 This is Nick Gillespie and this is the Reason Livestream with my colleague, Zach Weismuller. Hi, Zach, thanks for saying hi. I am broadcasting from New York City and that's relevant to today. Zach is in native Florida, as is our guest commissioner, William Joseph Bratton, who was also calling from Florida and American law enforcement officer who served two terms as the New York City Police Commissioner from 1994 to 1996. And again, 2014 to 2016, he had been the commissioner of the Boston Police Department and he had also served as the chief of the LAPD, the Los Angeles Police Department, where reason is headquartered 2002 to 2009, only person to have run both the New York Department and the LA departments. He is a prominent voice in the new documentary, Gotham, The Fall and Rise of New York, written and directed by Matthew Taylor. The film examines the city's safety and quality of life over several mayoral administrations between 1966, the John Lindsay years through 2013, the end of Michael Bloomberg. That movie, by the way, comes out on March 21st. It'll be available everywhere on video and demand like Apple and all of that kind of stuff. But commissioner, thank you for talking to reason. Great to be with you. Thank you. Yeah, and you know, I am talking to you from one of what used to be one of the worst streets in New York, Bleaker on the corner of Bowery. Very familiar with it went by. And not because you were going to CBGBs, right? You know, this you presided over the largest and most sustained decline in crime, you know, in a major city in the United States, you know, for, you know, in recorded history essentially like that. What we want to start with is by playing a clip that's from the very opening of Gotham, The Fall and Rise of New York, kind of sets the scene when you showed up in New York in 1990. Zach, can you play this clip? In 1990, the city had an Eastern European look in the sense that it had an overwhelming greatness. I remember it was walking in Times Square. I knew, I wasn't worried, I knew that in 20 seconds somebody would have cost me for some reason. Bad schools, high crime, not the greatest economic vibrancy. If you had a car, you'd put a sign in the window that said no radio in here so that someone wouldn't come along and smash it up. And there were people begging everywhere. It was terrible. Commissioner, tell us, when you see footage like this, you know, a kind of medley of what it was like to be in New York in the late 80s, early 90s, how did it feel? How did people feel when they were walking down the streets, when they were going into the subways, when they were shopping or just going to parks? What was the vibe of the city back then? The vibe of the city was it's nickname, Fear City. The police union had described New York City back in the late 80s, early 90s as Fear City. A very appropriate naming because it was a place where you were fearful everywhere in the parks, on the streets, in the subways in particular. It was not unique in American cities at that time, but New York being New York, it was the one where all the attention was focused on. And when I first visited there in 1989 being recruited to take over as Chief of the Transit Police, I described it in my first book, Turnabout. It was awful. It was a mess. And unfortunately, some signs of that have returned once again in 2023. I guess it's interesting or important to note too that New York had been suffering under this kind of a sense of general criminality for decades by this point. Starting in the 60s, but certainly the 70s and a good chunk of the 80s, this was just taken for granted. New York was kind of dead and it might give off heat for a while, but it was kind of a lumbering beast that was trapped. You mentioned you were brought in from Boston to become the head of the Transit Police that watched the subways in particular. We want to play a clip that kind of talks about what it was like to go into the subways and then I want to get your comments on that. Zach? It was like taking a walk down into Dante's Inferno. The smell filled a lot of the turnstiles with disabled, aggressive begging, people coming on to the train everywhere. And they actually had cardboard cities on the end of the platforms. Bratton pioneered this idea that if we address small crimes in the subway system, we can prevent bigger crimes in the subway system. So they started looking at who was jumping over the turnstiles and who was beating the fare and found out that a disproportionate number were also wanted for violent crimes. Or they were carrying guns or knives into the subway system. So if you apprehend people beating the fare, you can prevent violent robberies and murders in the subway system. And within just months of this, the Times was saying, okay, crime is down by double digits. When you see footage like that, I guess before I ask you a policy question, what comes to mind? Do you break out into a sweat? Do you remember things in a particular way? No, it just brings back memories of the bad old days. And at the same time, it creates the new memories in terms of the successful turning around of crime in the subways. And even though there are significant problems in the subway system once again, there's nowhere near as bad as it was back in 89 or 90 when I first took over the then separate New York City Transit Police. It was not part of the New York City Police Department at that time. Yeah, the police were centralized under, it was under your control or did that come after you or police? Actually, I fought aggressively against the Transit Police being merged into the city police. I was successful in doing that before I went back to Boston. But when I came back in 94 with Julianne, he had campaigned on the idea of merging the then three departments together. And we successfully merged them in 1995. Let's talk about in the subway. That is where, you know, we hear the beginnings of things like broken windows policing, zero tolerance comp stat. What were the policies that you enacted and kind of enforced in the subways that really radically turned around the amount, the volume of crime and the sense that you were going into, you know, one of the rings of help. I'm a student of history. I love history and particularly police history. And fortunately, in my case, I made some history in the 1970s in Boston, in that I adopted a principle of policing that was first established in 1829 in London, the Metropolitan Police under Sir Robert Peele. His nine principles. The first principle was that the basic mission for which the police exist is to control crime and disorder. In the 60s, 70s and 80s, most police departments in America stopped policing disorder and tried to focus on the growing serious crime problem. You have to focus on both in the 70s and an experimental neighborhood program I led in Boston. We focused on both and had great success reducing crime and disorder. Kelly and Wilson in the 80s wrote an article broken windows. And I had been living broken windows policing in the 70s successfully. So it resonated with me and I became very good friends and acolyte, if you will, of Wilson and Kelly in the 80s. Yeah, and you collaborated on a number of articles and whatnot with George Kelly in particular, who ended up working at the Manhattan Institute. So what did that mean in terms of the subway you go down into the subway? What changed when you, for example, 1993 and a half million writers losing ridership every day close to 200,000 people not paying the fare and that number was growing. The system when you entered it a lot of broken turnstiles and turnstile array broken intentionally by token suckers. These are individuals you put your token in and then it suck it out because the machine would not work. While they stand at the slam grate and hold their handout and intimidate you into giving them the token as you went to think we had almost I believe the number was four to 5,000 people attempting to live in the subway 700 stations. We had, excuse me, 450 stations. We had another 300 that were actually living in the tunnels. Many of them homeless, many of them emotionally disturbed, many of them narcotics addicted. We had aggressive begging everywhere and we had every day on average 60 or 70 serious felony crimes, including robbery, stabbings, 22 murders, 1990. And that was various serious crime as well as quality of life crime. Why the importance of quality of life crime is what all 350, excuse me, three and a half million writers saw every day. Well, 70 of them were victims of a serious crime each day. Three and a half million were victimized by what they were seeing that was creating fear. So what did you do then to clean up the subway? It was very easy. It's exactly what the transfer police now in 2023 are