 One phenomenon in recent years, especially post the George Floyd incidents, but even predating that has been the rise of what has been known as the progressive prosecutor in several large American cities, criminal justice reform minded DAs. And a couple of years ago, I talked with George Gascon, who was a former police officer who became DA in San Francisco and then LA. I am curious what your reaction is to what Gascon had to say. We have convinced our community for years that over incarceration and more police presence and more prosecutions actually was leading to greater safety when in fact, it has probably led to greater insecurity. The emphasizing the criminal process when it comes to low level nonviolent offenses actually increases safety in general, not just for those types of crimes, but even for a more serious crime. What should the consequences actually be? Well, I hate to even almost use the term consequences because when people are saying the same because they don't have money to get housing, criminalizing that behavior, I think it's not only immoral, I believe that it doesn't fix the problem, right? So I would say that rather than consequences, I like to use a term, you know, the right intervention. To summarize Gascon's argument there, it's that the police are generally the wrong intervention for a lot of what is going wrong in public spaces and that there should be either a more robust social safety net or some other organization that intervenes in certain circumstances. I'm sure you've heard this argument a lot. What's your reply to it? I support that argument. Most American police chiefs, most cops who have to deal with all of this, the emotionally disturbed, the homeless, the narcotics addicted, would like to get out of the business of something that they're not trained adequately to deal with, that they're working with laws that are inappropriate. So where Gascon's coming from and for purposes of your audience, people need to understand, George Gascon was my number two in the LAPD. For most of my time as chief of police, I supported him when he went to Mesa as chief of police in Mesa. I supported his appointment as chief of police in San Francisco, but I do not support most of his ideas since he has now gone over to the progressive district attorney wing of government. You cannot show me one city in America that has one of these progressive district attorneys. We're well intended and we share the belief that criminal justice reform is necessary. We share the belief that there are a lot of alternatives to using the police for a lot of these social ills, but until we fund them adequately, till we coordinate and organize them adequately, police are left as the agency of last resort to deal with them, that's the reality. And you cannot find one city in America, Philadelphia, Los Angeles certainly, that has one of these progressive DAs that are funded by the George Soros Open Society Foundation that are having success in reducing crime or disorder. They're all a mess and they're well intended, but their policies and procedures are actually not reducing crime or disorder. This stuff is not rocket science, I understand your history, what worked, what didn't work. And what I worry about unfortunately of the next two years is we're going into the silly season. We're going into the next presidential election and we're effectively got two totally divergent perspectives. Very far to the left, on one hand, the Democrats very far to the right, on the right, the Republicans, need to get more people to send the ground, to comment. Explain what is the problem when you say very far to the left and that's a problem. What is the definitive mistake that people on the left are making and on the right? On the left, it is the idea of continued attacks on police, the idea of undermining the legitimacy of police. Does policing have its flaws? Does the profession have its issues? Like every profession it does, but I've been in it for 50 some large years and believe me, what it was back in 1970 is not what it was in our 19, 2023. On the right, the issue is this rise of militarism in terms of the proud boys and this anger at government. But when I talk about the far lefts, I mentioned also I would go back to George Viscone and the progressive DAs, well intended, but with the results, where are their policies and procedures? They're keeping a lot of people out of jail, great. But we have more murder victims, we have more rape victims, we have more people being harmed, more cities being made less safe. If they were showing success in terms of reduced crime and victims, I'd be celebrating them. I have no problem with a lot of the reforms they want to put in place, but the way they're doing them, not working. On the far right, the idea of war cops. War cops is not the solution unless those cops are highly trained. You think Memphis is going to benefit by hiring more cops like those five that they just hired in the last couple of years? Certainly not. I think the response that the progressive prosecutors and their supporters would have is that your, or one response I'll have is that your approach, even if it can, you can show some empirical results with it, the other side of the empirical equation there is that when you kind of flood the zone with more police officers and tell them to go more aggressively intervene in the problem areas that the inevitable result of that is that more people in minority communities, more blacks and Latinos are going to have more interactions with police, more unwanted interactions with police. And I mean, that has been borne out by the data that those communities disproportionately then get more, you know, interface with the police. And there's inevitably going to be people who aren't doing anything who are walking down the street getting harassed suddenly. I don't deny that this whole conversation has been about how to deal with that. Again, I'll speak to my own time, my own record in the sense of I don't apologize for any my ears and policing in the sense of 95, 96, did we encourage more arrests? Yes, because that was going to be necessary to stop the fair evasion of the subway, to stop the 2000 murders on the streets, the 5000 people shot in the streets in New York, the half million people, victims of serious crime in New York. I'm very proud that by 2019, before the state legislature started messing it up again, there were fewer than 100,000 for the first time in history fewer than 100,000 reported crimes in a city that had now grown from seven and a half million to eight and a half million people in a city that has also become much more minority majority than it was back in 1994. So it can be made safer everywhere for everyone. I think I've got a lot of, if you will, proof of that. I think a lot of the ideas that I promulgate that I basically, with a lot of the time I spent with Kelling that I promulgate in my book. There are ways to deal with this, to deal with the issues of race and race is central to all of this in terms of dealing with the police. I just did an event last night with Connie Rice from the Civil Rights Advocate in Los Angeles who I've got a great partnership with and was very helpful with me in Los Angeles trying to get the race issue in Los Angeles under control. For 50 years, the LAPD terrorized the black community in Los Angeles, no denying it politically as well as using the police. And we were able to turn that around, turn it around fairly dramatically. Hey, that's an excerpt from our reason live stream with Bill Bratton, who was New York City's top cop. He also worked in LA and oversaw dramatic decreases in crime. We talked about what's going on now, what worked in the past, what might work in the future and how to square all of that with the need for civil liberties. If you wanna watch the whole video, check it out. And if you wanna check out our reason live streams, we do them every Thursday at Zach Weisbühler and I at 1 p.m. Eastern time, go to reason.com and check us out.