 All right, thanks so much folks thrilled to have you here for this next debate is the left soft-on-crime Before we get started with the actual debate We're going to for our sponsor manifold who we want to say seriously. We love manifold I use them myself in other words you can create any like Bitcoin predictions Whatever you want you can create these prediction markets a lot of fun stuff like that So check out manifold in the description box. They're our sponsor for debate con for And if you want to vote in this poll that you see on screen online or here if you're in person If you just scan that QR code you can vote on this prediction market for who's going to be more persuasive in this debate So if you're online click on that manifold link in the description box and predict who you think is going to be more persuasive in this debate The objective criterion as usual for deciding who was most persuasive will be a Pre-debate hand raise in terms of votes and a post-debate one. So if you Even to a small extent lean towards the affirmative that the left is soft-on-crime Would you please slip your hand up right now and then if you would say no I actually don't think that the left is soft on crime You slip your hand up even if it's just a smidge where you're kind of like no, I don't think they are cool So with that we usually start with the affirmative so very quick ten minute opening statement ready to kick it over our speakers Thanks so much Sean the floor is all yours ten minutes five to ten. Okay. I don't need that much time So to me, it's pretty obvious that the left in the United States of America in particular is soft on crime What are the names of the most recent left-wing movements when it relates to criminal justice you have defund the police? Abolish the police which means they want to pull law enforcement off the streets They want to redirect it to social workers, which by their own admission is a softer approach to the law enforcement approach in terms of criminality You also have prison abolitionists. These are people who want to reduce the incarcerated population What is the reason behind that because they believe it's too punitive Against the people who commit crimes in our society in terms of punishment Most left-wingers in the United States of America are against the death penalty now You can agree or disagree with the death penalty all you want But I think we can all understand that the death penalty is the harsher Position in terms of criminality so in a bunch of different regards that the left in the United States of America is clearly and obviously softer on criminal justice related issues in terms of What their ideal prison population or prison setup would be like if you're not even in the abolitionist camp They talk about Norway in Norway. They had a mass shooter. He killed I believe a hundred and something people one of the stories after he got his 20 year sentence for that thing I believe it was 23 years was that he was upset in a Norwegian prison Why not because they were putting him in isolation or anything they would do in the United States of America It's because the number his PlayStation 2 games were very outdated that he was playing while being incarcerated This guy was not your normal shooter. He was a terrorist. He had political motivations And this is the model that we're told to look towards As the model in the for the United States of America for the future where your top sentence would be something like 23 years maximum for our crime. So in all these different ways and all these different Of respects, I think the left is softer on crime and I don't even think that they're in denial about this So as far as this premise goes it's not even really a question unless it's rhetorical You got it. Thank you very much for that opening Sean. We'll kick it over to cipher for his opening as well Thanks for being with us the floor is all yours. Thank you James. So first, let me start off by thanking James or in modern day debates for putting this panel together The conversations and debates hosted by you and your team are important to the public discourse Also, I know how much work that it does take to take this kind of convention on So I'm sure that the audience here and myself are appreciative of that So, but let's go ahead and get started In order to answer the question is the left soft on crime We must first define what is the left and what is mean to be tough on crime First when I say the left here I am talking about the broad spectrum of american politics that encompasses liberals democrats Progressive and those that are further to the left than them The right will be conservatives of all stripes traditionalist republicans and those further to right as well If my discussion with conservatives online is any indication of this I think most would agree with me and I'm sure that most democrats and liberals would as well if not all of them Next what does it mean to be tough on crime for the sake of this argument? I believe we should focus at or look at what is the best ways to punish criminals Reform criminals and bring justice to give victims and prevent crime from happening in the first place Conservatives tend to focus on zero tolerance practices such as the police going after the lowest levels of crime with more of a focus I'm sorry Off lowest levels of crime to get people off the streets tough prison sentences Even for minor offenses with more of a focus on incapacitation rather than reformation Basically throw the book at them and to get them released off the streets within criminal justice circles This approach is most often referred to as broken window policing which seeks to prevent crime by eliminating disorder to To go after the lowest levels of crimes with the hopes of actually Disturbing the highest levels of crimes even murder and rape And in the 90s Rudy Giuliani was its patron saint But we must ask ourselves does this approach actually work at reducing and preventing crime? The answer is it is complicated with much of the data being