doing in New York once again. And surprise, surprise, the success they're having is crime is going down and quality life is improving. We focus first on fare evasion. And fare evasion was a dollar 15 theft of service. The cops did not want to enforce it. They thought they were just protecting the revenue of the transit authority. Plus, they would be tied up anywhere from 12 to 24 hours processing that fare evasion arrest. We structured it so that we put teams of officers working together, supervised, and we would arrest 10 or 15 or 20 fare evaders, hold them together and then bring them upstairs. And we created what we call a bust bus. It was a specially equipped bus where we could process the prisoners right there at the station. Seven out of 10 could be released immediately because they had no record so we could effectively give them desk appearance tickets. But three out of 10 were found to be wanted on warrants or, in many instances, carrying weapons. So the figure we used back in 1990 was one out of every 21 we arrested had some type of weapon on them. And one out of every seven had a warrant outstanding, usually for a previous transit offense. So the beauty of what we were doing was the public saw for the first time in 20 years the police were actively going after the fare beaters. Two, we also had an advertising budget. Believe it or not, I had money to advertise. I had 6,000 train cars, I had a couple of thousand buses. We put advertising all over those buses and trains that the police were back, that we were here to take back the system. And we also had an increase in the number of officers. But most importantly, they have to have the officers doing something, patrolling the cars, making arrests, ejecting the homeless, ejecting the emotionally disturbed, ejecting the narcotics addicted and trying to move them into shelters, trying to move them into services. And it was extraordinarily successful. So during the period, 1991, the two years I was there, we had double digit declines and serious crime, extraordinary decreases in fare evasion, and a sense that the subways were getting safer, even as the streets seemed to be getting less safe. Even on the streets, crime was going down by one or two percent. Nobody noticed it. Why? Because on the streets, they were focusing only on serious crime, and not particularly successfully. But they were not doing anything about the 8,000 open-air drug dealing locations in the city. They're not doing anything about the aggressive begging, the graffiti, the prostitution, the street prostitution. And they were also not doing much successfully about cleaning up Times Square. So the city above ground remained a mess, even as below ground, it was getting better. There's been a fair amount of debate, which I'm sure you're aware of, in criminology circles about broken windows policing and what it is and is not. And one thing in your answer there made me think of one component of that debate, which is, you mentioned, cracking down on fare evaders was a big component of what you were doing in the subways. And there's one line of argument that is like, well, that's really what was the difference maker here, is it's almost like it's less about the public disorder perception of things and more about you're kind of creating a pretense or like almost like a fishing expedition to be able to stop a bunch of people and then from that you're able to find the people that have outstanding warrants and so forth. And that is really the part of it that's having an effect more so than broken windows more broadly understood. Is there anything to that? What you're describing is the term is called a pretext stop, that you're trying to find a reason to make a stop. Broken windows policing, however, is about probable cause. It's an offense, a criminal offense or a administrative offense, in the case of the subway oftentimes, that the police officer actually sees the violation. It's probable cause. He has probable cause to stop you, question you and potentially arrest you if he finds a weapon on you, for example, or if he sees that there's a warrant for you. So a lot of the hocus pocus that's out there right now about broken windows is inappropriate or they equate it with stop, question and frisk. Stop, question and frisk is reasonable suspicion. The officer suspects that a crime has been, is about to be committed, but then has to articulate why he believes that is the case. Broken windows policing, probable cause, the officer witnesses the offense and has the legal authority to do something about it. So they see the person jumping the turnstiles and then they collar them. They see the graffiti, they see him picking the pocket, they see him accosting the other riders on the system. So the far left has been able to really muddy the waters significantly relative to trying to equate broken windows policing, which is probable cause policing, quality of life policing with stop, question and frisk. Both of them are essential tools of American policing and need to be practiced legally, need to be supervised closely, and need to be defended vigorously. And I'm a staunch defender and proponent of both of them. How would you defend stop, question and frisk? Because that seems to be the even more controversial policy where there's been real constitutional questions and rulings against it, because you're not actually, as you say, you're not intervening after a crime. It's the police officer kind of saying, okay, I believe that this person is about to commit a crime, and doesn't that contribute to rationing up the tensions? Let me explain. Stop, question and frisk is protected and governed by Terry versus Ohio Supreme Court case 1968. We studied extensively when I was in the police academy in 1970 because it was so new that you have to believe that a crime has, is or is about to be committed and have to be able to articulate the reasons for that. And that articulation is critical. And what has happened in recent years, unfortunately, because of poor leadership, poor supervision, poor training, is officers are not trained enough as to how to articulate why they made the stop. And it's allowed in the case of New York City where it was overused, well intended, but overused in the early 20th century to the extent that the legal eagles on the criminal offence side were able to make a case in federal court that what the NYPD was doing to speak specifically New York was inappropriate and was unconstitutional. Stop, question and frisk is constitutional. It is a basic element of policing, but you have to safeguard it with all the required training, supervision and oversight. That was not happening in New York and many other parts of the country. So when it was stopped in New York, crime continued to go down? It wasn't actually stopped. Let me clarify that. It was diminished significantly by my predecessor, Commissioner Kelly. It had gone as high as about 700,000 events 2010-11. When I was appointed commissioner under the Blasio after Bloomberg left, we got it down to, I think right now they average less than 10,000 documented stops a year. I had always advocated and one of the reasons DePlasio appointed me as his commissioner, he campaigned and won the mayorality in 2013 on the issue of doing something about stop, question and frisk. He understood because basically I was tutoring him that you couldn't do away with it. It was essential, but what you could do was improve its supervision and its implementation and you could do it in a way that crime would continue to go down with fewer stops and effectively what happened in 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19, crime continued to go down every year and every year fewer stops. And I have never had a year as a police chief or a police commissioner where crime did not go down during my time as a chief or police or commissioner. Never. And I predicted that we would continue reducing crime, but what did we also reduce? We reduced summonses, we reduced citations and we reduced the prison population at Rikers by almost 60%. State prison population would down by almost 40%. Why? Because we were controlling behavior, misbehavior, disorderly conduct and more serious crime which basically controlled by effectively putting in place Comstat, the system that was designed and implemented during my time as commissioner in 1994. Let's talk about Comstat and let's start with it in the subway system because that's where it was first implemented. What was Comstat? And this oftentimes gets rolled into broken windows, but it's a distinct entity, right? Can you kind of explain what it was and how you started? I need to take you back briefly to the 1970s when I was running the neighborhood policing program in Boston. I would go to community