 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds on reason. What does good policing look like? Just Asking Questions, I'm Zach Weismiller, Senior Producer for Reason, joined by my co-host, Reason Associate Editor, Liz Wolfe. Hey, Liz. Hey, Zach. New York has called in the troops. Following a shooting on the A train during rush hour, Governor Kathy Hochel has deployed 1,000 National Guardsmen and police officers to run checkpoints in the subway. Violent crime in America's cities spiked in the years following the pandemic and have somewhat subsided since, but polling shows that crime remains a major concern for many Americans. To talk with us today about crime, policing, civil liberties and city life is Peter Moskos. He is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former Baltimore police officer. Thank you for joining us, Peter. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I mentioned the perception among the public. I'm just gonna pull up a little bit of Gallup polling data here that shows 63% when they last checked in believe that crime is either extremely or very serious in the US. That blue line underneath is pretty interesting because when you ask people, how is it where you live? It's much, much lower, about 17%. So could you just give us your assessment of how bad or good or like, where are we with crime in America in 2024? Well, the polling data is interesting because a lot of people use that in sake that people overestimate crime, which is always partly true by the way, but another way to look at it is, most people are safe in the neighborhoods they live in, but they're also aware that other people aren't safe. Crime is very segregated by geography in America and certain neighborhoods have a serious problem with crime. I mean, other people, of course they might be slightly worried, but crime isn't something that affects everybody equally in America. So right now we're in a situation. I mean, in 2020, after the George Floyd protests and riots, crime spiked. And I mentioned that because it didn't spike with the start of COVID, nor did it spike anywhere else in the world because of COVID. I don't want to say COVID doesn't matter, but that was not the moment, not the moment in which crime went up. It was when policing changed in late May and June of 2020. I would argue that it's because, well, police were preoccupied with protests and riots and also they were under what they felt was undue scrutiny because of what an officer in Minnesota did. So proactive policing basically ended. And some of that is because of COVID. The criminal justice system stopped. Courts grinded to a halt basically and people were released from prison and jail because of COVID. So it all ties together, but a key part is what policing we're doing. And since 2020, they've been slowly getting back in the game. And you can see this when you look at stats for discretionary police activity for car stops and for low level arrests. There's a very strong correlation between policing, good policing and crime. Well, so how true is this? I mean, I'm almost, I'm fascinated by these things are a hellscape right now narrative. I feel like I've seen lots and lots of crime fears rising. And it seems like there's a narrative that is taking hold that goes something along the lines of, look, crime rates are really high in some places. You know, DC residents very much feel this way right now. We had homicide spikes in a lot of cities over the course of 2020 and 2021. And now, even if in many places, DC is a notable exception, the homicide spike has gone down a little bit and the homicide rates are a little bit less bad than they were. There's still a sense that there's fentanyl everywhere and people are crouched over in the city streets and there's very awful issues with drug addiction and homelessness on display and public spaces being perceived to be less safe than they used to be. How true is the hellscape narrative right now? Well, you and I live in New York. It's, I mean, it's vastly overblown. We go about our daily lives and New York is still, I think, a wonderful place to live and work. But that, it doesn't mean that there aren't serious public disorder problems. I think a lot of this has to be sort of disaggregated in the sense that there is a public order problem and there is a violent crime problem and they're not necessarily the same problem. Similarly, I don't like looking at national, I don't believe in the concept of national trends in crime because crime is local. What happens in Portland doesn't impact people who live in DC and vice versa. So there can be a similar nationwide happening that affects crime in different places, but the cause and effect is always local. I mean, that's why you do get violence increases in some cities and decreases in others. I had a piece recently in Vital City where I talked about this. It's not that there's a tide or some magnetic force, some magical thing in the air that impacts crime everywhere in the world. No, it's what happens at a local level politically. It's what happens at a local level in terms of which laws are passed and it's what happens at a local level in terms of policing. So I wanna pull up some of this data and get your analysis of it because what I have here are some of the crime trends in US cities, which is tracked by the council on criminal justice and you mentioned that spike. This is showing the monthly homicide rate across 35 cities that they've selected. It's most of the major American cities plus a bunch of the mid-sized cities and there you see the homicide rate spike in looks like early-ish 2020. That's a student of 2020. It's late May and June, but I mean, it's immediately following the George Floyd protests. Okay, I mean, when I look at this particular graph, it looks to me like it starts a little bit before that, but it may be accelerated, yeah. But keep in mind, there's always sort of the seasonal variations where crime would be at its lowest. So some of that you would just expect. And then you have, I mean, and COVID did happen, so. And then this breaks down the different types of offenses that have gone up over between 2020 and 2023. Again, homicide was 40% higher in the first half of 2021 than in the first half of 2019. Some areas that where things seem to go down were like burglary, robbery, and then a really big spike just this year in motor vehicle theft. So could you just pick apart a little bit of all of that for us? Like, first of all, let's start with the homicide spike. Why in particular would homicide just go up? That's what kind of scared the crap out of everybody in 2020, 2021. And it was a huge and very quick increase. I mean, it was the largest increase I think we've ever seen in America during that time. And that does, again, though, it tends to be in neighborhoods that already had some shootings, suddenly had double and triple the number of shootings. And some neighborhoods that had few had a little more and many places had no shootings before or after. The other crimes, I mean, I keep in mind that all this is reported crime. And some of it is directly related to police doing less. Every time police make an arrest, it's a reported crime. So if police aren't being proactive, the crime rate will go down, but that doesn't mean necessarily that the crimes aren't happening. And then you also, I mean, COVID was a wild card in there and that sort of changed burglary rates and so on. But I think a lot, I mean, I trust shooting numbers, I trust murder numbers, I trust car theft numbers because those are relatively accurately recorded. The other crimes, a lot of, I mean, even in the best of times, roughly half of them aren't reported and there's no reason to think that percentage didn't change drastically in 2020. So partly I just don't like using those other figures because I don't think they're reliable data. But- Why are so few of them reported? People either, you know, they're busy, they're going to work, they don't wanna bother waiting around because it'll take, you know, half their day and also potentially get involved in the criminal justice system, even if just as a victim or a witness, but the obligations can stack up on that in terms of going to court and whatnot. Some of it is they don't wanna talk to police. Some of it is they