actually mixed Cities that did not implement this approach saw as much reduction in crime as those that did Many people believe that tough sentencing guidelines deter crime But in actuality it has virtually no impact because criminals for the most part believe they will not get caught and therefore not get punished More police on the streets seem to actually reduce violent crime But at the expense of trust on society and with police and especially with policing focused on zero tolerance policies and broken window policing There uh, sorry Additionally felons find it hard. Oh, sorry. I missed one place. Sorry Then there is the level of punishment not allowing for redemption or rehabilitation in numerous conservative states like florida Once a person is released from prison They are required to make restitution payments failure to make these payments is often a violation of parole and will land the person back in prison Additionally felons find it hard to find employment after being released While those who are locked up for even the most minor of offenses will lose their jobs Why wouldn't recidivism be high under these circumstances? One of the co-offers of broken window policing George kelling said that he didn't expect it to be used in the way that it was and would not have recommended policies such as stop and fricks in an interview with hidden brain in 2016 Going all the way back to 1982 kelling and wilson stated quote How do we ensure that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry? We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question Furthermore the authors use this metaphor not as just an approach to policing itself But to society broadly it wasn't just criminal disorder that was the problem, but social disorder broadly This brings us to the theories of preventing crime and what is effective broadly There are two primary elements criminologists look at with preventing crime first is deterrence Where would be criminals are deterred from committing crime in the first place due to consequences of committing said crimes This can be the belief that they'll be caught ostrich sides from society or face severe legal punishments Secondly is the belief that society is just whether the laws are executed justly the laws themselves are just And whether or not Economic opportunity broadly is shared Make no mistake it is the level of social societal fairness itself Not just whether or not there is equality under the law that this pertains to think about it If laws are not enforced fairly then justice is not administered fairly and social trust in society breaks down What happens when social trust is low people become selfish? Because if everyone is not following the rules then why should any individual If people at the top are scamming for money participating in economic rent-seeking to get ahead exploiting people below them etc Then why not break rules norms and laws? Why would you why would you not do that to get yourself ahead if everyone else is doing it? Why not do some crime? And we have data to back this up periods of low social trust correspond to increases in crime as numerous studies have shown going back to at least 2008 with pre-research And going further back with Robert Putnam's bowling alone When what other sorts of things create the conditions for crime? Are there other social environmental factors that contribute to a crime that we can implement policy to address? What if I told you that in that neighborhood makeup itself contributes to crime? Around 2014 the rand corporation did a study that looked at why the black white crime gap existed When controlling for purely economic stances such as income inequality and wealth inequality They found that crime dropped substantially the gap between crime, but about 40 of it remained But what explains the remaining gap neighborhood makeup the number of single parent households the concentration of poverty access to quality education and mentorship networks and lack of support networks among other things within a neighborhood itself The concentration of poverty within a neighborhood is a policy choice Zoning laws investment into low-income housing being concentrated in per specific parts of town Red and red lining all contributed to this concentration of poverty If we extrapolate from neighborhood makeup to the wider society Can we get any other insights into conditions to make crime attractive? As I mentioned previously social trust is a big component in understanding crime One of the things that increases social trust in Society is economic fairness, which is often measured by the guinea index The guinea index is a measure of wealth inequality within a society Societies that have a low guinea number are often those with the highest levels of trust Lowest levels of general inequality and the lowest levels of crime Lastly another aspect that contributes to the trust in society is trust in institutions themselves A lack of institutional trust breaks social trust broadly Institutional trust is engendered by enforcing laws equally going after crime broadly and by institutions having a positive impact on its members' lives This means going after tax cheats white collar criminals Politicians who break the law people who scam the government and others out of money stock market manipulators crypto scams, etc It also means providing people the means to help themselves through investments into social capital Capital such as education and health care creating a tax code that is equitable and fair enforcing regulations that protect people, etc Now, I don't know about you But when I think about the side of the political spectrum that is focused on notions of fairness Justice equality, etc. I'm not still not think about the right. I think about the left The left has tested and proven policy positions to tax each of these aspects that increases social trust and decreases social disorder and therefore Increases or decreases crime It is for these reasons that I not only believe that the left is not soft on crime But is