meetings every night. Something new that the police going to the community and talking about crime. And I was loaded with all my crime statistics. The people in the neighborhoods just wanted to talk about disorder, the stuff they saw every day. So my understanding of the importance of focusing on broken windows quality of life began in Boston. I had maps in my office covered with acetate and every night a clerk would put up on those maps, little dots indicating where serious crime had occurred. So we were dealing with quality of life issues but also starting to identify patterns and trends that were evolving within a few days of them occurring. So Comstat effectively was created back in the 1970s when I was police commissioner in, excuse me, a police lieutenant in Boston. I was promoted to the superintendent in chief position in 1980 because of my success in dealing not only with crime but with disorder. However, in the 80s I left the Boston police department and ran several smaller agencies in Massachusetts. But then in the 1990s going into New York working with Jack Maple, the late great Jack Maple, working together we began to replicate what we had done in Boston going after quality of life crime, fair evasion, et cetera. But going after quality of life crime had the residual benefit of we were also stopping a lot of criminals. But we also began to map and track with great difficulty on a transit system because you get 6,000 subway cars moving all the time. The idea of identifying patterns and trends and who was committing crime over a very brief period of time instead of over a long period of time. In 1994 I was became commissioner in the NYPD, working with Maple, Louie Anamone, my chief of department. We created Comstat, C-O-M-P-S-T-A-T, shot for computer statistics. Effectively it was the first automated mapping of crime that was occurring in New York City. Timely accurate intelligence, gather up your crime reports every day, rapidly respond to what the patterns and trends are showing you that emergency, effective tactics, what's going to work, task forces, uniform, what's the best way to deal with that particular crime. And then relentless follow-up that even after you basically made the arrest, you kept going at it to make sure it wasn't coming back again. And what Comstat also did, it created transparency. Because in one room we would have 200 police leaders from all over the city come in for three hours a day, twice a week. And what did we talk about? Crime. Amazing. The NYPD was going to talk about crime for the first time in its history in a transparent way, sharing ideas, what worked, what wasn't working. That's Comstat. We've got a clip. Yeah, let's show a clip. I've got a question in the documentary about Comstat and then I want to ask you a follow-up question about how that system actually worked. Comstat program gave us the answer. Comstat program gave us the answer. 75% of the crime is committed in those days on the platform. Only 25% in the cars. All the police were in the cars. We took the police out of the car. We put them on a platform where the crime was taking place. We allocated them exactly the way crime was allocated. 75% of the platform, 25% in the car. All of a sudden crime went down within weeks by 50%. Within months, people were saying the subway to save again. And when the criminals would move back, because we had the Comstat system, we were only two days behind them. The city never dealt with crime in a scientific way like this before, in an intelligent way like this before. So, I mean, that all, it sounds very logical. The criticism I want to raise with you is that there's two main criticisms. One is that there's been some reports from these retired officers and other reporting that perhaps the data Comstat can incentivize manipulating the crime stats by downgrading felonies to misdemeanors or just not reporting crimes at all to make the picture look rosier than it is. And then on the flip side, it can also create these kind of de facto quota system where it incentivizes police to write a bunch of tickets for basically harmless things like blocking pedestrian traffic, when someone's standing on a totally empty sidewalk or something, just to prove that they're doing something in the Comstat red zone or whatever. How do you mitigate those kinds of problems and the whole, like, you know, juking the stats type of problem? You mitigate them through the transparency of the Comstat process because in that process, that precinct captain is Detective Sarge and they've been there with dozens, if not hundreds of their peers who are going to very quickly question if something is out of the ordinary. Additionally, you also do that with leadership supervision. There's no denying that there were a few people that attempted to use shop pencils as we refer to it, but we very quickly break those shop pencils and a number of people were effectively identified, demoted, transferred. No, we did not play games with the numbers because we depended on those numbers. But was there that risk that people hoping to effectively put on a good show? Certainly. Did it occur? It certainly did. But did it occur in the widespread way that some of the interviews you're talking about tried to present? No, it was a rarity rather than even a common occurrence. I might point out also that in the Manhattan Institute film and the clip that you just showed, there's some confusion. The turnaround of crime in the subways began in 1990. Rudolph Giuliani had just lost the 1989 male election. During the next four years, he attempted to understand, to win back the next male race, how to do that. And so the representation in the film, the video, is that CompStat turned subway crime around. CompStat did not. CompStat as a system we brought in in 1994 as police commissioner. But we began the crime turnaround in 1990, ironically under Mayor David Dinkins and his administration. But I was working for Bob Keiley, the chairman of the MTA. I was working for the president of the transit authority. And while I had to report to the police commissioner and the mayor, I was a senior vice president of the transit authority. So the video in the movie, it honestly depicts when it began to turn around. Giuliani was able to accelerate the process significantly on the streets of New York. But the subways had already been, by that time, overall crime in the subways was now by 30, 40, 50% by the time he was elected mayor. Yeah, I wanted to raise that because you were hired by David Dinkins. David Dinkins basically was the mayor. Right, during his mayorality. Go ahead, I'm sorry. Yeah, during his mayorality, crime started declining in New York in 1990 under David Dinkins. And as you were saying, it accelerated for sure under Giuliani and it continued going down even after crime. You know, there was a national decline in crime in the 90s at the exact moment that everybody was predicting that it was really going to get even worse and worse. What do you think accounted for the turnaround starting in 1990, you know, before Giuliani and the way the Manhattan Institute movie talks about it. It's very much has to do with people like you but with Mayor Giuliani. What was going on between 1990 and 94? Between 1994, David Dinkins, first black mayor elected in his first year or two, the city continued to struggle. We had the Crown Heights riots in the Hasidic area of Brooklyn. Terrible riots that went on for several days without being effectively dealt with. So Ray Kelly, who was the first deputy commissioner with Lou Annamone, basically was able to finally bring those riots under control. Meanwhile, even as crime was beginning to go down dramatically in the subways and be noticed by the New York Times and others, because I had a great propaganda machine, I could advertise what we were doing. On the streets, people were not seeing anything different after Dinkins came in to the extent that the New York Post had a very famous headline, Dave Do Something. Because in his first year or two, crime, while it went down one or two percent, it wasn't noticed because the streets were still a mess. 8,000 open-air drug locations, why? Because the cops, uniformed cops weren't authorized to deal with a lot of that type of activity. And that goes way back, right? It was an anti-corruption initiative put in back in the 1970s. This goes to my issue about history. Those who don't know the history are doing to repeat it. I studied the history of the NYPD very closely, 60s, 70s, 80s. So when I came in in 1990, I had very clear ideas about what to do with the problems in New York and the corruption issues for one, but also how to get the cops back engaged on the streets of New York City. What Dinkins was able to do, and in some respects forced