believe sometimes correctly that it's, you know, police aren't gonna, well, what's it matter? The crimes already happened. What are police gonna do then? They're not gonna solve it. And even if they do it, probably won't help you, you know, fix the door that somebody busted on your house. So, I mean, there are a lot of different reasons people don't report crime. But again, partly because of COVID, I think that non-reporting went up in 2020. What's going on with the, do you have any insight on what's going on with the vehicle theft? Well, I think it's a combination of things. Some of it is, you know, was discovered that these certain types of vehicles like Kia's are really easy to steal. So that became, I mean, it became a trend of fashion. I think that's a- Thanks to Chick-Toc. Thanks to- I mean, there were some cities that, I believe San Francisco was actually trying to sue Kia because they said they made their cars too easy to steal and therefore put an undue burden on their police department, which seems a little ridiculous. But you think that actually accounts for a lot of it is- A lot of it. It does, I mean, it does depend on policy and policing at a local level in the sense that if you tell police that they can't pursue stolen cars, they get away. I mean, there's a risk, of course, to pursuing stolen cars, which is traffic crashes and deaths. But when word gets out that there's no consequence for stealing a car. So even, and part of it is police were pursuing us. Part of it is that if they did catch criminals, they were released, either released pending trial or charges were dropped. But there's a huge difference between somebody who gets caught, you know, which isn't that likely, first of all, but if they get caught, do they spend the night in jail? That can have a deterrent effect because it's not pleasant. If the alternative is you get a desk appearance ticket or some equivalent and get to go back home and get to party with your friends and tell them about your crazy adventures. That, you know, that does send a message that, okay, I guess this is okay. There's there really. So, I mean, this is basic deterrence theory. And we seem to have forgotten that at some level that you can impact people's behavior through us. I mean, I'm not talking locking up somebody for life. I'm just really talking about arresting them and having them go to jail. A lot of cities have stopped that in the name of, well, in the name of various things, decarceration, equity, progressive prosecution. You can't put your finger on any single one of these and say that's why, but collectively these things certainly matter. Let's wait. So are there examples of deliberate policies to linger on the car theft example for a second that discourage arresting or incarcerating someone for stealing a car? Cause that's a pretty high level felony. I've heard some of the progressive prosecutors. I remember talking to George Gascon about this one time and he said that some of the cops when he was in San Francisco sort of spitefully took a hands-off approach once he got in and that's where he was placing the blame. But are there actual policies that are discouraging police officers from pursuing stolen car crimes, car theft? Well, no pursued policies are part of that, but that of course isn't universal. That depends on the city. But I don't wanna let these prosecutors off the hook. I mean, Gascon may have been right, but it's not that the police were doing this necessarily without cause. If you arrest somebody first, I mean, there's a risk to that. You could get hurt. There could be a viral video. You don't get in trouble for not working as a cop. So every time you do, I mean, there's a decision should, is this worth it? And if you do put yourself at risk and you do make a good arrest and then the charges aren't pressed or prosecuted, you kind of go, well, what's the point? Why did I put myself out for this when it doesn't happen, when the system breaks down, post arrest? I mean, right now in DC, and I don't, more than half the cases, they don't remember the exact number, but more than a half of arrests aren't charged. That of course has an impact on how police do their job. You might say, they're, you know, they're taking, they're doing what the prosecutor wants to some extent, and keep in mind that the prosecutor has an incredible amount of discretion and total immunity. So it's a very important job. But if the prosecutor decides that their primary focus is to reduce incarceration rather than prosecute criminals, the system breaks down. I mean, that's their job is, you know, it's an adversarial system and they're supposed to be the ones who are prosecuting criminals. There's a far cheaper version of the argument that you're making. I think you're making a much better argument, but the cheaper version goes like this. And we see this on Twitter, social media all the time. People essentially say, whenever there's a high profile, crime and a viral video in any big city, New York, LA, DC, San Francisco, there's a whole bunch of people who respond with this chorus of, well, you voted for this, didn't you? And what you're saying is almost like the good faith and far more rigorous version of, you voted for this a little bit. Do you, what do you think of that sort of reaction that many people have? Is it, you know, sort of a half truth? Is it something that's just totally counterproductive to talk about? Or is it useful to try to get people to understand the relationship between the prosecutors that they put in place versus and how that affects which crimes are actually gone after and the overall quality of life in their cities? I mean, often the people who make that argument, I'm a little bit leery of, I don't know, sometimes it's too simplistic, but the basic concept is, yeah, elections have consequences. And these prosecutors are not silent about their goals. When the Manhattan DA announced, you know, that he wasn't gonna prosecute shoplifting, that matters. I mean, I often think there's a weird sense that criminals don't have agency. They know very well what the policies are because they deal with the system. And you have, especially in democratic cities, these elections are determined in primary elections by and large, voter turnout is incredibly low, which I think is a greater problem for democracy in our country, but you get someone who says a certain platitudes that you wanna hear and people go, oh, that sounds good, but they're not, but yeah, they have consequences. If prosecutors don't wanna prosecute and we have to figure out what our goals are, and apparently people are voting for this. And then when it happens, they kind of go, oh, I didn't actually, you know, I didn't expect that. Well, then you have to put someone else in that office. Let me speak as someone who maybe it would be in that category of like I, people would say like I got what I did as a voter. I was in California in the early 2010s when some of this stuff was on the ballot. I recall voting to and, you know, rethink aspects of three strikes, for instance, where it would be like if the third strike was what they call, I think, a leaner, then they wouldn't necessarily incarcerate the person for 20, 25 years or whatever the third strike is supposed to be. And then there was a slew of them there and the famous, you know, $950, anything below $950, shoplifting would not be a felony. I don't think I voted for that one, but then there's like drug reforms. I, there's some sense where I feel like some of those were a good idea. Like I still think that super long, you know, endless sentences aren't always the great, the right way to go. And we need to rethink drug policy but also like shoplifting or stealing a car is a crime that needs to be prosecuted. Like if you had to drill down on like what you think are the most destructive one or two policies for like real law and order, like what would those be? I'm not a fan of three strikes, but I might be a fan of 10 strikes. At some point when you have repeat offenders, I mean, you know, enough, you know that someone with 12 felony convictions, if you've released that person, even, you know, pending adjudication, they're gonna go and do a 13th. I mean, that's what they do. So I don't necessarily have the solutions but just sort of