own interests by coddling criminals. Other than blacks themselves, no group would benefit more from solving our crime problem than wealthy urban whites.

We can therefore ignore those who deny the reality of black crime. They’re either too stupid or dishonest to engage with. Among others on the left, there has been an acceptance of reality combined with pleas to simply frame the issue differently.

When liberals talk about perspective here, what they usually mean is that the likelihood of a white person being victimized by a black person is small in an absolute sense, so why worry about it? It would be a fine argument, except that we are constantly told to obsess over the harms done by police shootings, white supremacist violence, and vigilantes falsely accusing innocent black men of crimes.

I thought about showing you NYT and CNN headlines implying that blacks have to live in constant fear due to racism. But you’ve probably seen them, and instead I’ll share this clip showing how the topic was addressed a few years ago on a major network TV show.

As a digression, I would recommend checking out a few episodes of A Million Little Things if you want to see the horror that is the PC therapeutic slop that normies are being fed these days, but that’s a discussion for a different time.

So the crime debate has been going something like this.

Conservatives: Look at all the black-on-white crime.

Liberals: Get some perspective man. It’s nothing compared to the chances of being murdered by your own race. Not to mention heart attacks or covid. These are very small numbers.

Conservatives: You guys are the ones telling us blacks are living in constant fear. Stop doing that.

Now, when having these debates, what’s frustrating is that people are usually talking past one another. There’s not like one guy named “conservatives” and one guy named “liberals.” The liberals who are telling you to have some perspective on black crime often aren’t the same ones pushing the narrative that blacks should live in fear of whites. It’s easy to “own” the other side by putting together views of different people and finding contradictions.

That being said, the myth of substantial white-on-black violence is so deeply embedded in the culture that it’s a storyline in network TV shows. I think it’s fair to ask people to take a position on it. If you dislike racists on Twitter focusing too much on black-on-white crime, know that they are closer to the truth than the race obsessives on the other side, and have a lot less power.

One odd thing about these calls for perspective is that when liberals say that intra-racial crime is more common than crime that crosses group boundaries, what they are essentially saying is don’t worry about black crime, because the victims are overwhelmingly black people. But wait! Since when are liberals uninterested in problems that disproportionately affect blacks? These are the people who write serious NYT think pieces about how national parks are too white. They now turn around and say, let’s not talk too much about murder, because blacks are the victims? It’s a very odd thing, and it’s hard for me to even steelman their lack of interest in solving this issue as they obsess over every other black grievance, real or imagined.

Some years ago I noticed that fact checkers started providing “perspective” on claims rather than simply saying whether they were true or false. Of course, what perspective to take on facts is a huge part of what political discourse is about. Do blacks commit a lot of violence against whites? Compared to the number of cancer deaths, no. But in the context of a comparison to white-on-black violence, absolutely. One can conduct a similar analysis of issues like covid, terrorism, and school shootings.

For me, I like cost-benefit analysis as the way to understand what problems are worth worrying about and what we should be doing about them.

Black-on-white violence is not the biggest issue in the world, but it is useful to talk about in order to challenge narratives that pose much more serious problems. Arguments about supposed racism committed by whites against blacks are why we can’t effectively fight crime in this country and why we can’t have freedom of association or meritocratic criteria in hiring. The belief in white racism as a major factor in American life is the force that distorts all of policymaking and culture. Any arguments that are effective at discrediting that narrative are worth making.

And no, I don’t consider acting on statistical realities to be a kind of racism society should solve. Once you remove reactions that are based on group behavior, and private preferences that are none of the government’s business in a free society, the remaining “racism” in the United States against blacks is negligible, and more than balanced out by the ways in which they are advantaged.

The truth of the matter is we have a disgraceful amount of crime in the US, and the costs are not simply a matter of the number of people robbed, raped, and killed. It’s also a tragedy that what could be some of the most valuable urban real estate in the country is basically uninhabitable. In fact, part of the reason that black-on-white violence is rare in this country is because whites have overwhelmingly fled places where blacks live due to the threat of violence.

Other pathologies of American life, like NIMBYism, which drives up the cost of housing, are also downstream of the crime issue. If you’re a resident of Tokyo, you don’t need to worry about greater density leading to a decline in public safety, the way that Americans have to.

There’s no “perspective” one can take from which a reasonable observer won’t find that inner city crime is a major problem, and something we should do our best to solve. The chart below shows the ten American cities of at least 100,000 people that have the highest murder rates, and how they compare to the most violent countries in the world. The murder rates for cities come from CBS, while the country data comes from the World Bank.

You might be saying that it’s unfair to compare cities to entire countries, since urban areas might have concentrated violence. Yet the most violent countries in the world tend to be small. For example, St Louis, which is number one in murder in the chart above, has 293,000 people. That’s a larger population than St Lucia (180,000) and St Vincent (104,000), which are shown on the graph. Detroit has 632,000 people, making it more than 50% larger than either the Bahamas (407,000) or Belize (400,000). New Orleans (384,000) and Cleveland (373,000) are close behind. So this isn’t a matter of cherry-picking areas with minuscule populations and making them look bad. These cities are the size of small countries, which means we are pretty much comparing apples-to-apples in many of these cases. And if you want to make a real apples-to-apples comparisons, try contrasting American cities to those in other first world countries, like London.