to do, but as is pointed out in the Manhattan Institute video, Peter Belone, this extraordinarily great, talented speaker of the City Council, was able to work with Dinkins to get legislation passed in Albany to hire 6,000 more police. The department at that time had, I think, 25,000, 6,000 huge increase, and they got it passed. Amazing. Transit police, for example, went from 3,800 to 4,100 offices as a result of that. The city police force increased by almost 5,000, housing increased. But the mistake that Dinkins made, which is talked about in the video, I think Ray Kelly maybe speaks to this, is that he took a lot of the money to fund social programs first and kind of put off the hiring of the offices in large numbers to the end of his term so that during the mayoral election of 93, Giuliani still able to take crime in the city as a mess, and the promised 6,000 offices, most of them had not yet appeared. In my first six months as Police Commissioner with Giuliani, we effectively increased the size of the end of our city police force by 5,000 of the offices that Dinkins had got the funding for. If Dinkins had front-loaded the hiring of cops instead of the social work programs, he probably would have been re-elected mayor again, maybe, because I'm not so sure that the Dinkins administration would have focused on crime in the same way that Giuliani and I did during our time. Before we move on to something a little bit different, can just talk about the volume, the number of cops. And this is kind of related to broken windows or having a presence. How important is it to have a visible police presence, independent of whether or not these are good cops or bad cops, whether or not they're doing stop and frisk the right way or the wrong way, just having more bodies on the street. Does that always have a positive effect on crime? No, it does not. Let me explain why. During Dinkins last year, he had more cops because he was able to hire cops, and I think they increased by about 25 or 50 every precinct in the city got more cops. But what those young kids were doing was they were not effectively going after the things that people wanted to address, the quality of life crimes, etc. So it's as important, numbers are as important as what they're doing. And what we did with them in 1994, we basically put the cops back in the street to be cops, to go after the drug dealers, to go after the quality of life, to go after all the crime that was occurring. And I'll give you an example, the LAPD. I had 9,000 offices in America's second largest city, third largest police department. I would have had to have had 18,000 offices to have had the equivalent of what I had to work with in New York City. But in Los Angeles during 2000, 2002 to 2009, the reduction in crime almost equaled that of what we did in 1990s in New York City. Why? Because it's how we were using the cops. We were using them very effectively, very assertively. So it's as much about how you're using them. But then how you're using them is where the issue of supervision, leadership and training comes in. Because if you're not using them appropriately, or if you're not supervising, they can go out of control very quickly. And that's exactly what happened with Stop, Question and Frisk in the period of time, up to 2014, that resulted in that federal court case. It was found that those offices, these young kids right out of the academy, poorly supervised, were making many inappropriate stops that they could not articulate why they made the stop. They could not articulate the reasonable suspicion. And that's why the federal court came down so hard on the NYPD in that particular case. Could you give me an example, just a concrete example of what is a good use of Stop and Frisk and what is a bad use of Stop, Question and Frisk? Well, it basically goes right to the heart of reasonable suspicion. You have to be able to articulate why are you making the stop. And in city after city around the country, it's been determined that many of those stops are being made inappropriately. So it's given Stop, Question and Frisk. Oftentimes it's called Stop and Frisk, but the important part of Stop, Question and Frisk is the question. You stop somebody, you have the legal right to stop them, if you have reasonable suspicion that you can document, but then you question. And then the questioning basically may lead to effectively the frisk, the fear that the individual may be armed. So it's an essential tool of policing. Some cities have tried to claim that they don't do it. You cannot police any community in America without the officer having the ability to do a Stop, Question and Frisk. It's like going into a doctor's office, and the doctor's not allowed to ask you any questions about why you're there. It's the foolishness of trying to do a way to Stop, Question and Frisk. It never ended in New York and will never end in New York. But it's also partly, I mean, this gets to some of the tensions and certainly in places like New York and LA, there were decades of high tension. Sometimes it tracked along ethnic lines or racial lines, but there had been major scandals. Exactly. What had set the tone for two decades in New York was the kind of serpico, the book, the movie in the sense that the NYPD was as big a gang as there was in New York. That corrodes trust and authority in LA. There was a sense that the police acted as almost as an occupying army. That wasn't a sense, that was the reality in the black communities in LA and the reality in New York City, the 70s in particular, the corruption issues were very real. It was department-wide. And that's where once again the leadership comes in understanding what's the history and how do you go about correcting, how do you win back the community trust. And in both New York and in LA, we won back a lot of that community trust, particularly in the minority neighborhoods, which are always going to be impacted, unfortunately in our country because of the high rates of crime that those communities unfortunately have historically had and continues to have, which draws more police into those neighborhoods, which ends up in unfortunately more negative enforcement actions because there's more crime and more disorder. This is where it's essential to be able to control your cops to the extent that they're doing everything legitimately, if you will, police legitimacy is what the expression that we use. And oftentimes it's not led properly. We've got two examples of that, Memphis and Louisville. Memphis is a horrific murder of that young man by those five cops. And now as recently as yesterday, the Justice Department coming out showing that Louisville for most of the last 20 years was as bad as Los Angeles in terms of it's basically being at war with this black community. And it's for me, it's hard to believe in 2023 that that type of behavior can go on unchecked for two decades in the 21st century because we learned in the 20th century how to detect it and how to prevent it. How are the ways, what are the concrete things that you do to win back trust in communities that, you know, where the police have kind of shit the bed as it were? Being there. The old Peter Sellers movie, being there. And by being there, I mean in terms of leadership being there in the community. In the 70s, the reason I got promoted from lieutenant to superintendent, four nights a week I was out hosting community meetings basically listening to people and that's where I got my full understanding of Sir Robert Peel's crime and disorder together. They have to do both. And it's the idea of the cops being there and the cops being there in a consistent way. You hear the expression community policing, neighborhood policing. What is that? Really effectively it's returning to the Sir Robert Peel model, a cop on the beat. And today more likely the cop in the sector car because we've gotten so automated. But it is the idea of, one, the increase in minorities and women on the job so that particularly minority communities they see people who look like them, who are policing them, policing with them. This stuff is not rocket science. It's a lot of hard work but we know how to do it. I would argue that did it effectively in New York, did it effectively in Los Angeles. And a lot of the vestiges of that still remain and in fact during my time with DeBlasio, 2014, we totally resected the whole city and set up a neighborhood policing program modeled after the one we had in Los Angeles in which every sector has two neighborhood coordinating officers who are assigned, who don't chase 911 calls. They are assigned to a sector to interact with the community. They are the go-to people. They give the people in that community the store owners. Here's my cell phone number. Here's