saying, well, crime is down nationwide. So it doesn't matter. It's not a moral or politically winning position. Some of it is also look shop, it's not like shoplifters were always prosecuted, you know, before 2020. There is a resource limitation and you have to pick your battles but don't announce non prosecution as a policy. You need the discretion to say, okay, maybe, you know, let's be realistic. We're not gonna prosecute this person, whatever, it's not worth it. But then you get someone who is a repeat violent offender and if you get that person for shoplifting, yeah, then you go after them for what you got. So it's this sort of blanket statements of non prosecution from prosecutors that I think is very troubling. But then it, you know, it combines with changes in state, here's the thing, there've been hundreds of different laws and elections and changes in policy over the past decade and policing in the criminal justice system. And I can't think of a single one that would be considered getting tougher on crime. I'm not against a lot of these reforms. Some of them are often, there's part of it that's good and then like there's a hidden part that actually is, you know, poison pill and disaster. Well, it's not a poison pill, it's just a disastrous part of the policy. But when you collectively, you've have, you know, you've passed hundreds of laws that make it tougher to prosecute or police cities. Yeah, collectively they have an impact. And they keep saying, well, you can't, you know, it's not this one, okay, maybe it's not that one. But some, you know, overall tell me how, you know, it's just, it's chipping away constantly. There's a motivation that I think a lot of people don't realize which isn't to improve policy. It's too, it's driven by an ideology that wants to abolish police and prison. And so anything that sort of moves in that direction, they can, you know, they can support. And then individually, you know, they'll give it a nice name and there might be a good part of it too, like with bail reform in New York City or New York State was not all bad, but parts of it were horrible. You know, they passed a law that every cop in New York City knows and nobody else does and it was called the Chocolle ban. This is the city council. Well, Chocolle's already illegal in the state. So that part was completely redundant. And then they threw in this part about putting pressure on the diaphragm and they made that in the course of an arrest. And they made that a crime and it only applies to police officers. Well, that also makes police worry. Well, I mean, every time I arrest someone who's resisting, potentially I could be prosecuted for that. And they say, well, you know, we won't really, well, they tried to say, well, we won't really do that. Well, they might, you know, wait for the right video. And then when there was a move to sort of change that absurd part, like, oh, we didn't, you know, the mayor de Blasio at the time was saying, oh, we can change that later. And the people in city council said, no, you can't. We wrote it exactly as we wanted. So that abolition movement is dangerous to public safety. It's inequitable and who it affects in terms of criminal victimization. So there does have to be some political pushback. And I think we're starting to see that finally, but it's a lot harder to, you know, put the house back together after you've broken it. But how big is that contingent really? I mean, we see some of the loudest voices in that movement, in the, you know, police abolitionism, in the prison abolitionist movement. You know, we see these loud voices amplified, but the vast majority of normal people, when you actually pull them, they don't want that, right? Like I said, this is just something that those of us who spend a lot of time on Twitter or are in the media class give sort of undue airtime to, or is this like a real phenomenon that's actually majorly affecting the types of prosecutors that get put into office and the, you know, political wins? In some, yeah, most of the public, if you give them these individual things, they go, that's crazy. But in some cities, it is that whatever percent wants that, they often control city council. And people continue to vote for them because they're progressive and they think that's the right thing to do, or maybe they actually want this. But, I mean, New York city council just passed a horrible law and it, they overrode Mayor Adams Vito that says that cops have to document every time they interact with the public in any matter that concerns any crime. It will be literally impossible. This means like if there's a shooting on the subway, and they go in and say, did anyone see anything? Or what, you know, they would now have to document, there were a hundred people in that subway car, now they have to fill out a hundred forms. Is that, is that so, really? Yeah, it's a New York state, it's called the level one stop, which is not a stop in the legal sense. It's not a stop based on reasonable suspicion. It is an interaction and that's what the law does. It goes into effect in the summer. I mean, it can't be followed. So it'll be curious to see a way to dream line that. I mean, cops now have body cams, every interaction can be documented that way. Like, wouldn't a better way to do that just be like, hey, you can, if you had an interaction with a police officer, you can easily request the body cam footage of that interaction. Of course, but I think you're missing the point, which is not really about that. It's about, it's trying to stop policing. And this has yet another way they can do that. I mean, and also, as a witness, he went that way. But do you want, I mean, I don't want to be documented. There's a risk to that. Yeah, I no longer believe these laws are passed in good faith is the problem. They have a goal in there, so they're succeeded. But this is, yeah, I don't know, it's nothing else, it'll be a big lawsuit against the police department, but they passed a law that cannot be followed. And they overrode a veto of it. So they do have political power. That honestly convinces me to a far greater degree than I had been, though it does make me way more depressed than I was before. So thanks a lot, Peter. The next point about that law is actual stops in the legal sense that the most of the country understands that stops based on reasonable suspicion where you can't leave or don't feel free to leave. That's what a police stop is. Those are already documented. So we didn't need the law for that. The only purpose of the law was to get that interaction part. So I'm gonna get one more. I want to take us into the thing that you were referencing, which is that last week, there was a pretty horrifying shooting on the A train. Zach, I think you have the video of that. So if we could just roll that. I do, and I'm gonna just roll a little bit of it. It's an edited version, and I'm gonna narrate a little bit of it for our listening audience who is not watching the video. This happened in the middle of the day, or, you know, late in the afternoon, 445 p.m. You see a man with a yellow hat there who is confronting someone who's sitting down, getting up in his face. Everyone's kind of just passively sitting by. He's escalating. The guy he's challenging is standing up, and, you know, they're taking off their jackets, getting ready to do pisticuffs here. Everyone's clearing out to the other side of the car, and now they're putting hands on each other. He's got him. The assailants has got the other guy pinned and throwing big haymakers. And he just got stabbed there. I won't let him get stabbed. Someone has intervened to try to break them apart. This guy deserves some credit. Yeah, for sure. And now he's, you know, they're apart, but he's searching through his bag for what will turn out to be a gun. Everyone sees that he now has a gun and is approaching, and everyone's panicking, trying to get out. You'll hear the gunshots ring out in a minute as they, luckily, they were right near a stop as he started shooting. Everyone's scrambling to get out. Let me out! Just a terrifying situation. Let me out! Being in. There's a baby on there. Hear the gunshots. There you go. And yeah, I gotta ask Liz first, because I know you ride the A train. You know, what was your reaction to first