As I argue in my articles on El Salvador, any polity that has a high enough murder rate needs to make solving crime its number one priority. This was true for that nation before Bukele came along, as it is for major American cities today. It’s not a big mystery how to do this, it’s just politically difficult, because literally everything that works is considered racist. You need more cops, more prisons, and more use of DNA databases and facial recognition technology. You can’t have concerns about disparate impact in a world where crime is so overwhelmingly committed by one group. And yes, liberals are right about one thing, which is that gun laws matter too.

But the left is so out of its mind on everything touching on race that even though they’re right that gun laws matter, when it comes to actually enforcing them, they tend to shy away from doing so for the obvious reason.

While I support policies that can make incremental improvements, actually solving our crime problem to any serious extent would take a revolution in our culture or system of government. Whether you want to focus on guns or the criminals themselves, it would involve heavily policing, surveilling, and incarcerating more black people. If any part of you is uncomfortable with policies that have an extreme disparate impact, you don’t have the stomach for what it would take. And, unlike some, I’m not naive enough to think that non-criminal blacks would end up grateful towards those who took the steps necessary to make their communities safer.

Dealing with the crime issue is complicated for reasons that go deep to the heart of the American psyche, which means there’s little hope that things will change any time soon. Until they do, we should continue to at the very least push back on the most malicious lies being told about race in America.

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. -- Rob Henderson

Interracial violent crime in the US

How to interpret the numbers

noahsnewsletter.com

Since the death of Jordan Neely on the New York subway, there has been much discussion of interracial violent crime on Twitter. Conservatives have been pointing out (correctly) that blacks commit a disproportionate amount, while leftists have been trying to argue (erroneously) that they don’t.

The latest attempt to show that blacks don’t commit a disproportionate amount of interracial violent crime was by a guy named Judd Legum, whom I’d never heard of before. Here I’ll explain exactly why he’s wrong.

Note that Legum has a Substack newsletter with 258,000 subscribers, of which more than 10,000 are paying subscribers. This equates to a minimum annual income from Substack of around $600,000 (minus fees). So this guy is earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, despite the fact that he’s making completely erroneous claims about an important subject. What’s more, his newsletter previously won an award for “online journalism”.

Legum made several erroneous claims in his recent article but I want to focus on this one: “when you normalize the data for population, the rate of “Black on White” crime is similar to the rate of “White on Black” crime”. To support the claim, he refers to a table in a report by the US Department of Justice – which is reproduced below.

As Legum notes, “The data shows that 15.3% of crimes against whites are committed by Black people. And 10.6% of crimes against Black people are committed by whites.” Since 15.3% is not that much greater than 10.6%, he’s claiming that blacks and whites commit a “similar” amount of interracial violent crime.

Here’s what’s actually going on.

3,581,360 is the total number of violent incidents with a white victim. Of these, 15.3% had a black perpetrator. This means the total number of violent incidents committed by blacks against whites is 3,581,360 × 0.153 = 547,948.

563,940 is the total number of violent incidents with a black victim. Of these, 10.6% had a white perpetrator. This means the total number of violent incidents committed by whites against blacks is 563,940 × 0.106 = 59,778.

Dividing 547,948 by 59,778 gives us 9.2. Which means the total number of violent incidents committed by blacks against whites is 9 times greater than the total number of violent incidents committed by whites against blacks.

If we compare blacks and Asians, we get an even bigger disparity. In fact, the total number of violent incidents committed by blacks against Asians is 89 times greater than the total number of violent incidents committed by Asians against blacks.

These massive ratios have nothing to do with the population sizes of different groups. Although there are more whites than blacks in the US, there are more blacks than Asians. Yet both whites and Asians commit many fewer violent incidents against blacks than blacks commit against them.

Adjusting for population size by calculating “rates”, as some conservatives have been doing, is actually wrong in this context. To see why, consider the following example – which I borrowed from the Twitter user Lao Yang.

First, let’s check that both populations have the same overall crime rate.

The total number of crimes committed by members of population A is 9,801 + 99 = 9,900. (9,801 crimes were committed against other members of population A and 99 were committed against members of population B). Therefore, population A’s crime rate is 9,900/990,000 × 100 = 1 per 100.

The total number of crimes committed by members of population B is 99 + 1 = 100. (99 crimes were committed against members of population A and 1 was committed against another member of population B). Therefore, population B’s crime rate is 100/10,000 × 100 = 1 per 100.

So both populations have the same overall crime rate. And each committed the same number of crimes against the other. Why, then, is it wrong to calculate “rates” of interracial crime?

Well, we can calculate both offending rates and victimisation rates. Population A’s offending rate is 99/990,000 × 100 = 0.01 per 100. And population B’s offending rate is 99/10,000 × 100 = 0.99 per 100. So population B’s offending rate is 99 times higher.

Now let’s do victimisation rates, which are exactly the same. Population A’s is 99/990,000 × 100 = 0.01 per 100. And population B’s is 99/10,000 × 100 = 0.99 per 100. So population B’s victimisation rate is also 99 times higher.

Population B commits crime against population A 99 times more often than population A commits crime against population B. Yet population B is victimised by population A 99 times more often than population A is victimised by population B? This can’t be right.

The reason is that interracial crimes involve encounters. And the number of times blacks encounter whites has to be equal to the number of times whites encounter blacks. Therefore, interracial crime numbers do not need to be adjusted for population. (You could adjust them for the combined population of both groups, but that would be pointless.)