in fact tough on crime with that I conclude my opening statement. Thank you very much for that opening statement We're going to kick it into open discussion Excited that both of you guys are so well read the floor. It's all yours. Okay, so It's interesting that you bring up redlining as one of the things that is a contributing factor to crime And I do agree that social trust is important Which is one of the reasons why broken windows policing was instituted to maintain order so that things looked orderly So people can feel that and have more trust in society Like a lot of broken windows gets kind of straw manned into enforcing all the small petty laws But what it's actually about is identifying specific crimes that have downstream effects on other other crimes in the In specifically new york city where this was kind of pioneered So william bratton was the head of the mta police and he started enforcing fair evasion And the theory behind enforcing fair evasion wasn't to just go after people who couldn't afford to pay the subway It was this idea that you know there's a lot of thefts and other problems in the city of new york like in the interior of the city And possibly the people who are committing these crimes are also not paying for the subway Which kind of makes sense if you're willing to stick somebody up for their wallet You're probably not going to be too worried about jumping the turnstile So when this was enforced they started arresting people they would run them for warrants And because it was a paperwork nightmare They actually brought the mechanisms to run their warrants into the subway and they found that one out of and this is in the 80s I believe 1984 is when this was first instituted They found that one out of every seven people that they stopped had a felony warrant So this was not only orderly because it ended up Getting people to pay for the subway and made that the norm But it also produced results in getting people off the street now back to the redlining point of view It's an interesting theory that redlining because it is an unfair practice Contributed to the increase in crime when redlining came into effect in 1934 and ended in 1968 Throughout that period of time up until about 1962 1963 crime was actually dropping in the united states of america However post the repeal period from the six from 68 onward We saw one of the greatest spikes in crime in american history actually the greatest spike and it was prolonged And it was a disaster And it's what ultimately ended up leading to the 94 crime bill that joe biden gets a lot of heat for Well post that crime bill we saw a great drop in crime So I actually think the data even some of the examples that you brought up specifically aligned with my premises instead of yours because Your correlations with this policy affected people in this way don't line up like why would a policy be more Detrimental in terms of criminality after it's repealed than when it was instituted and if tough on crime didn't work Why did we see it's and you could say it's a correlation But why did we see the most significant prolonged drop in crime in american history Post the passing of all these different pieces of tough on crime legislation So there's a number of ways that we can look at this So with redlining specifically the reason why I bring up redlining as concentrating poverty is because if you Overlay a poverty map with a redline map you have a lot of overlap with how much poverty is concentrated in the area And the areas that were once redlined people that had the resources to leave those neighborhoods once redlining practices were ended We're able to leave those neighborhoods Concentrating more poverty within them. Not only that I brought up the Concentration of low-income housing low-income housing during the 30s all the way to about 1970 ish or so around there. Don't quote me on the years was Concentrated in projects so giant apartment buildings where people of low means or no means were kind of sequestered more or less This kind of creates a ghettoization effect If you go back to 1980s when other psychologists and sociologists were looking at this There's a great hbo document or tv drama documentary series called show me a hero Where I don't remember the sociologist's name Specifically, but he said we have to break up these highly concentrated areas of poverty And get these people integrated into more affluent communities because then they'll be running into people that are more wealthy Have better social skills, etc And those people will be brought up in order to uh to prevent crime from happening Because they would just see better examples. They would have more they'd have a better support network, etc The the show didn't go as well as we would hope it went because you know, of course the 80s Everybody's like don't bring the poverty here. Don't bring the crime. We don't like those people because it was the 80s, right? And not only that one of the other things that with the the turnstile jumping I just did the the math here and if it was one in seven That's only 14 of people that were stopped for fair jumping So the majority of people that were stopped for fair jumping didn't have any sort of criminal background warrant of arrest for them And i'm taking you at your word at those numbers. So that means that a number of what 78 70 to 76 percent or so people were being accosted if i'm getting accosted for Minor affractions if i'm getting told by because some some Karen is like calling the cops because i'm loitering and i'm a teenager What is that going to do to my my view of society broadly? I can't just live So what will that do to my mentality? Well, I mean first of all you could pay for the subway and one out of seven with what money One out of seven got popped for felony warrant That doesn't mean that only one out of seven were criminals and that's like so felony warrants being serious Yeah, that they already had a warrant against them. So they were already looking for this individual But you also had rates of theft