seeing the story? Well, I mean, this happened at 4.45 p.m. This happened on a weekday, right before rush hour. I, you know, I live in Rockaway in Queens. I'm on the A train. This is the A stop in downtown Brooklyn, which I take all the time with my kid to get to our friend's houses. This is a highly traffic stop. It's a pretty horrifying situation. And the thing that I keep going back to, and I want to turn this over to Peter, is what, if anything, do these high profile crimes tell us? And also, the other thing that I keep grappling with is, I think literally the week before this, you know, Governor Huckle announced an initiative to deploy, I think a thousand total national guardsmen and state police officers to start doing random bag checks for commuters of the subway system and, you know, more police to patrol the stations. And the thing I just keep coming back to is, you know, if we're stopping one in every 10 commuters to search their bags and in fact, this gun was in a pocket. I mean, what would this initiative actually have done to stop this type of crime from happening? And is there a way to restore some sense of public trust that riding the A train with your kid in the middle of the day will be safe again? First, I want to talk about those national guards, national, that is political theater. Yeah. That they're at Grand Central. It's so the governor can say she did something and perhaps can reassure suburban commuters. It, it's show. And there's also a dynamic between, I just to point out to non New Yorkers who might be listening in and also to Zach, it's also a little bit of stunt between Governor Huckle and Mayor Eric Adams, right? Because Adams has also been trying to do this type of thing. And so it's a little bit of this like one up in game to try to, you know, there's always been tension between the governor's office and the mayor's office. And so it's an opportunity for both of them to sort of posture as the one actually fixing the problem. I'm curious why you say that it's theater because, you know, the New Yorkers who watch that video, I'm sure they're just thinking, well, I don't want a gun smuggled onto my train. So what else are you going to do except try to screen every bag that goes through? So what, why are you saying that it's theater? Partly, excuse me. Partly because they're national guards, they're not police. They don't have police powers. They can't stop or arrest somebody. So that's part of the problem. Soldiers are not cops. But we can't, I mean, it is important to keep guns off the subway and off the streets. And we did that in the past. And that's part of like, we have lessons from the past that we seem to have forgotten. The number of murders on the subway not too long ago were zero in a year. And there were three or fewer for roughly a decade. And then we stopped policing subway rules. And murders went up from two to four to six, eight. Now they're in the double digits. I think there were five last year, did go down last year. But I forgot the data here from, so this is a visualization that you created based on MTA data that goes up to 2022. And yes, as you see, it goes up. I was gonna say, that looks familiar. At 10 last year. And our audience, our regular listening audience knows that we always post the links to all these sources. So you can look for that in the description. And then this is the actual MTA data. And as you were mentioning, 2023, it dropped down to five murders instead of 10. These are relatively low numbers for a huge city like New York. But I mean, there should be no murders on a subway. You could have zero. And felony assaults, 570 felony assaults in 2023 up from 556. And these are within the subway going on there. And this is within the subway system itself, right, Zach? Yes. Okay, so I think, yeah, that's the important thing to keep in mind here. I mean, 12 rapes happening on the subway trains over the course of 2022. Not to be just like stereotypical libertarian about this, but like if this was a privately run train, like that would be shut down if there were 10 murders on it. So there's something going wrong here. It is literally millions of people ride the subway every day. So, there is the perspective that I ride the subway and it's, I expect to get where I'm going safely. And so far I have. But the subway has a special significance to New Yorkers because generally we're forced to ride it. So we don't have a choice. And when something happens on the A train, even though it happened miles from where you live, you feel that you have a certain sort of possessiveness or even pride, like that's my train. So it has that this could have happened to me. It spooks you in a way. I literally had friends who get off at my stop and then this is their stop and they were on this line like a few hours before this happened. Like it's like that type of thing where it's just like, oh my God, that could have been the car with my buddies coming back from my house in it. I mean, that's not just the shootings. You know, it is indicative of general greater disorder and crimes on the subway. And that's part of the problem. And this could be policed. I mean, that guy who got shot with his own gun in the end, you know, of course he didn't pay his fare because criminals as like some point of pride simply can't pay their fare and go through the turnstile. I mean, there are videos of people which I find amusing. Just remember one guy who was jumping the turnstile leaving the subway. It was just, it was so ingrained. Which for non-New Yorkers, again, you don't have to pay an exit fare. You don't have to swipe again. You literally just go out the door. Like it's not like DC or other systems where you swipe in and you swipe out. New York, you just do it upon entry. And so that idea that you're talking about there that, you know, if there was more enforcement of the lower level stuff that it would stop, it would prevent some of these higher level incidents from unfolding. I noticed on your blog this really interesting graph that kind of maps out that correlation. So the blue line here is citations issued. And as that goes down, shooting incidents go up. This is NYC shooting incidents, June, July, 2017 through June, July, 21, 22. So is that what you're getting at with when you say that, you know, there needs to be a return to a different kind of policing that this is like, it's like Bill Bratton 2.0. Like we need to really be doing broken windows style like nothing slips by. No, because nothing slips by is zero tolerance. It has to be intelligently used. When Bratton did reduce robberies on the subway, this is now we're talking back in 1991 when he was the police chief of the New York City Transit Police Department, which is now merged with the NYPD. He did implement a broken windows approach. And with his right hand man, Jack Maple, they noticed that when they did catch criminals, they all, the vast majority lived by, I think it was seven subway stops. So they focused on those seven subway stops. And they arrested turnstile jumpers, which now, by the way, has been decriminalized. So now it's just a violation. Yet another one of those things chipping away at police tools. But even to their surprise, by arresting turnstile jumpers, felony crimes on the subway dropped immediately and substantially. So partly it's because the actual criminals were being detained, but partly it was a sense of just someone's in charge here. It is not a free for all. People behave differently in different environments. And it's about changing behavior. But so to know it's not just about cracking down and everyone and getting stats for stats sake, you have to figure out what the problem is, who's doing it, but broken windows was very much used as a way to, it was a net to some extent, but it was a way to actually target specific individuals. It turns out that a lot of people jumping turnstiles were wanted on a warrant of significant percentage had weapons on them. So suddenly people were less likely to carry weapons because they thought, well, I might get stopped. So in a sense the subway in mass was deescalated in the 90s. And it's interesting because it was before the great crime drop in the city. And it was a great natural experiment because robberies were down in the subway and not on the streets