In summary: comparing interracial crime across groups is relatively simple. You just divide, say, the total number of crimes committed by blacks against whites by the total number of crimes committed by whites against blacks. Doing so confirms that blacks commit a disproportionate amount. Age can explain part of the disparity between blacks and whites, and an even smaller part of the disparity between blacks and Asians.

NCJ Number: 145948

Journal: San Diego Justice Journal Volume: 1 Issue: 1 Dated: (Winter 1993) Pages: 57-64

Author(s): M E Lewyn

Date Published: 1993

Length: 8 pages

Annotation

This article examines several possible explanations about why women fear criminal victimization more than men, although statistics show that men are significantly more likely than women to be victims of a violent crime.

Abstract

Some explain women's greater fear of crime as due to their greater likelihood of being victimized by strangers. This explanation is based on a false assumption; crimes against women are far less likely to be "stranger crimes" than crimes against men. Another explanation of women's greater fear of crime is their greater physical vulnerability. Studies show, however, that women are not more likely than men to be physically injured during a crime. A third explanation for women's greater fear of crime is that they have greater appreciation for the risk of victimization and take precautionary measures. This theory fails to take account of many women's failure to take precautions against those crimes for which they are at greater risk, that is, threats of spouses and acquaintances. A fourth explanation of women's greater fear of crime is their risk of being sexually assaulted. This explanation does not explain why women are more fearful of many other crimes for which they are at low risk of victimization. The author supports the theory that women fear crime more than men because women are culturally conditioned to view themselves as vulnerable and as targets for victimization, while men are raised to perceive themselves as strong, brave, and invulnerable. 

Opinion | The Biggest Root Cause of Crime Is Fatherlessness

Children are likelier to finish high school and stay out of trouble if they’re brought up by two parents.

WSJ

A decade ago, New York City launched a campaign to combat teen pregnancy. It featured ads on buses and subway cars that read: “If you finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children, you have a 98% chance of not being in poverty.”

That advice, more popularly known as the “success sequence,” is often credited to research done by Brookings Institution scholars Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins, though others have made similar observations. In his recent book, “Agency,” Ian Rowe of the American Enterprise Institute writes that the message “has attracted many admirers because of the simplicity of the three steps that young people, even if born into disadvantaged circumstances or raised by a young single parent, can themselves control and take in their lives.”

The effort nevertheless faced significant backlash from detractors who accused then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg of stigmatizing teen pregnancy and pushing a “moralistic, conservative agenda to revitalize marriage,” Mr. Rowe writes. Mr. Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio, ultimately abandoned the effort. Public moralizing has since fallen further out of favor and been replaced by a kind of self-congratulatory nonjudgmentalism. In today’s New York, you’re likely to see ads for free syringes and directions to “safe” injections sites for junkies, even as drug overdoses have reached record levels.

We could use more of that moralizing from public officials, whether the issue is solo parenting, substance abuse or crime. The success sequence works to keep people not only off the dole but also out of trouble with the law. High-school graduates and children raised by both parents are much less likely to end up in jail. “Virtually every major social pathology,” political scientist Stephen Baskerville writes, “has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, suicide, and psychological disorders—all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor, surpassing even race and poverty.”

America’s crime debate tends to focus on so-called root causes, such as joblessness. But it’s worth remembering that the sharpest increase in violent crime began in the 1960s, a decade that saw low unemployment, strong economic growth and a doubling of black household incomes. As notable, labor-force participation rates of young black men fell during the 1980s and ’90s, one of the longest periods of sustained economic growth in U.S. history.

A new academic paper from the Institute for Family Studies doesn’t deny that economic conditions play a role in criminal behavior. And co-authors Rafael Mangual, Brad Wilcox, Joseph Price and Seth Cannon write that “changes in law-enforcement and the prosecution of criminals have also had a hand in the recent uptick in violent crime in American cities.” The paper’s main argument, however, is that family instability may be the biggest factor of all and that it’s not receiving the attention it deserves.

“Cities are safer when two-parent families are dominant and more crime-ridden when family instability is common,” the authors write. Nationwide, the total crime rate is about 48% higher in cities “that have above the median share of single-parent families, compared to cities that have fewer single-parent families.” Even when controlling for variables such as race, income and educational attainment, “the association between family structure and total crime rates, as well as violent crime rates, in cities across the United States remains statistically significant.”

Having a father around, the authors note, is about more than an additional paycheck. Fathers teach their sons responsibility, self-control, how to carry themselves, how to treat women. They tend to be more effective disciplinarians, and their involvement in childrearing is linked to positive outcomes in the academic development of their children, “especially in mathematics and verbal skills.” That finding “has been established for both sons and daughters but, unsurprisingly, it is especially pronounced among boys. The presence of married fathers is also protective against school suspensions and expulsions, as well as the risk of dropping out of high school.”

Between 1960 and 2019, the percentage of babies in the U.S. born to unwed mothers grew from 5% to almost 50%. “Shifts from the late-1960s to the 1990s away from stable families have left some cities, and especially some neighborhoods, vulnerable to higher rates of crime, especially violent crime,” the study concludes. “We need to realign material and cultural incentives in our cities to favor marriage and stable families, not undercut them.”