go down not only in the subways But when this was brought in out because they actually made bratton the police chief or the the commissioner I think it's what it's called and you saw a drop in new york city's crime That is historic and you did bring up that there were drops in crime nationwide But it's a well-known phenomenon that new york city in particular had this drop occur about four years before now In freakonomics, this is so well known They actually have a segment in there on whether or not this could be due to the legalization of abortion And the idea behind that theory, which I don't subscribe to is that all these unwanted children Weren't born since new york had elective abortions before other places. They saw the crime drop before those other places and Point being is not the merits of that particular theory The point being is that we know it happened in new york city prior to the nationwide drop or at least the declines started prior to that and that is possibly in my opinion and might sound crazy Due to the fact that they started enforcing some of these policies Some of this data driven policing like the commsat program which maps crime Geographically and targets officers to those places And that led to the drop because they were pioneers in that because the nypd became the most sophisticated Data driven police department in the entire world We can also look at la la police department throughout 1980 to 1996 was pretty much dismantled not dismantled But in disarray we'll say corruption crime beatings etc They experienced a similar decrease in crime as new york did in the 80s a few years later Not in the 80s and the reason why we have to compare similar Place cities to similarly place cities is because the demographics poverty etc all kind of correlate together And that's how you get a natural experiment in the real world Well, that's actually a great point that you brought up about poverty because I think you actually have your correlation a little bit backwards because if there are areas with high rates of criminality And it could be even something as simple as high rates of theft The the reason for the lack of investment in those areas is due to that criminality It's not the other way around like think about it like this If you're going to open up a business if you're going to put your own money to open up a storefront And you have two options two different neighborhoods similar price However, the rate of theft in one neighborhood is five times higher than the rate of theft in the other neighborhood And you're trying to do a big box store big box stores tend to have profit margins from one to three percent You're obviously going to choose the neighborhood with lower rates of theft Because that's going to eat up your profits in those locations And by the way, this is why a lot of people call certain poor neighborhoods with high crime Food deserts because grocery stores operate on the exact margins that i'm talking about and they can't afford to be there So what ends up happening is that the crime is actually driving the poverty Not the other way around and one of the greatest anti poverty programs that since this is something that you could care about Or that you care about it would be to reduce criminality in those specific areas because again Just think about your own money how you would spend it how you would invest it It's clearly and obviously risky or there on top of that If you open up a business in one of these areas with higher rates of theft or violent crime You have to carry higher insurance premiums It's the same as like if you were driving a car and you have an accident history or like an area You know certain states have actually higher insurance premiums than other states due to higher rates of accidents So all of these things play a role in keeping those areas in poverty And the best way to address that would be to go after the criminals the small percentage of people In those areas in order to make the neighborhood better overall because the people being victimized, by the way Are in those very neighborhoods So not only do I think the left is do I believe that the left is softer on crime? But I actually believe their misplaced compassion for these areas ends up hurting the very same poor people that they're trying to help So I don't want to make this a debate about capitalism or economics or anything like that I want to focus primarily on crime But to shan's point since he brought up the the existence of food deserts We have to actually look at where the The grocery stores in question are placed and how that that economics of the distance between population centers Actually plays into that distribution hubs, etc. We can't just look at it to be just crime With that said, I don't disagree that there is a vicious cycle here Poverty creates crime crime creates more poverty, etc. And it's a vicious cycle So we have to tackle both Mike the whole premise of this debate is whether or not there is a better way Or if there is a good way to tackle crime itself and whether or not it is tough on crime policies Or other policies that the left would take on it and that's why I have the positions I have I believe that the positions of tackling poverty tackling mental health tackling economic fairness enforcing rules against people that are above us that are breaking those rules also And impact all of these things as well. Yeah, I don't think anybody disagrees that if you're, you know, a white collar criminal That you shouldn't be prosecuted if you steal a bunch of money from your clients or whatever you misappropriated into your own personal account Or you invested in some project that you believe in without disclosing them Especially if you have like a fiduciary responsibility of them that you should be prosecuted Like if you break the law even at the white collar level you should be prosecuted However, what I would disagree with is this idea that we have like more rapes in like south central chicago Because some executive is misappropriating funds that