above. So it's a very good indicator that was what was happening on the subway actually mattered. It wasn't just luck. It wasn't just some greater trend that affected everybody. Is this too high? Oh, is that, go ahead. Well, I was just saying, one thing that jumped out to me when I was looking at this is further down in that same post, you go into, well, what are some of these citations? And you can look at some of the summons. A lot of them are things that I would completely agree should not be tolerated in a public sit base, whether that's public urination or fighting, reckless driving, trespassing. But then there's things like motorcycle helmet required, unlicensed street vending, unlawful- And some sort of alcohol, like open container long-vibrations, right? Yeah. So I mean, for me, it's like what I worry about. Yeah. Well, let me just say one thing first, which is what I worry about is that if the, like once the conversation turns to, we really need to ramp up enforcement on the minor violations. There are a lot of minor violations that I think are unjust and counterproductive to enforce. And it seems like it seems very difficult to have that nuanced conversation at the policy level. And it always becomes like, you have to have, I know you're not advocating zero tolerance, but that seems to be how it often shakes out. It's like zero tolerance or we're going to like let people pee wherever they want to in public. Like what do you think are the most, like what are some of the areas where you think, you know, maybe the police shouldn't be focusing that much resources there and they should be focusing it here instead. The key is not to focus on the specific minor violations we're talking about. These are tools that we give cops to make legal stops of the three you highlighted there, the motorcycle without a helmet, which I didn't include in my chart, but that's an interesting one because if you have a gang of motorbikes going down the road doing wheelies, going against traffic, people making a lot of noise, people on sidewalks, people generally don't like that. Okay, but you need something to actually, you need a crime. So that's what they, I assume that's what they used. It's not that they're saying, this is really the great, it's not the problem necessarily is that people aren't, motorcyclists aren't wearing helmets. It's the problem is the motorcyclists and we need something to get them on. That's what these minor offenses are for. Wouldn't there be another crime to get them on if they're violating speed limits or unsafe driving? Like why do you need all these pretense? You need something that isn't subjective. Speeding, you're not, you don't have a radar camera. Unsafe driving is you have to describe it and the judge won't generally buy it. Not having helmet is a yes or no situation. You can't, I mean, you either do or you don't. So that's a great one because it's not a very subjective interpretation of the law. Open container, again, this is the thing, it should be selectively enforced because the problem isn't necessarily somebody with an open container. And you always get the thing, people in Central Park listening to a concert or drinking wine, yeah, but they're not shooting each other. There was another recent shooting in New York where a 19-year-old woman was killed in a bodega after a guy was hitting on her. I can almost guarantee he had an open container before he killed that woman. This is a block where someone was murdered at the bodega last year. So that is where police should be focused on that block because of the violence there. And presumably this guy was harassing women all night. I don't know, maybe he was at home reading a book. The thing that worries me the most here is that like there's the predatory version of that. Like the kind of the worst example that we've seen in recent years is like what was going on in Ferguson, Missouri before the killing of Michael Brown. And there was that huge reaction to that and the narrative of what happened to Michael Brown ended up not being correct. But there was a lot of the reason there was anger in Ferguson seemed to be because they had this predatory policing system where they were just like milking these people for with fees and fines and getting them caught up in going to the courthouse all the time to deal with that and like the amount of revenue they were taking in from Ferguson was like twice some of the surrounding cities just from fees and fines. So it was truly outrageous. Yeah, very outrageous. So I know that's not the situation in New York and we would never want it to become that. How do you avoid that outcome? If you wanna do broken windows policing how do you avoid it becoming predatory and like parasitic? How do you avoid it becoming the stop question in Frisk Fiasco that we did have in New York City? Which happened later, that was in the 2000s. Good leadership. And of course that's easier said than done. Somewhat of accountability. We collectively did not know what was going on and for what we never heard of Ferguson but we did not know what was going on in Ferguson. I'm in this field professionally. I was shocked, really shocked my conscious that report about what they were doing in terms of pedestrian stops and revenue that the city was being funded on fines and court fees and that and that. So that has to stop. But that does not relate to that 19 year old woman being killed in a Brooklyn bodega. Part of the problem is there's an outrage somewhere and then we say, well, we can't have policing anywhere. What the NYPD did in the 90s in terms of their crime reduction was outstanding and arrests did go up. A little known fact is arrests went up far less in the 1990s than they went up in the 1980s under Dinkins and community policing. I mean, we either one policing or we don't. Now that said, we want good policing and we want it targeted but we do need discretionary policing. And if you're going to prevent a murder you have to stop someone before they murder somebody on a lesser crime. Now there still is a crime. So not that everyone who gets stopped is a murderer but well, you could also not commit that crime and you won't be stopped. But that block in Brooklyn is a hotspot. So yeah, you need to enforce open container laws there. You need to just like saying someone's in control of the subway, you need to say someone's in control of these streets. I mean, it's not a very good libertarian position but rule of law is a good thing. And that's a radical statement these days. I get what you're saying but I do struggle with this tension though so much as a libertarian. And you know this, we've talked about this before, Peter but where I feel this strong tension like it's actually a really, really good political shift that has happened over definitely my sort of political lifetime, the time that I've been paying attention to politics. This sense of people really beginning to pick up the libertarian talking point and this deep philosophical value that libertarians have of trying to distinguish between victimless crimes and crimes where there is a discernible victim, right? And so when I look at the list like what Zach just pulled up on the screen and I see things like hearing a muffler noise from far enough, from a certain distance away or open container violations are another good example. And then I contrast that with- I wish they would enforce that more. Of course, that's the problem with the tailpipes. But so there's like those categories of crimes and then there's turnstile hopping, right? And I see these things as fundamentally different because with, I suppose you could argue the fair evasion thing, but at least with that there's really this sense of, well, wait a second, you have to pay for the service that you are using, right? And if we want our city to function properly and we want to ensure that the budget doesn't get totally screwed up, it's important for people to pay their fairs. We're already majorly subsidized. So our fairs are way cheaper than what they would be if we were actually forced to bear the true cost of the subway system. But I struggle a little bit with this idea of like- I struggle a little bit with this idea of like, will New York City be turned into Singapore if we crack down on all of these more minor