We all know single mothers—some of us even may be related to them—who heroically beat these odds and raised children that have gone on to lead productive lives. The public-policy goal should be to reduce the number of people who will have to face those odds. And that means calling out behavior that is objectively harmful to people and society in general.

Executive Summary This Institute for Family Studies report finds that strong families are associated with less crime in cities across the United States, as well in neighborhoods across Chicago. Specifically, our analyses indicate that the total crime rate in cities with high levels of single parenthood are 48% higher than those with low levels of single parenthood. When it comes to violent crime and homicide, cities with high levels of single parenthood have 118% higher rates of violence and 255% higher rates of homicide. And in Chicago, our analysis of census tract data from the city shows that tracts with high levels of single-parent-headed households face 137% higher total crime rates, 226% higher violent crime rates, and 436% higher homicide rates, compared to tracts with low levels of single parenthood. We also find that poverty, education, and race are linked to city and census-tract level trends in crime. In general, in cities across America, and on the streets of Chicago, this report finds that public safety is greater in communities where the twoparent family is the dominant norm.

• 76% of suicides are men
• 85% of homeless are men
• 70% of homicide victims are men
• 40% of domestic abuse victims are men
• Men are the majority victims of violent crime
• Men on average serve 64% longer in prison
• Men on average are 3.4x more likely to be imprisoned than women when both committed the same crime

There is nothing wrong with being mindful of your own personal safety.

We all have a right to feel uncomfortable, and to act accordingly. It’s okay to cross the road to avoid others, I do this myself.

So too we should all be mindful of how we can make others feel safer when walking home at night – this is just basic common decency.

But what isn’t okay; is to fear monger, vilify and create a cultural panic around ‘men’ as a group.

To talk about men as if they’re monsters forever lurking the shadows; comparing experiences with men to walking through a room of snakes, or swimming in a shark tank, and yes, eating from a bowl of poisoned M&Ms.

This is not advocacy. This is ignorance, and hate.

Neither do such thought experiments help women ‘feel safe’ either. In fact, such terrifying analogies will likely make them feel the opposite.

Neither do you get to tell men (who are at a significantly higher risk), that they can walk the streets at whatever time they like, without fear or consequence – under the protective shield of so called ‘male privilege’.

Walking home at night is not an opportunity for you to inject your bigoted political ideas around men, or stoke fear and division.

I am tired of it.

I am tired of the endless pearl clutching.

I am tired of seeing the conversation of violent crime centred on highly privileged millionaire celebrity women, who are not at risk, and taken away from those who are – which is young, inner city, working class black boys.

I am tired of the conversation making no effort to understand what shapes violent crime, or how to reduce it, to instead fan the flames of a gender war.

I am tired of seeing tragic stories hijacked for political ends, to become yet another bludgeon to hit ‘yes all men’ with.

It is boring. It is divisive. And most of all, it doesn’t achieve anything.

So let’s look at the numbers, for a more reasonable and evidence based insight into violent crime.

In fact, such terrifying analogies will likely make them feel the opposite.

"... as we know from the war on drugs and the war on terror, for those in the business of providing protection, high threat levels are bread and butter. Likewise, for those in the business of healing race relations, racial division is your sworn enemy but your secret friend—so much so that wounding and healing become part of the same operation." -- Lyell Asher, "Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults."

‘Defunding the police’ is a threat to black life

US policing can be fixed – as long as we ignore the advice of BLM activists.

spiked-online.com

The senseless murder of Tyre Nichols, by five black Memphis police officers, was an undisputed tragedy. But it’s important to judge it in context.

For many on the American political left, the explanation for what happened was simple: white supremacy. Despite the officers involved being black, this was still held up as evidence of the continued victimisation of black men by police officers who too often resort to violence whenever they interact with ‘people of colour’. Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, George Floyd and other BLM martyrs, of varying degrees of actual innocence, have been cited in support of these claims, and have been used to fuel the ‘Defund the Police’ narrative.

This take is wrong. We shouldn’t demonise policing and policemen simply because the annual number of problematic killings is above zero. According to the Washington Post’s excellent database, about 25 unarmed black Americans were killed by police gunfire annually from 2015 to 2018. The figure is only at 25 because of an atypical 37 killings in 2015. Over the past four years, in fact, the number of unarmed black Americans killed annually by police gunfire stands at 12. In contrast, far more police officers are shot and killed in the line of duty each year – 314 police officers were shot and 58 were killed in 2021 alone.

While the left highlights the fact that black Americans are killed by police at two-to-three times the rate that would be expected from their share of the population, it neglects to mention the most glaringly obvious reason for this. Black Americans are a far younger, more urban and more working-class population than are white Americans. Largely as a result of this, they are disproportionately perpetrators of violent crimes. They therefore come into contact with the law more often than other sections of US society. According to recent figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), black Americans are at least five times as likely as whites to commit murders and nearly three times as likely to commit violent crimes overall.

Moreover, the homicide problem in specifically black communities has grown significantly since the killing of George Floyd in 2020 – with the annual number of murders surging to over 20,000 and black-perpetrator homicides passing the 10,000 mark in both 2020 and 2021. There are now significantly more black (60 per cent) than ‘white and other’ (40 per cent) homicide victims annually, despite the fact that black Americans make up only 12 to 13 per cent of the US population. This entirely new level of blood-letting is the true crisis faced by black American citizens living in struggling neighbourhoods – not the phoney risk of ‘genocide’ at police hands, as BLM claims.