my email address. You have an issue, give me a call and I will try to work with you. Those two neighborhood coordinating officers are then coordinating with the 12 to 16 officers who patrol that sector routinely. But with police schedules, they've been in the city three or four days a week, then there are days off for three or four days so you don't have consistency. That's where the neighborhood coordinating officers bring consistency. This stuff is, it's addressable, takes a lot of work, but boy, it can work wonderfully if you put the time and effort into it. I wanted to return to something you said a little bit earlier about a couple of the components of what worked in New York was getting the necessary manpower, putting more officers on the streets, and then being more assertive in terms of, you know, looking and intervening. And one of the results of that, this is a chart from a book by Franklin Zimmering, the city that became safe. And everything we show up here is always in the show notes below if you want to look at our references. But these are misdemeanor marijuana arrests, which you see spiking precipitously in the 90s. And what I'm interested to get your opinion on is now cannabis and, you know, we're a libertarian publication. And so this kind of chart is, you know, alarming to us to say the least. And then, you know, in the subsequent years, most states at this point have legalized cannabis on one level or another. I guess my question for you is, how do you think that has gone so far? Terribly. New York City, New York State's a case in point. I had the experience when I went to L.A. in 2002. California was supposedly the healthiest state in America, basically had medical marijuana clinics where you basically get a doctor's prescription to go get marijuana. And outside every one of those clinics you'd see quite a few characters hanging around hoping to scrounge marijuana off the people going in with the prescriptions. That my prediction for you, I am not a supporter of marijuana in any way, shape, or form, except for medicinal use because I don't think we still fully understand its impact on the development of young people or the day-to-day use that we're now actually encouraging. In my last year, 2016 in New York City, marijuana was associated with more murders than cocaine, heroin, and the other drugs. Fentanyl had just begun to occur during that time. What does that mean to say associated, that there was marijuana on the scene? The crime associated with people trying to rip off marijuana dealing, that it just was always found at the scenes of so many of these crimes. But you're not saying it was... I mean, it's not like during Prohibition where, you know, Al Capone and Bugs and Moran were fighting it out over booze. I mean, it's not marijuana isn't causing it. It's just it's at the scene because people are using it. A lot of it was in fact with criminals basically going after each other to rob each other of the monies that it generates, rob each other of control of the sale of it, which was because it was illegal to sell it, still illegal in some instances. Right now, part of the issue, it is so confusing as to how do you get it? Right now there are 1,500 illegals locations in New York to buy it. There are three legal locations. So the billions of dollars of tax revenue that the state claims it's going to get, they're not going to get it. Meanwhile... Well, that's bad bureaucracy. But I mean... It's bad bureaucracy. Isn't that? And I mean, the rollout has certainly been botched of legal marijuana. But if... Isn't this a point in case where it's not marijuana? People don't smoke marijuana and then become I've got to kill somebody. If anything, they tend to become pretty chill. But by making it legal and putting it into storefronts, like nobody really gets... You don't see a lot of murders around the black market sale of booze anymore. Like you did during prohibition. Wouldn't legalizing it alleviate much of the crime that you're talking about? If it had been done properly, it was not done properly in California. It's being done horrifically poorly here in New York State. Even the idea of restricting these legal marijuana stores to people who had been convicted of crimes involving marijuana. So it sets a bad example in some respects, if you will, that because you were involved in the illegal sale in the past, you now go to the front of the line to try to sell it legally. No, the issue here is the idea... If I just to dilate on that a little bit, you don't believe in the idea of a good drug dealer, essentially. I'm very clear. I am not a supporter of the legalization of marijuana other than I'm a strong believer in its use for medicinal purposes. I think it's use in a regular way over time. We just don't know. There's a lot of studies out there that are still being studied. So that this rush to legalize, most of the rush to legalize by our politicians is two-fold. One, to prevent the potential creation of criminal records, which is a reasonable rationale. But the other is to generate money. And generating the money, this is where it's going to fall down because there's not a state that's legalized that's ever recognized the money that they thought they were going to get. Why? I think we'll have to agree to disagree on some of this. We'll definitely disagree on that one. And other drugs and other drugs or currently illegal drugs you are against. I mean, because one of our arguments would be when you make the sale, the production and the sale of these things legal, you take the crime away from it. Exactly in the same way that alcohol. You take some of the crime away because the illegal market is still out there. You think the Mexican cartels basically gotten out of the business of trying to control the marijuana. They're very busy now with fentanyl, naturally. But the idea is that... There's a way around that too, legalize it. The black market still generates a significant amount of the crime in the sense. And also the fact that it's still a cash business in this. The other issue at the federal level, it's still illegal. So you basically have to take cash because you effectively can't use the banks. So as Mayor Adams has complained about it in New York City, I haven't seen those specific figures, but the concern about all these illegal marijuana shops with all this cash on hand become targets for robberies. We'll see how that goes over time. Well, again, there's a clear fix to that. But, Zach? The fix is not so clear. That's for sure. So there's been 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 the 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 to me about the rise of police and the criminal, or sorry, the role of police and the criminal justice system during that interview. So let me play this clip from Gascon. I'd like to get your reaction. Big lie was basically that 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. De-emphasizing the criminal process when it comes to low level non-violent offenses actually increases safety in general, not just for those types of crimes, but even for more serious crimes. What should the consequences actually be? Well, I hate to even almost use the term consequences, because when people are saying the attempt, 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 the term, you know, the right intervention. So 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 the 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, until 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 GAs 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. It's in fact not kind of incursive because we're tolerating this behavior and there seemingly is no penalty for misbehavior for the minor crimes. And we're seeing that in city after city. And this is where the idea of broken windows, policing comes in. If you see an offense that you take action, that action doesn't have to be a rest. That action, excuse me, last idea plug again, that action can be a summons, can be a cessation, can be an admonition. And that's what we encourage. And effectively that's what's going on in New York right now in the New York City subway system. They're making more arrests, but they're also issuing more summons. They're doing more ejections with the rest being effectively, in some respects, the last resort. The rest for people who will repeat offenders. And relative to fair evasion, you'd be hard put to find anybody that said, like as Island now, a population has been increased dramatically. That's up there serving time for fair evasion. It just doesn't happen. You mentioned some common ground there with Gascon on the issue of the police don't have to be the people who handle every single problem necessarily. And this is something I noticed in