things? And isn't it actually a really, really good thing for libertarians and non-libertarians alike that we distinguish between, okay, which crimes have an actual big impact where other people are harmed versus which ones are just true individual freedom things? And we should just let people play their damn loud music if we want to. How do you look at this? Like, do you think that it's a good thing that people are sort of grogging this idea of the victimless crime and trying to roll back the degree to which we've cracked down on this? Or do you just see it as like totally a proxy, totally a thing in a cop's toolkit that's really important to preserve? Well, if it's related to a major crime then it's a tool in the cop's toolkit. But I mean, if my neighbor is playing loud music at 4 a.m., I'd want him to stop. And if I ask him and he doesn't, this is like the idea that you live in a city so you have to deal with drug dealers blasting music in a car outside your apartment. No, we don't have to put up with that. I mean, these are choices. And of course, some people will, what is acceptable behavior is there's a huge gray area and how that's defined. But no, I'm not against better quality of life in the neighborhood that I live in. But here's a true victimless crime is drug addicts shooting up in public. I don't want that. That's my bourgeois, entitled position. And we didn't used to have that. And then we made a political choice and we legalized it by the legalization of needles. And we took that, the enforcement mechanism out of police because that's what they were using. And now we have people shooting up in public. So I think it's declined a bit recently. I mean, I don't know, do you have a problem with people shooting up here when in a car? I mean, go ahead Liz, sorry. Yeah, I absolutely do. And I think you're an interesting person to talk to in particular because I feel very conflicted on these questions, right? On one hand, I think open container violations, okay, maybe that's the best possible example where it's like, you know what? It really doesn't particularly bother me if somebody has their little paper bag and their can of beer and they're just doing their thing and they're a little bit of a drunkard, but you know what? As long as they're not behaving in a threatening manner toward me or going to assault me or my kid, like, you know what? Do your thing on the stoop. Like I don't give a shit, but it is difficult though, because these other things that we're talking about, like somebody shooting up, there are tons of awful externalities that could stem from that, which legitimately makes the city less lovable, right? Like I think about my toddler playing at the playground and the fact that they're being, you know, needles in a given place, which I don't know whether heroin addicts are always the best at sanitation practices and ensuring their needles are properly disposed of. Okay, well that actually has a very real effect on the ability of like families to enjoy these public spaces. And damn it, I'm a taxpayer. And so I do feel like I have some right to these public spaces and to having them be reasonable. And even the needles thing aside, there's also this question of, you know, sometimes erratic people or there's something very, I think, I don't know how to factor this into my little libertarian brain, this idea that we are taxpayers who deserve high quality public spaces. And when you have erratic people or when you have people who just truly are in a state of extraordinary despair and need slumped over in public spaces, making it so it's hard to pass through the turnstile because they're passed out in front of it, which was a situation I actually encountered in Brooklyn on the G. There's something awful about that. And I find that to be, I don't exactly know what to do there. I don't exactly know what type of policy to support because on one hand, you could conceivably make the case that that's a victimless crime. On the other hand, isn't the user, the addict, aren't they the victim, right? It seems like a really bad state of affairs. I'm curious about how you square that. A good way to look at it is if somebody is claiming and controlling public space, that's a problem. That is a broken window. It's just one litmus test you can use. If that person is in the park, therefore nobody else can use it, then it's a problem. Part of me just goes, this isn't about theory. It's not about, I don't know, I always wanna focus more on the nitty gritty and think of people who have to live through these. And we, I mean, I really mean you and me right now, we have to deal with these problems less than a lot of other people in New York where these quality of life issues are far greater. And I think there's an unfortunate tendency to sort of say, well, I don't think this, you know, talk about state power and so on, but I mean, other people don't give a damn about there and they're just trying to get their kids to school and go to work and don't wanna have to deal with erratic and potentially violent people. In some ways it is kind of that simple. And I don't like getting distracted in a way by the theoretical concerns. Not that we should never think about them. But no, someone should not, I mean, look the subway in some ways is the easiest place to police because you can eject people from the system. That's a power that police on the street don't have. You can do a lot on the sidewalk that you're not permitted to do in the subway. So I don't know what the answer is for drug addiction or homelessness or housing policy. And to be a big glib, I don't care. I mean, I do care at some level, but as a subway rider, I don't care. Whatever you're doing, you can't do it here. You've made this point a few times that I found it. It's been really formative to how I look at the subway system and this policy question specifically, but this idea of like, it's a deliberate policy choice to turn subways into de facto homeless shelters, which is what they are in New York right now. And we can ask questions about what is fair to the actual homeless people in question, but we're also kind of side stepping the question of, what is fair to the commuters? What is fair to the subway riders? Do they have a claim to this thing that they are paying for? And I think you come down in this place of like, the answer is yes, we do have a claim to that. And that's an important thing to kind of keep in mind, which for whatever reason keeps getting shunted aside by a lot of really progressive New Yorkers. And that's been a very formative thing in changing how I look at this question. And we already draw the line somewhere. You know, we don't let people camp in Central Park. Oh, but Tompkins Square Park is okay. Like, we have to draw the line somewhere. And I would like to draw that line outside the subway system as a subway rider. I think that's very important. But we already have these lines. And again, their choices. The subway system went through this exact same problem and issues and solutions in the 90s. And then we just sort of gave it up because I don't know. And, you know, it's not, you can defend a better subway environment. I mean, I think primary, people do forget about the subway riders. I think that really isn't incredibly important. But it's not good for people. It's not good for the people who live. These people need help who are on the subway. I mean, yeah, sometimes they're just someone down on their luck. But I mean, you and I have both seen people like this. We've trained our city to walk over like, is that person dead? I don't know. Well, one's gonna walk by because I'm going to work. It is not a healthy environment. They are victimized. They, you know, hypothermia, electrocution. The idea that they should be de facto homeless shelters so that the problem isn't swept under a rug you hear. So some advocates want that in our face so then they can advocate for money for their nonprofit service providing organizations. No, I mean, I would like the problem solved. That's not my professional forte. In the meantime, I do kind of want it swept under the rug for lack of a better term. We shouldn't have to put up with that. But morally, it's also the right thing to do for the people who desperately need help. I do want to ask you to