None of this excuses terrible police work, such as that which cost Tyre Nichols his life. However, as Bob Maranto and I have noted, perhaps the most serious problem with the BLM-inspired ‘defund the police’ narratives is that they utterly ignore potential changes to policing that might actually work. Over the past two decades, well-documented police-community coordination in major cities has been effective at reducing the number of black men killed by police, and even the share of black men engaged in violent behaviours.

Over the past decade, many police forces have begun to dramatically revamp their use of force and rethink citizen-interaction policies. Sometimes this has been prodded by federal intervention – particularly after the 2015 Department of Justice investigation into policing techniques in the troubled city of Ferguson, Missouri. As leading criminologists like David Kennedy and Thomas Abt have pointed out, police forces working with community groups have had success targeting a small number of the most ‘at risk’ men in high-crime neighbourhoods. The technique is simplicity itself: offer these potential offenders (and potential victims) strong positive incentives if they begin to turn their lives around, but harsh penalties if they do not.

Memorably, in the summer of 2020, the defunding movement proposed replacing police officers with social workers and community ‘violence disruptor’ groups. It was not entirely wrong about the role social workers can play as part of an anti-crime strategy. However, the activists failed to recognise that these groups cannot act independently of the police. Social workers, in particular, cannot effectively respond to serious situations of domestic or family violence alone – since most are young untrained women and these troubling cases often involve serious criminals armed with guns or knives. Independent ‘peace-makers’ are just tax-paying citizens – they have no access to the databases that police officers use to proactively interact with high-risk men, or any real ‘sticks’ to use to force compliance with the law. Social work and community activism can work only as an addition to better-funded and more proactive police departments, not as an alternative to them.

Other practical strategies for improving policing can work, too. As Maranto and I note, New York City – perhaps surprisingly one of the US’s very top police departments – simply fires all officers who pick up more than two or three verified citizen complaints, or demotes them to hated jobs, such as in the departmental motor pool. Maintaining a strong, well-funded Internal Affairs division, and even requiring officers to fill out an awkward 40-plus page report every time they unholster a firearm, have proven to be effective violence-reduction strategies as well. The prospect of bureaucratic tedium really can keep officers in check.

It is also clear what does not work to improve policing – the BLM-promoted strategy of reduced stop rates by lower-funded police departments. As Jason Johnson of the Law Enforcement Legal Defence Fund notes, when arrests recently plunged by 38 per cent in New York City, homicides rose 58 per cent – by more than 100. In Chicago, the equivalent figures were 53 per cent and 65 per cent. In Louisville, Kentucky, stops dropped by 35 per cent, arrests dropped by 42 per cent and murders rose 87 per cent. As Travis Campbell of the University of Massachusetts observes, the response of cities to major Black Lives Matter marches does appear to correlate with a slight decline in police shootings, but also with a remarkable surge of 1,000 to 6,000 more annual homicides nationally.

Given all this, what the horrific Tyre Nichols case reveals is not ‘black white supremacy’ but the flaws in the currently popular woke model of how to fix policing. Race doesn’t seem to have played a huge role in Nichols’ killing one way or another. More significant is the fact that the ‘hired from the hometown’ officers who allegedly beat Nichols to death were recruited under ‘dangerously lowered’ standards – two of those involved in Nichols’ death were sworn in back in August 2020, after Memphis Police Department had decided to attract more minorities by lowering education requirements. These lawmen were assigned to an almost irrationally aggressive anti-crime unit (called ‘SCORPION’), which was established precisely because crime had surged so much in Memphis – and everywhere else – following George Floyd’s killing and the Great Police Pullback. A decent man lost his life as a result.

We know what might save 10 or so ‘black lives’ every year from police shootings. And we know that these approaches might also protect a great many citizens from being knocked over the head with a brick by muggers. Yet too many on the left are happy to mouth inane ‘defund’ slogans and push dangerous policies. In doing so, they are harming the very people on whose behalf they claim to speak.

Wokeness, Public Safety, BLM & Antifa

A new series by Matt Thornton

boghossian.substack.com

A poll conducted in 2020 by the Skeptic Research Center asked a nationally representative sample of Americans the following question:

 “If you had to guess, how many unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2019?”

The survey offered answer choices ranging from “about 10” to “more than 10,000.” Roughly 31 percent of survey respondents who identified as “very liberal” estimated that police had killed about 1,000 or more unarmed black men the previous year, with another 22 percent overall believing the number to be at least 10,000.

In summary, 53% of Americans who identified as “very liberal” believe police murder somewhere between 1000-10,000 unarmed black men a year.

What is the actual number? Twelve.

According to the Washington Post’s comprehensive database of police killings, police shot and killed 54 unarmed people in 2019, 26 were listed as white, 12 black, 11 Hispanic, and 5 “other.”

It’s also important to note that the majority of the twelve shot were actively trying to hurt or kill the officer. For example, in at least two of the twelve cases involving black men, the perpetrators were killed while trying to run over an officer with a car. In another, an individual took and used the officer’s taser on him. In another, a female officer was being physically beaten by a suspect when she fired. All those cases were classified as “unarmed.”