there, Kelling, who you wrote a op-ed with in the Wall Street Journal in 2014, he wrote an essay in Politico in 2015. We're both kind of making the same point that a lot of broken windows has been misinterpreted or misunderstood. We've discussed some of that in some of the conflation that's happened with stop, question, and frisk. But one point that our colleague, C.J. C. Armella, highlighted here was that in that essay, Kelling said that broken windows policing is a highly discretionary set of activities that seeks the least intrusive means of solving a problem, whether it's prostitution, drug dealing in a park, graffiti, public drunkenness, and moreover, depending on the problem, good broken windows policing seeks partners to address it, social workers, city code enforcers, business improvement, district staff, teachers, medical personnel, clergy, and others. Do you agree with Kelling's argument there or clarification about broken windows that there's more to it than the police need to be out there aggressively enforcing every infraction? That's correct. He has never basically indicated or have I that you have to enforce with the rest every infraction, but you do have to address the infraction and that's whether it's the admonition to move along. It's also the idea that the common ground you're talking about that I write about in my second book, Collaborator Parish, the idea that you want to get people onto common ground. Isn't that the issue in America today that we can't get people into common ground in Congress and legislators, if anything, we're pulling father apart. The common ground I think we can agree on is that police should not be the sole entity dealing with any of these major issues that they get jammed up on in terms of some of these instances of police use of force involve the homeless, involve the emotionally disturbed, involve the narcotics addicted, and we are not the end all for that, but we are in many places the only entity that is there to deal with that problem. And that's the reality. The good news of what's going on these last few years is the recognition that let's try some different things. In 2005, actually working with George Giscogne when he was my number two, we created an LA smart guys. And what was the smart guy? He was a trained officer working with a trained clinician. And when we got a call from a mentally disturbed person, we would send that car to basically try to work on de-escalating the issue rather than just sending two officers armed with all the accoutrements that they carry with them. And you're seeing more and more of that. But the reality is that police are never going to be able to be taken totally out of the equation. Why? Cost. The amount of money it would cost to have full-time clinicians to deal with any of these conditions. In our society, the money is just not there. So this is where the idea of community policing comes into play, partnership. And this is what Kelly's talking about in the quote that you just showed there. The idea that broken windows is never going to work with just police enforcement. It has to work with what did Kylie and Gunn do in the transit authority? Even as we were arresting fair evaders, seven out of 10 of them were stopped, but then they were released with a ticket. They weren't jailed. They were inconvenienced for half an hour or so. But they were simultaneously cleaning up the subway. They were getting rid of the trash. They were getting rid of the graffiti. They were improving, getting rid of the odd 6,000 train cars. They got rid of that graffiti. That was like the hallmark of New York of the 70s and 80s. And so this with a partnership with the station masters, with the transit authority, with the police. This is an example. The business improvement districts in New York that are so successful, Grand Central Park, Bryant Park, why are they so successful? They focus on cleanliness. They focus on enforcement. And they focus on furniture. The idea of benches and street lights. The creative idea at Bryant Park of not having permanent benches but chairs because you can move around. So three or four, you want to sit together. You get a little folding chair and you make your own little group. You want to sit by yourself, take that chair and go sit off on the corner. And it's that creative thinking that is that what broken windows was all about with Kelly and Wilson. And it's been part of the misinterpretation or even the effort to try and link it that somehow or another, that it stopped questioning the risk. As I've tried to explain to you on several occasions, reasonable suspicion, probable cause. Could I ask to kind of pick up on a little bit related there? I mean, you've talked about bad cops being a problem. What is, where does the protection of bad cops come from in terms of, you know, is it, is it a function of qualified immunity? Is it a function of police union strength? Is it a function of politicians and or police bureaucracy leadership not being willing to actually clean house? Because this is also something a lot of libertarians, a lot of progressives, even some conservatives talk about, you know, there's always this theory that, well, there's just a couple of bad apples, but it does seem very difficult to actually discipline police who do really bad things over and over again. It's all of the four elements that you just articulated. Union issues, contracts, arbitration protocols, laws in certain states, qualified immunity, the reluctance of cops and many professions, doctors, et cetera, to testify against each other. This, once again, is where the leadership comes in, because you can deal with this. In every department I've worked in, I would say to you that one, two, three percent of that department has problematic offices, in terms of brutal, corrupt, rations, one, two, three percent with the LAPD, the NYPD, and that's corroborated in a number of ways in terms of the numbers of complaints, numbers of arrests that were made against offices. So this is where I'm very concerned at the moment with the difficulty of recruiting new personnel, city after city is starting to lower standards, physical standards, academic standards. When I was commissioner in New York in 1994, after coming in and dealing with the dirty 30 corruption scandal where I had a whole precinct that went corrupt on my predecessor, Ray Kelly, then basically I had to deal with the prosecutions of it. When we looked at those cops that were resting, they had a lot of commonality. They were effectively, some of them come on to the job at age 19 and then worked in the department for a couple of years, before they became 21, high school or GED education. So one of the things I did in the NYPD, I raised the hiring age to 22 and raised the requirement that they had to have 60 college credits or the equivalent. Why? Because I'd have the ability to get a more mature officer, I'd have the ability to look at a track record on their academic scores, and I would have the ability effectively to have an officer that was used to going to school. So as we provided better training, he'd already had a background in terms of that. We also found, interestingly enough, in New York City, by doing that we would increase minority hiring. Why? Because the City University of New York's system basically was a free school and there was heavily heavy concentrations of minority kids, many who could not get a job, so they continued their schooling. So we benefited from that, because they had not only 60 college credits, they had college degrees. So we were able to effectively, the kids coming in from Long Island with the kids with high school education, the black kids from New York oftentimes had the college education. So there was a way of basically dealing with a multiple number of problems with a common sense solution. So I'm very worried that everything we've talked about today requires a highly trained, highly supervised, highly motivated and constantly being trained police officer. And that's something we do an abysmal job, that we don't continue to train them other than firearms training a couple of times a year. And we're in this strange period where we need more cops, we want more cops, but to get them we're going to start lowering the standards. And what is that going to result in? It's going to result in Memphis, it's going to result in Louisville. What role does the, because this is something we talked about, we had a stream following the beating of Tyree Nichols. And we talked a lot about these elite kind of squads that go into crime hotspots. The one in that situation was called the Scorpion Unit. And the police reformer we spoke with, and that case Walter Katz was agreeing with this notion that creating these elite units, it's kind of playing