return to the question Liz raised earlier. The, this is called the Singapore question because I agree with you that any space whether it's publicly or privately managed is gonna have rules. It's just kind of crazy to think that anything would be able to go in the subway or a park where children are playing. But then are there models of governance or cities that you look at? I would put, we raised Singapore because that's kind of like the far end of the spectrum of like extreme law and order like famous for, you know, flogging people for spitting gum on the ground and so forth. And then there's a whole range of, you know, other most a lot of other East Asian cities that are, you know, not quite Singapore. There's European approaches where there's more permissiveness in certain realms like drug use, but maybe not in public spaces. Like what do you, is there anything that you look at as a good model? Yeah, a lot of European cities do get it right and it can be more permissive but it's also more heavily policed because there are rules and the punishments aren't as severe but there are punishments. But, you know, I would just simply go back to New York in 2017, 2018, everything was trending in the right direction. Murders were below 300. Quality of life on the subway was high. Arrests were down. Incarceration was down. Everything was trending right. And then a cop murdered a man in Minnesota and we decided the whole system was broken. You know, this isn't, you know, Singapore is an extreme example and it's not gonna happen here. I think it shouldn't happen here but things were pretty good in New York not that long ago. We could just go back to that but that would require, you know, the laws and the policing that we had then but everything was going, everything was going kind of well. I mean, I want to say everything because still people were being killed and people are suffering out there but it wasn't magic that did it. It was hard work. It was choices we make. So I don't dream of a utopia. I just want things as good as they can be and as of now, you know, probably 2017 or so was the ideal year in New York. We could go back to that. Is there, you know, when you look at the long history of crime both in the US and in New York City obviously we're nowhere near the peak. Here's just the federal crime data. I know you don't like looking at national crime data but- Oh, I do, I like looking at it too. Don't worry. It's a lesson for me. Similar story in New York. Like how, you say you want to go back to 2017, it's like how far off is New York from 2017 because it's definitely not the most violent city in America. I'm speaking as a non-New Yorker so I have no skin in the game here but like what are the specific things that you feel like have experienced the most like measurable decline that you're looking to see reversed back to 2016, 2017 era? People in black and Hispanic men getting murdered I think is a big one. I mean, that's where it trumps everything. It does trump my discomfort on the subway. You know, that shootings doubled in certain neighborhoods is a moral imperative. I think that always has to be saving lives, always has to be number one on the list but luckily it's a big city with a lot of resources that we can do more things, simultaneous things. So we can focus on all these factors but I think violence and shootings always has to be the main focus. One thing I do want to bring us to though because Peter I know you have been a defender of this in the past is why should we bring back flogging and are you at all worried about whether or not the Lee Kuan Yew Singapore vibe is appropriate for American cities? No, but you have sort of made this sort of counter-intuitive case in defense of all of it. I wrote a book about it. I prefer to focus on my next book back from the crime drop in New York but in defense of flogging, I've got a lot of press didn't sell anything. It was a discussion about prisons and I use foggings to focus on incarceration and the concept of punishment and what is acceptable punishment? And the gambit of the book was we don't whip people in America anymore because of our racist legacy because it's cruel, because it's vicious but if you gave people the choice between getting flogged Singapore style and released or going to prison for a number of years almost everyone would choose the lash over years of incarceration. But we can so flogging we don't do because it's immoral and unconscionable instead we do something worse. That's sort of the theme of the book is to focus on our sort of hypocrisy around crime and punishment but the key part of the book was saying that we do that punishment is an important part it's not just about rehabilitation people who do wrong should be punished and by punished I don't mean flogging and I don't mean incarceration necessarily but the idea that crimes have consequences it's not just about helping the criminal though if we can that's desirable too but punishment serves a purpose and we've kind of gotten away from even talking about the value of proportional punishment. For deterrence years ago I interviewed Mark Kleinman who outlined the idea that there's a trade-off between the length and severity of a sentence and what he calls swift and certain punishment and so therefore if we're locking people up for decades we're filling up our prisons where it's expensive it's overtaxing the system whereas if you traded that with more regular enforcement you're gonna get caught almost every time and you're gonna face some sort of punishment every single time that's gonna be way more effective as a deterrent than the current system which is like you're probably not gonna get caught but if you do we're gonna throw the book at you do you buy that basic calculus? Yeah I mean the tenants of deterrence go back to the Karya and it's swift, certain and proportional punishment. One of the things I do mention in defensive logging is Canada generally the sentence length is on average and it depends but it's half of what it is in America. They seem to do okay in Canada. The nominal benefit from locking someone up for 15 years as opposed to eight is very small. It's certainly secondary to actually catching the person and pressing charges and convicting and locking them up at all. So it is weird that we have this sort of almost fetish with long prison sentences. That said America is a more violent country so it depends on the crime. If you have a repeat offender who murders someone well I don't think they should get out in five years but those are sort of different. I mean America will probably always have more incarceration because we have more as long as we have more violence and we will because of gun laws and inequity and just maybe our culture. But there is a much more, we could have a more rational approach to courts and prosecution and punishment and incarceration and that's of course what in defense of logging was trying to sort of bring out that debate. Not to be all like correct, yeah. Not to be all hit splint about it but do we even have a shared sense of proportionality as it pertains to crime anymore? It feels like we're increasingly fractured and maybe this is just the circles that I'm plugged into but it feels like we're so fractured to the point where there's a bunch of almost reactionary law and order types who see the current state of quality of life in American cities and say fuck no. And then there's a lot of the progressive ACAB types who I think legitimately think that like stealing people's things is just not a big deal and so do we even have a shared sense of what proportionality should even be? I mean, that seems like an incredibly difficult thing to get consensus on. We don't and that goes back to the importance of the rule of law. I mean, this is why we have laws as to impose a uniform sense of proportionality. I mean, the irony of sort of a lot of the progressive position is, you know, if you got rid of police and prisons it's not gonna be replaced by utopia. It's gonna be replaced by people who are gonna be in many ways a lot more severe. I mean, one of the things cops do ironically somewhat regularly is they protect criminals from the mob. The public can be vicious. These, you know, oh, we're gonna have a community get together. Well, my neighbor, you