“Unarmed” never means “not deadly.” There is always a gun involved—the officer’s. In many encounters, the suspect is fighting to get ahold of it. In the Ferguson case, it was claimed that Michael Brown had his hands up when Officer Darren Wilson shot him, in cold blood, in the middle of the street. Upon investigation, the forensic evidence as well as a half-dozen black witnesses confirmed Officer Wilson’s account. Michael Brown tried to take Officer Wilson’s gun and was charging at him when shot. The “Hands up, don’t shoot!’ slogan was a lie.

When you set aside cases where the suspect was actively threatening an officer’s life with physical force, you are left with one or two cases a year. In 2019, officers involved in two shootings were found at fault and sentenced accordingly. 

What is the net result of so many people being so misinformed?

After the George Floyd incident in June 2020, in cities across the country, regressive anti-policing policies were rushed in. In Chicago, this meant the department was down 1000 officers. New restrictions on the police were put in place that inhibited proactive/community policing, and several thousand violent offenders were put back on the street thanks to far left District Attorneys and activist judges. The net result was a 25 year high in murder for the city and hundreds more dead bodies, many of them young kids.

In 2021, more than 12 American cities saw record breaking levels of murder. Without evidence, ideologically-driven reporters parrot back to each other that this increase must be related to lockdowns. A closer look shows clearly that the constant attacks on law enforcement, budget cuts, and a climate of hatred fueled by that same irresponsible media have effectively halted proactive policing. Whenever that happens, violence skyrockets and thousands more needlessly die. The blood that covers media personalities, policy makers, and activists who’ve pushed the “defund the police” narrative will never wash off.

Because homicides within the black community occur at more than four times the national average, the people who will suffer most from these changes won’t be the upper-middle-class urban elites who foolishly push them through or the politicians and media personalities who have their own armed security. It will be poor, black Americans who live in the kinds of areas where 3-year-old Mekhi James was murdered, along with 197 other Chicago youth since 2020. It’s no wonder that black Americans consistently poll higher than whites in wanting increased police presence. The citizens in those high crime neighborhoods know better than anyone that cutting police funding doesn’t solve our violence problem—it increases it.

The narrative that police officers are looking to kill black Americans is a pernicious lie. Understanding this is the first step in making our cities safer for everyone.

Are We in the Midst of a Transgender Murder Epidemic?

Sydney. London. Toronto.

Quillette

The claim that there’s an “epidemic” of fatal anti-transgender violence in the United States has been made widely in recent years. A Google search for the phrase “epidemic of anti-trans violence” turns up pieces from the New York Times, NBC National News, ABC National News, and the Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBT lobby group—among 2,500,000 other results. The HRC’s primary on-point article was headlined ‘A National Epidemic: Fatal Anti-Transgender Violence,’ while the Times led with ‘Eighteen Transgender Killings This Year Raise Fears of an Epidemic.’ Transgender Day of Remembrance has been celebrated since the late 1990s to honor those “members of the transgender community whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence,” and the American Medical Association has stated on record that fatal attacks on transgender people—particularly minority trans women—constitute a large part of an “epidemic of violence” against the trans community.

However, there is remarkably little evidence that transgender Americans are killed at an unusually high rate. According to an exhaustive database kept by the HRC, there were 29 recorded murders of trans individuals in the most violent recent year on record (2017), a fraction of the 17,294 murders committed that year. In fact, the transgender murder rate is far lower than the murder rates for African Americans, poor Americans of all races, and “men” in general. Further, most murders of trans persons are same-race domestic or personal disputes, not hate crimes.

In the Times article, authors Rick Rojas and Vanessa Swales open their piece by noting that in 2019 “at least 18 trans persons” have been murdered “in a wave of violence that the American Medical Association has declared an epidemic.” According to the article, trans people—in particular trans women—have been shot, beaten, found dead in lakes, and even “burned beyond recognition.” Further, the situation seems to be getting worse: the Times journalists note that “many” say hostility toward trans people has intensified “as a rise in visibility has stirred animosity, and motivated people to attack.” Transgender Memphis woman Kayla Gore is quoted saying that the apparent rise in anti-transgender crime has pushed her and others toward increased personal vigilance: “[An attack] is always at the forefront of our minds, when we’re leaving work, going to work, going to school.” ABC News’s account contains similar language, with the authors stating: “For transgender women of color, every day is a fight for survival.”

But is this any of this an accurate summary of the dangers transgender people face? The Human Rights Campaign maintains a year-by-year database containing every known case of a transgender individual being killed by violent means, and gives this number as 29 in 2017, 26 in 2018, and 22 in 2019. Not only do these figures not reflect a year-by-year increase in attacks on trans persons—they are remarkably consistent, and may be trending slightly downwards—they also indicate that the trans murder rate is significantly lower than the murder rate for Americans overall.

Let’s crunch the numbers. Taking the HRC’s highest recent estimate of trans fatalities (29) as representative, and assuming the transgender population to be 0.6 per cent of the U.S. population—although some trans activists argue the true figure is as high as 3 per cent, which would make the murder rate even lower—the total number of murders in a hypothetical all-trans USA would be roughly 4,800 per year (4,833). In other words, if you multiply the population of the US (327,167,434) by 0.6 per cent you get a current transgender population estimate of 1,963,004.6, and if you divide that figure by 29 (the number of murders) you get 67,690—one murder per 67,690 trans citizens. That works out as a projected annual total of 4,833 murders (327,167,434/67,690) in an all-trans America, with an annual murder rate of 1.48 per 100,000 Americans. That’s about one-fourth of the actual current murder rate: there were 16,214 recorded homicides in the United States in 2018 (five per 100,000) and 17,294 in 2017. While LGBT advocates may be correct that there is some under-reporting of the transgender murder rate because not all trans individuals are “out,” the fact is that the murder rate for trans people would have to increase by 300-400 per cent to match the murder rate for the general population.