into that, like you're going into a war zone type mentality. And this particular unit had a very bad reputation in the neighborhood. Does that play a role in, you know, heightening tensions and creating the possibility of a really bad situation as happened with Tyree Nichols? Well, it's happened in city after city around the country that Justice Department just announced yesterday they were actually going to commission a study to take a look at these units. And I've got a lot of familiarity with them. I've created a number of them myself, disbanded a number of them. First off, it's the idea of the name. You got to be very careful that because so many of the names basically intended to send fear, intrepidation in a sense of vicar units, et cetera. But Los Angeles had the crash units. It was an acronym that was trying to, I still can't tell you what it all meant, but the crash unit gave the impression of crashing through doors. No, so these units are essential, essential because we still in America, believe it or not, we have serious crime. We still have incredible issues among violence, among narcotics dealing gangs, et cetera, among criminal gangs. That's the reality of life in America today with the gun situation we have. So while we try to do our best to train the average police officer to deal with almost everything they have to deal with, that much the same as you need detectors for prolonged investigations, you need much the same as the military has, the ranges of the Navy SEALs, policing to deal with that criminal element, a relatively small element, thank God, in most cities, but still they're there, that the average police officer is not going to have the expertise and capability to take them on. The city of Los Angeles this morning had three officers that were ambushed showing up at the front doorstep, the guy immediately opened fire on them, that you need them, but you need what seems to be missing, certainly in the Memphis cases I'm looking at it, leadership, supervision, throughout that whole scenario in Memphis, you never saw a supervisor. You got 20 cops on the scene from the so-called elite unit, but you never saw a supervisor. So supervision is critical, the recruitment aspect of it, getting the right people in, clearly most of those cops in that unit were not there. The training, the tactics were abysmal, abysmal, and were they trained that way? Well, that's going to be part of the investigation. Now, these units, like the Navy SEALs or the ranges or whatever, they are essential, unfortunately, in America today with the violence levels we have. There was a way to create them that they better supervise. Eric Adams and his new commissioner just tried to do that here in New York over the last year. The previous commissioner disbanded the anti-crime unit. They have reformed it. They went through an exhaustive process of screening the candidates, changed the uniforms, so they are actually in some form of uniform, and it is a heavily supervised unit. They've been in place now just about a year and knock on wood, no significant issues this year. So that's going to be something we're going to hear a lot more about in the weeks and months ahead. We deserve to hear about it, because the American people need to understand why do we have them, and if we're going to have them, how do we control them? What do you think explains the increase in crime? Starting in around 1990, there was a kind of national decline in crime with some hiccups and whatnot, started picking up again during the pandemic, essentially in 2020. What's going on that crime is increasing? First I have to comment about picking up during the pandemic. There's no doubt that the pandemic was in influence. Some of that was the fact that we're living so many criminals out of jail early, in unsupervised ways, New York City's case in point. But keeping my New York City starting in 1990 through 2019, the year before the epidemic, for 29 straight years crime had gone down in New York City. The jail population at Rikers was 22,000 on average every day in 1994. It was down, I think, to about 7 or 8,000. Actually more guards and inmates at Rikers. I'm sorry to interrupt you for a second. Can you explain how does that work? Because most people and a lot of critics of police say that the way that crime was taken down was by throwing more and more people in jail. But basically what you're saying is crime was declining. The number of people in Rikers was declining. I often talk in medical terms, I write about it in my most recent book, The Profession. You go to a doctor, he examines you. You go to cancer. He's going to give you the option of chemo, radiation and more serious case surgery. All of those are going to make you ill for a period of time with hopefully the outcome that he gets the cancer out and you live the best of your life. The crime situation in America in the 90s was so bad. In New York City, I'll speak to specifically the subways and the streets that it was going to require a population that for 30 years had not been policed properly. And I'm not talking minority population, I'm talking population in general. In the 70s and 80s, New York City, the crime went up every year. This is discussed in that Manhattan Institute video. Fred Siegel has a wonderful book, The Future Once Happened Here, looking at New York, Los Angeles and Washington DC, that goes to broken windows. We stopped enforcing quality of life on the streets. It's like a young child, if you don't correct the behavior as they're growing up, they just engage in more misbehavior. So to stop that cycle, it required effectively more arrests. There was no getting around it. It was going to require more arrests. However, in 1996, I gave a speech for the Manhattan Institute, which I predicted, and I was very correct in my prediction, it was a bell curb. We were going to make more arrests, more summons, et cetera, and very specifically going after the violent criminal. But over time, as we controlled behavior, we would change it. And what happened if you look at that tracking through the 90s going forward, like as population goes down from 22,000, state prison population went down by over 40%, and the streets got safer. New York City's safest side, large city America, 65 million tourists. But it was the idea that, and even up to 2018-19, that would still continue. I come back in 2014 with fewer stops, stop question and frisk, fewer arrests, fewer summons. What was happening? Jail population was going down. City was getting safer, fewer shootings, fewer robberies, et cetera. And what changed in 2019? The well-intended efforts of the New York State Legislature to correct all the palings of the previous 30 years. The idea that too many people were going to jail, when in fact the population was going down dramatically. And so, a lot of the opponents about dealing with crime argue that COVID was responsible for the surge in crime we're now experiencing. I'm sorry, you look at New York City, it began with political leadership in Albany. You look around the country, many other cities were having success reducing crime up until that period of time. COVID influenced it, certainly, as many people who should have been kept in jail for a period of time were let out, as well as the court systems collapsed in this country. They totally collapsed for two years. So you had no system to identify, to hold trials, and to effectively control behavior, if you will. Can I just follow up real quickly? Yeah, go ahead, Zach. I just wanted to explain this chart because it bolsters the point that Commissioner Bratton was making there about the incarceration. The dotted line on the top is the incarceration rate in the US. The bottom is New York City during the relevant time period, and you see the divergence there. It actually goes down in New York City. Every year. Yes, so it's not like just locking up all the criminals or something made New York safer and New York during that time period saw greater crime improvements in reducing crime than the rest of the nation. So that's an interesting aspect to note of your approach, is that it did not require mass incarceration. Some of what resulted with that lower crime, et cetera, was increased tourism, increased jobs to support that tourism. It had not been a new hotel opened in New York when Giuliani came in in 1994 for years, and then you started having all these boutique hotels popping up. I think there were like 65 of them in the space for a couple of years. And I remember going with Giuliani in 1994 down to the South Side Seaport, an international meeting of real estate investors, and telling them point blank, you want to start taking a close look at putting your money into New York City because we're going to make it safe, and we did. And it continues to be a relatively safe city compared to some of what's going on in America, Chicago, so double the number of homicides that New York has. But right now, it's trembling at the moment in terms of where it was secure. It's trembling at the moment, but I think we'll get through it. But it's going to... Out of crises comes opportunity. I use that expression all the time. And so let's not waste this crisis, if you will, and find the opportunities that you're talking about, the opportunities for partnership, coordination, collaboration. This stuff is not rocket science. It's the... 