there's more murders And I mean you can't do it as a one-to-one comparison like this is all it's like a cheese It's like a it's like swiss cheese, right? Everything talks those steps on top of each other, but until you get a whole whole block Yeah, so like in in the district of columbia What they find when they arrest somebody finally for murder is that they have 11 other previous arrests under their belt Before they get to the point where they commit that homicide So that's a weird correlation. So we can we can well, it's because people don't typically start at murder Well, no, I mean I'm saying that what how are we going to know which 11 of those crimes would lead participation? My point is is that dc also instituted a bunch of criminal justice reforms that I think have backfired And I think it's way more efficient to hold somebody. I don't know. Maybe call me crazy after they committed crime number seven In jail prosecute that seriously sure, but that's not necessarily tough on crime Stance, that's just common sense if we're having a tough on crime stance. Maybe we can say that You know, this is generally in the 90s where you had a three strike rule But the third strike could be something as simple as taking a water bottle from the refrigerator and walking out the store I don't think anybody in this room would think that a person that did that as their third crime should serve 20 years in prison Well, typically a third strike rule would be on a felony conviction for the third strike. That's how that's how it is now But not in the 90s That's when that wasn't and that wasn't and that wasn't just and when we're talking about tough on crime policies They said any crime any kind of crime that you would do I mean in those in this situation should result in the third I could be I could be wrong. I'm pretty sure about this. I could be wrong But I'm pretty sure california is three different felonies and even then it wasn't even it's life But life is defined as 25 to life in terms of uh that particular law But I think you would agree that if a person is doing something as heavy as taking a water bottle They shouldn't serve 20 years. Okay. So so is that now being soft on crime for not to having 20 years against that person? No for a misdemeanor for misdemeanor theft. I don't think so then why would you say that the left is soft on crime? But this is the position the left generally would take I mean I think the left's position in general is that uh three strike laws for felonies aren't a good thing not If your third strike is like stealing a water bottle But my point that I was trying to get to it was I think it's more not only smarter and also tougher But it's more efficient for you to go after somebody who has a prolonged criminal history Rather than say, you know what have we prosecuted enough people on wall street for their white collar crimes? Which might lead to some kind of fairness idea in society, which might lead to that's not at all What I'm like what I'm suggesting I'm not saying that you have to go after every every single white collar criminal before you can even tackle low level crime I'm saying that if the perception of society is that the white collar criminal is not getting prosecuted at all And it's taking the most advantage of society then why would a low-level criminal? Why would a low-level person feel that this that society is fair just again if the people at the top are screwing you Why shouldn't anybody else do it morality is something that we can all debate and we all probably in here agree that we should be moral people But that's not all people operate people are going to operate kind of on a reasonable stance of like what is good for me That's what capitalism is kind of about to a degree correct So then we have to look at how that impacts everybody's psychology. So social then going down the line Yeah, again, like this is why I think the left is in general softer on crime because You're talking about like the perceptions of fairness that that the criminal has while they're committing this crime And I'm talking about a basic simple thing like if you have a long history We agree with you in jail for the purpose of incapacitating you so you don't repeat offend And with the bail reform movement that's going on right now There are actually issues with some people on the left broadly speaking not being Not being I guess hard enough when it comes to it But broadly speaking the left is not doing that broadly speaking. You have prosecutors district attorneys, etc They're going after homicides very very harshly for It's in in austin for example in travis county the da the Prosecutor in travis county has gotten a somewhat somewhere between 80 and 90 Conviction rate for murders that he's probably brought up the prosecution going after the gun crime going after the hardest crimes Of our society. Yeah, I mean conviction rate is is one way to measure it But the thing is prosecutors if you don't know they're not going to charge a case unless they're really certain that they can get a conviction So sure that's not based on the arrests that are made and what are brought to them And what we see by a lot of these left-wing prosecutors is the dropping of charges at higher rates than the previous prosecutors So bragg alvin bragg out of new york city actually specifically Manhattan has downgraded about 20 more charges than his previous person From felonies to misdemeanors again He's softening the penalties for this and has that had a negative and well, I guess the what has increased crime In new york city, we have seen a dramatic crime increase Have we seen a dramatic crime increase in new york city specifically because of these policies? Can we prove that yet or is or is it because of other situations that we've had in society that's happened over the last 40 There's actually multiple factors in new york city that combine and again da bragg is only the district attorney for Manhattan So like one of the things that i would examine when i'm looking at him Is when his office