The absence of a homicide “epidemic” for transgender people becomes even more apparent when we compare trans murder totals not merely to the population overall, but to specific high-mortality groups within it. The most vulnerable of these is my own group, African Americans. According to the FBI, of the 14,123 murders in 2018 in which the original police agency to investigate provided demographic information about the victim, 6,088 involved a white victim and 7,407 involved a black victim. Given that blacks make up only 12-13 per cent of the American population, we can see that the black murder rate—which I calculate at one murder per 5,298 persons, or 18.88 per 100,000—is roughly six times the Caucasian rate and almost 13 times the allegedly “epidemic” transgender murder rate.

African Americans are hardly alone among Americans in being disproportionately likely to be murdered. Looking at the “middle tables” of the FBI’s 2018 Crime in the United States report—such as Table Six, which breaks serious crime down by region and metropolitan statistical area (MSA) within states—it seems virtually certain that murder rates for young Latino or “poor white” men, among other population groups, are an order of magnitude higher than the rate for trans persons. While that’s an estimate, it is a matter of record that the murder rate for all males—one per 14,981 citizens, or 6.68 per 100,000—was 454 per cent higher than the transgender murder rate in 2018. In fact, the murder rate for trans women (and trans men) appears to be on par with the murder rate for women overall.

Not only is there no “epidemic” of murders of transgender individuals, it’s also not true that most trans murders are motivated by “hate.” The first case I reviewed while researching this article, that of Claire Legato, involved a trans woman killed while attempting to break up a physical dispute over a financial debt between her own mother and a close family friend. This was not atypical. The conservative writer Chad Greene, himself a member of the LGBT community, recently reviewed a sample of 118 of the cases of anti-trans homicide compiled by the Human Rights Campaign. His conclusion: exactly four of the perpetrators were clearly motivated by “anti-trans bias,” animus, or hatred. In contrast, 37 of the murders were due to domestic violence, and 24 involved sex workers and were largely the result of the dangerous working conditions associated with illegal sex work. More than a few others were essentially random acts of violence: one of the victims in Greene’s data set was Jordan Cofer, the transgender man murdered by the Dayton Shooter. (Greene’s work can be found here.)

In addition to not being hate crimes, the majority of transgender murders are intra-racial. According to Greene, whose conclusions align with my own analysis, 34 of the 37 identified murderers of black trans persons killed between 2015 and 2019 (89.5 per cent) are themselves black. The same holds true for the killers of white trans individuals: in seven of nine such murders during the period under review, the perpetrator was Caucasian. Even among Hispanics, who can be of any race and can identify as members of more than one ethnic group, at least four of the eight individuals responsible for recent fatal attacks on Hispanic trans persons were themselves explicitly identified as Hispanic or Latino.

There is no reason any of this should be surprising. It is widely known among criminologists and political scientists that, for all the media furor about inter-racial crimes, the significant majority of serious crime is intra-racial. Inner-city shooters and tough “rednecks” almost never travel to attack one another. From 1980 through to the modern era, according to PolitiFact, 85 per cent of white murder victims have been killed by other whites, and 93 per cent of black murder victims have been killed by other blacks. What is true for all Americans appears to also be true of trans people.

The truth is there is no epidemic of transgender murders. The recorded transgender murder rate is 1/3 or less of the overall murder rate for all American citizens and legal residents. Further, when such murders do occur, few are motivated by hatred and roughly 80 per cent are same-race killings. These statements are not “arguments” or “allegations” but simply declarations of factual truth. And in an environment where journalists such as Andy Ngo risk being banished from social media for simply stating these facts, it is important to reiterate a statement of principle that has been a cornerstone of science since Galileo: no one should be punished for telling the truth.

You need to have (and it needs to begin with) public safety. The sidewalks need to be safe to walk down. The store needs to be safe to go to. People need to understand that they're not going to be shot when they're at the red light. Their kid’s not going to be killed in the baby seat while they're driving through an intersection. So until you get that under control, nothing else is going to happen.

So again, the average black American between the ages of 12 to 24 is 13 times more likely to be murdered than a white American.

Ninety percent of these shootings are done by the same demographic: young, 15 to 24-year-old primarily African-American fatherless children killing other young African-American fatherless children over issues related to status. Understand that that’s what’s going on.

People who say pointing that out is just a racist act…to me that's not even a logical statement because you're pointing out a fact. If there's true racism within the system, then we need to identify it. Let's find out where it is so we can remove it. I'm 100% on board with that goal. Unless someone else has another solution, the only way I know that we can do that is to look at the data and to control for different possible scenarios that would explain that.

The fact of the matter is you can control for education. You can control for household income. You can control for unemployment. You can control for all this and still see large discrepancies in the numbers between different racial groups in the United States as far as crime.

The only statistic that I've seen that actually matches, and when you control for it, makes sense as it relates to the violence we're seeing not just in the black community, but everywhere, all over the world, and especially in the United States, is out-of-wedlock birth rates. The moment you start controlling for that, then you're going to start to see those numbers correlate with the areas where all the violence is occurring.