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. We need to get more people to center ground, to common ground. 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-odd years, and believe me, what it was back in 1970 is not what it was in 1923. On the right, the issue is this rise of militarism, in terms of the proud boys and this anger at government. I just did a tweet yesterday putting out chief mangers, Tom Manges led a Capitol Police chief attacking Fox News for trying to whitewash the events of January 6th. And the idea that how could anybody watch what was going on on those Capitol steps on that day, and say that was just tourists coming to visit. But here you have a national network TV trying to basically spread that garbage around. No, in terms of far right, far left, they're both creating problems. When I talk about the far lefts, I mentioned I would go back to George Viscone and the progressive DAs, well-intended. But where are 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, they're not working. On the far right, the idea of more cops. More 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 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. That has been borne out by the data that those communities disproportionately then get more interface with the police. 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 years in 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 2,000 murders on the streets, people shot in the streets of 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 Carney 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. There's hope here in the midst of all of this and shows like yours are very important because it allows for the perspective from a lot of sides to come into view for people to explain themselves in the sense that I do a lot of these, why? Because I'm very proud of the time I spent in the profession with the mistakes made, certainly. But I think overall the successes and lessons learned can be repeated and expanded upon. I want to ask you about... And we need to be coming to a close. Yes, absolutely. I think we can do an hour and I think about 20 minutes over that hour now. So let me finish with this. Over at least the past 10 years, maybe a little bit more since Michael Brown was killed in a police scuffler by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, but especially after George Floyd a couple of years ago, there is a narrative now, a large story that is believed by many, many people and it's being furthered by Black Lives Matter in particular, but that, you know, there's about 1,000 people a year who are killed by the police. It goes up and down a little bit. A subset of that are Blacks. They are disproportionately represented for their percentage of the population. But there is an idea that is gaining ground that the policing of Black and Brown people is merely the most obvious indicator that we live in a white supremacist society whose major function is to regulate and restrict the day-to-day life and the possibilities of Black and Brown citizens. How do you counter that in a way that does not simply, you know, turn us to the next position on the culture war? I don't counter a lot of that. Quite clearly the forces of the far right, the Confederacy rises again effectively that in terms of the anti-minority foundation that they're standing on, whether it's against Jews, whether it's against Blacks, that is of great concern. I think we're more divided now than any other time in our history except just before the Civil War. And so a lot of the issues right now are for the fact that Lincoln freed the slaves in the 1860s, but then we had 100 years of Jim Crow in many respects that was probably worse than slavery for many of the people still living in the South. And we tend to forget it's only, what, 50 years ago, 1960s and 70s that we really had the Civil Rights Act, not Luther King. So we've come a long way rapidly, and that's what the far right is scared to death of that they're losing their supremacy you talk about. But that's why the police are so essential to basically trying to keep them in the center to deal with the issues of crime. And unfortunately, part of the legacy of what you're talking about is the rates of violence in the Black community, the horrific death tolls that we're experiencing, those 1,000 deaths that you talk about and the percentage of Blacks that are part of those deaths. A lot of that has to do with the fact of the high violence crime rates in urban cities in particular that the police are drawn into. And, you know, you'd like the enforcement law to be colorblind, but fortunately the reality of it, it is not at this time, sometime maybe in our lifetimes it will be. But there's room for optimism here because there are things that work. It's the idea of really trying to collectively put them together and to try to find once again common ground that Peter Lucas had a wonderful book, Common Ground, talking about when I was a young cop in Boston in the 70s, one of the most racially divided cities in America, standing on the schoolhouse steps being stoned by the fathers of South Boston in terms of as a policeman trying to protect young Black kids desegregating those schools. I didn't think Boston was ever going to come out of it. Boston now has an Asian mayor. It's a city that has turned a dramatic corner in those last 50 years. So what's the expression, hope springs eternal? I'm an optimist. I'm a great believer in that expression of hope springs eternal. What's the opposite? It's dismay. I prefer to live my life as an optimist. I think we can leave things there. But before we let you go, Commissioner Bill Bratton, what's your favorite movie depiction of a righteous police force? There's a number of them. I'm a big fan of the movie Madigan. Can we find a Richard Widmark? A great detective. It was based on a book, the Commissioner that I read in the 50s, which was the inspiration for me wanting to be New York City police commissioner. What I lived as police commissioner in 1994 was depicted in that book from the 1950s and 60s. That's one of my favorites because I think it was a true depiction of the pressures on a police commissioner on a police department. There's any number of them and it was a movie crash that got an Academy Award when I was chief of police in Los Angeles. I thought that was such an accurate depiction of the city of Los Angeles as I found it in 2002 in terms of the racial tensions between blacks and minorities. A wonderful, wonderful movie that was very accurate in depicting it. There's a movie traffic that I think accurately depicts the whole issue among narcotics and the lumber trying to deal with that. No shortage of them. Again, I like my police history and so I tend to like movies about them. We will have you back after drugs are actually legal and we see that crime disappears around the drug traffic as well as the bills. What you're going to then see is all these movies about zombies wandering the streets. They'll be happy and peaceful. Final question. What is the one thing that is partly there are events that overtake everybody? What is the essential thing that police forces and beef cops up to police chiefs and police commissioners can do to win the trust of the population which seems pretty restive right now? Be true to the oath of office. Every police officer takes an oath of office and basically the heart and soul of that is to protect and to serve and to uphold the Constitution of the United States. And we saw a lot of that on January 6th on that day in terms of we would have lost our democracy on that day but for the actions of the Capitol Police and then supported by the Metropolitan Police. I really do believe we came that close to losing our democracy on that day but for the police. I'm very proud of their performance on that day. A lot of problems in policing but in the 800,000 cops in America there's a lot that every day uphold that oath of office that they take when they first join. We're going to leave it there. Bill Bratton, thanks for talking to reason. Zach Weismiller, thank you. Good to be with all of you. All the best. Bye bye now.