know, may wanna beat the crap out of that criminal and not sit around some kumbaya table with restorative justice. So we need the law also in some ways protects protects offenders from the vicious whims of the public. I mean, it's funny how quickly we forget the Seattle Chas or Chop experiment. You know, no policing in an area and very quickly an unarmed black kid was murdered and the murderers still have never been caught. Like, no, we're not ready for that. It would be nice if we were, I suppose. But I don't know if we'll ever be. Then an immediate rise of a warlord, basically. Yeah, I mean, someone, yeah, you're gonna get warlords in gang. I mean, the community, the phrase is often used favorably. First of all, I think it's a bad phrase. And I don't have it. My block is not a community. I am not my neighbor's keeper. I don't wanna be my neighbor's keeper. This is why I pay taxes. This is why we have the state. But yeah, without policing, the alternative is often gonna be far more severe than the current system. Yeah. You know, when you were mentioning sort of bringing some rationality to this think about like what role is technology gonna play in all this, particularly surveillance technology, where you're kind of taking the human element out of it somewhat, having a more purely rational approach to crime. I mean, that does seem like the- You want Eric Adams Robocop? I don't know that I want Robocop, but I will say these highly law and ordered societies that we were referencing before rely heavily on automated surveillance to implement that order. And on one hand, that is terrifying to me. Like I don't like the idea of ubiquitous government surveillance, obviously. On the other hand, automating some aspects of policing, I can certainly see the appeal if a lot of the problematic incidents that we see these hope high-profile incidents seem to like they could have been avoided if like maybe it was just automated camera or something issuing the ticket. Like how does automation and surveillance work into your vision of a better police society? It has, I mean, I'm worried to a little bit in some ways I think it's sort of inevitable. I hate to say Foucault was right, but he may be on this kind of concept of surveillance. Police can't and shouldn't be locked into the technology of today or yesterday. So as the technology advances, they're gonna be tools police are gonna use. Again, these are choices. I mean, it's good, it would be nice to get out ahead of this. What do we want police drones to do? 10 years ago, the concept was unfathomable to many people dystopian, but it's inevitable. And they serve a purpose. So we have to be transparent about this. We have to have discussions about it, but society changes, law enforcement is gonna change along with that. But that's a bit different than and a bit more complicated than the idea of cameras and automated enforcement. Again, I don't like zero tolerance. I'm really not for automated enforcement, but the move behind that is usually, oh, cause cops are racist, so cameras won't be. And yet, if you put cameras where traffic crashes happen and pedestrians die, I'm still gonna have a racially disparate impact. And then what do you do about people that with vague tags and so on at some point, you do need cops making traffic stops. Right. I mean, I think it would, even if there is a disparate outcome, it becomes a lot harder to argue that it's a disparate, that it's like, purposefully racist or discriminatory against someone. And we were talking with Coleman Hughes about this a little bit last week, Laura, if you put that they did that in Chicago and there was that disparate outcome, but the upside was also that these communities where there were a lot of traffic fatalities, the traffic fatalities went down disproportionately helping that community. So there's the double-edged sword to it. And then also there's, the thing that I always try to keep in mind with when we're talking about police surveillance is this idea that David Brin, the writer, talked about a lot of surveillance where not only are they surveilling us from above, but it's gonna require more surveillance by us of the authorities from below. And so that's where the transparency comes in that we should have access to, it should be much easier to requisition any footage that is caught by police and to be able to surveil what they're doing. Like the road has to go both ways if we're headed down. That- It's messy though. I'm very dangerous future. I'm for that, but do you wanna have access when the cops go and investigate a sexual child abuse case? People are having the worst day of their lives and cops are going into their home. I don't, it shouldn't be, I want transparency, but at some point there's a matter of privacy as well. And it's hard to, these are tough rules and regulations and decisions to make about this stuff. But the other, I think perhaps an overarching point about surveillance it is by its nature reactive. The video in a bodega can identify who the killer is in part cause that person is almost assuredly already in the system and facial recognition comes into play in that gang databases can come in and play that. And of course people are, some people are fighting all these things because they don't want policing. But they're reactive in nature. And ultimately police can be proactive and prevent crime and that requires men and women using brains and using their intelligence. And again, that tough part of good leadership is making sure it doesn't go overboard. There's a constant problem in policing of the statistical tail wagging the dog. You have to think, why are you doing this? What's the goal? And the goal never should be, well, I made an arrest. I mean, what's actually after the fact that might be the goal. But in terms of proactive policing I have to figure out what are we trying to accomplish and how do we accomplish that? But that's never gonna be done solely with cameras and surveillance at some point. It does involve physically arresting somebody. We can't get away from that. And I would argue we shouldn't, we don't want to but the surveillance and technology part and I think it's sort of we need that discussion but we shouldn't let it distract from the core of actual good legal moral constitutional policing. Yeah, absolutely. And I really appreciate you taking the time to talk through that with us today. This is, I feel like there are a lot more people fighting common ground on these issues where it was more polarized in your pro or anti-police before. And the more that there can be a consensus that, well, we want some definition, some workable definition of good policing that actually respects civil liberties. That's the conversation that I hope continues to develop and then be enacted into policy because we really, we need that. And I appreciate you participating with us. I wanted to- Before you close this out, can I just go on what you just said? Cause it's really important to focus on good policing. We only generally from the outside focus on bad policing. And we often focus on bad policing in places like New York we're generally compared to a place like Ferguson, Missouri. The NYPD does a much better job, not a perfect job by any means, but by focusing on good policing we can try to propagate those best practices. There's very little on that. We do tend to go from sort of outraged outrage and that doesn't really necessarily and they might be outrageous. Like I'm not saying we shouldn't focus on some of those outrageous but that's not how you improve the system. Yes. Accountability and improvements is what we want. And yeah, that's very well put. Before we wrap, I did want to mention that Liz and I have set up an email address just asking questions at reason.com. We hope to add a just ask us questions segments to the show. If you have a good direct question for either or both of us, please send it to there. You can also DM me on Twitter. That's fine. Peter Moscos, thanks for talking with us today. Oh, thanks. This was a great conversation. Thanks for listening to Just Asking Questions. These conversations appear on Reason's YouTube channel and the Just Asking Questions podcast feed every Thursday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please rate and review the show.