In the black community, out-of-wedlock birth rate is over 70%. When we get into the neighborhoods in Chicago and Baltimore, it's closer to 95%.

These are young black women having young kids. Those kids grow to the dangerous age of 12 to 19 where we all like to get in trouble. There's no male mentors or fathers around. They form gangs and they shoot each other over petty disputes related to status.

This isn't happening because of hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake. This is happening because somebody stepped on somebody else's shoe, or something like that, and the next thing you know there's going to be a drive-by shooting.

The only thing that's going to stop that short-term is putting more police in those neighborhoods to save lives. That's the only thing that's going to stop that.

Long-term, we have to be thinking about how we can disincentivize young people from having kids when they're not married, when they're still in high school. When they're 12 to 18. That's the problem that needs to be addressed. It's also something that nobody wants to talk about in the United States. There's a lot of lying, and a lot of obfuscation around it, but the numbers are very clear. Again, I encourage everybody to go and take a look at it themselves.

When you talk about the reasons why the out-of-wedlock birth rate is so much higher, that's something I think we as a society and people much smarter than me need to sit down and really assess and try and figure out what led to that. But what I can tell you is it wasn't always that way. The out-of-wedlock birth rate in the black community was actually almost the same and in some cases a little bit higher than white Americans up until about 1963. Something happened around 1963 where they started to diverge. The out-of-wedlock birth rate rose across the board in the white community, but especially in the black community. If you go back prior to 1963, you don't see these kind of numbers and you also don't see this kind of violence and this kind of crime. Once we go past 1963, that's when it skyrockets.

What happened in 1963 that explains this? I'm sure it's a complicated problem. It's probably going to admit to more than one answer, but it is something that we need to look at. And one of the things I think we need to look at is whatever economic incentives, that might have been well-intentioned, were put in place which caused this problem to happen. If we don't look at that and we repeat that same mistake once again, there's going to be a lot more violence and a lot more innocent victims shot and dead.

In 2005, the United States Department of Health and Human Services reported that the average experience of the American teenager includes living in the absence of their father. This leads to multiple negative impacts on youth in which 85% are reported to have behavioral issues (Center for Disease Control); 71% of high school dropouts and teen moms come from fatherless homes, which is 9 times the national average (National Principals Association Report); 85% of all children who show behaviour disorders come from fatherless homes, which is 20 times the national average (Center for Disease Control); 85% of youth in prison come from fatherless homes, which is 20 times the national average; (Fulton County, Georgia, Texas Department of Correction), and 63% of youth suicides are of children who come from fatherless homes, which is 5 times the national average (US Department of Health/Census).

• https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/bs-xpm-2014-10-08-bs-ed-child-custody-20141008-story.html (Archive: https://archive.vn/TkXoW)
• https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2002/03/custody

"... three separate and independent groups of experts reviewed decades of child development research. They found that after parents separate or divorce, children do much better with shared parenting — joint custody — on multiple measures of wellbeing than with single parenting. Yet in more than eight out of 10 custody cases today, one parent (usually the mother) is awarded sole guardianship."

I had a friend of mine who was just here last weekend who's a retired police officer that worked in various capacities in some of the rougher areas of Chicago, as well as an undercover officer in the motorcycle gangs, and different things throughout the years. He was involved in an undercover operation one time downtown Chicago not that long ago and they were waiting for their informant to show up at this particular location. And they heard gunshots just a block away, multiple gunshots.

So there's a gun battle going on. My friend looked at the other officers he was with and he's like, "Hey, if you guys want to run and jump on that, you know, I can wait here for the guy and you guys can go take care of that." They looked at him and said, "Why? If we go there and we catch him and we shoot him, and we wind up in a conflict, we're going to wind up on CNN and we're going to wind up prosecuted. And if we go there and we don't catch him in the act, but we arrest him, the district attorney is going to let them go. They'll be out on the street no matter what, before we even finished doing our paperwork."

There's the reality of police officers, day after day, going into the worst, most violent areas any city has, putting their life on the line, literally, to arrest people who are hurting innocent people, and then watching those people walk completely free because the district attorney refuses to press charges—not because there's not evidence, but because they're pursuing some form of social justice.

How many times does an officer have to do that before he just says, “There's no point. He's going to be back on the street before I even finish doing my paperwork. He's going to be back out there."

For the justice system to work, everybody has to be involved. The district attorney has to be willing to prosecute. The police officers have to know that the city council and the mayor have their back and will protect them if they're actually doing their job well in the way they should be, if they're doing it correctly. And they have to know that the district attorney is going to press charges and prosecute these people. When that happens, you can very quickly clean up a city and make it safer. We have evidence of this. You can see what happened in New York.

New York in the seventies looked a lot like New York is starting to look now. They did a complete turnaround. And for a while, New York was one of the safest big cities on planet Earth. And I was there during that time. I was walking around at 3 a.m. with my wife and I felt perfectly safe. It's not like that anymore. And for it to be like that again, we'll have to do what they did, which is prosecute, put lots more officers on the street, stop the bad guys, prosecute the bad guys, get them locked away because it's the same violent people committing the same crimes over and over again. And that's what has to happen. That's not happening now. Everybody has to be involved. The police officers can't do that part by themselves.