puts out that essentially they're not going to pursue any jail They're not going to try to jail anyone or hold them in prison in his opening memo Unless they commit a homicide or an attempted homicide You would look at the previous crimes that would get you prosecuted before like gun crimes And realize that even though shootings are up overall in new york city. They were actually up significantly more in Manhattan But in new york state they passed a bail reform law which honestly is outside of bragg's control And this law essentially lists a bunch of crimes that you cannot be held for At all like the judge has no judgment. It's not even about the money in that situation They can't even hold you as if you're a risk because in new york state in our infinite wisdom We decided that judges can't have judgment because you know, that would make too much sense But that's not the only thing that combines with a previous policy called raise the age Which made it which made it harder again And this is a softer on crime position to prosecute youthful offenders So you have youthful offenders that are already getting reduced charges Even if they repeat offend if they commit crimes in the categories listed under bail reform They can never be held under bail and then you have a district attorney That's refusing to prosecute a bunch of crimes that go even beyond bail reform And this leads to these kids getting and it's kids as in young people young men particularly Getting out over and over again until they commit this most serious crime Which ultimately ends up being a murder and the result of that in 2020 or 2020 from 2019 The year-over-year increase was a 47 percent increase in homicide in the city of new york Which is the greatest increase year-to-year in the history of the city It set us back in terms of the raw number of people that were murdered back to 2010 levels It had been dropping since 1995 consistently and all of a sudden we get a jump that shakes us back I'm sorry 10 years. My math is not very good right there So what if I told everybody in the audience here that non-prosecution of minor offenses actually led to a 30 percent reduction of serious crime That we it's instead of prosecuting these criminals for these minor infractions that we put them in some sort of diversion program Or some other rehabilitative program. Would you say that that is tough on crime or soft on crime? I would consider it to be tough on crime because you're actually going after the causes of crime itself And actually doing things that actually reduce crime and we actually see that there is a study by Amanda y agon jennifer l dorky and anna harvey august in 20 august Or i'm sorry anna harvey in august of 2022 called mr. Meaner prosecution from the journal of uh criminal justice quarterly There's also the idea that uh the bail reform that was done specifically in new york actually hasn't done anything to increase crime Instead using multivariate analysis and looking at other factors such as covet itself and the trust that covet Broke within society broadly and this is this is worldwide covet broke this worldwide, but it's been particularly An issue in the united states dropping 18 points from 2019 to 2021 It was we didn't have good trust in society in america to begin with it was only around 25 percent or so if people trusted The american public at large, but now it's down to 18 16 rather it's down to 16 percent So if you're going to have this Precipitous drop in trust in society, then you're going to have all these other negative consequences and when you Count for these other factors. It's kind of a wash. You don't see an increase in mr Non-prosecutionatory of mr. Meaner offenses doesn't actually increase crime So what period of time would with this non prosecution study cover because i haven't heard it I don't have it on my laptop right now, but i believe that it particularly looked from 2018 to 2022 2021 I i mean i haven't heard about it. I just i'm just curious because it was it to be fair It's been a recently published study. So i'm that's fair But um, so i mean i've heard a lot that covet 19 is the like reason behind this I feel like we're like off the topic versus on soft versus hard on crime, but that's fine And uh, it's interesting and i don't think that covet 19 had no impact Obviously that impacted everything like all of our lives were changed Even if you lived in one of these red states that never locked down or only locked down for like eight days People lost members of their family all that total total disaster However, like we have month-to-month crime statistics and one of the interesting things about these stats Is that covet 19 coincided with a dramatic crime drop In fact the crime drops until until late may of 2020 and in late may of 2020 That's when george floyd that video came out. He died and then all of a sudden We saw people trying to pull back the funding for the police We had the black lives matter riots and the crime increase seems to correlate with that change in society Not necessarily the lockdown of covet 19 now I'm not saying that covet had no impact again It impacted everything but if the if crime was dropping pre george floyd It starts spiking after the changes in policy and after the event of george floyd Then I would think of more direct thing that we should examine are those particular changes Now what are they we had cuts in police funding, but more importantly than the actual did we actually have cuts in police This is did we actually have cuts in police funding? Or did we have a budget going into the next year with a cut in it and then that budget got restored after this Supposed well not supposed but this is a this is a good point because more importantly than the dollar amount When they announced the cuts of these budgets and by the way, some of them completely backfired like los angeles I forgot the amount that they think seattle as well and yeah, there's been several other Well, los angeles. I'm mentioning for a particular reason So los angeles did pass a budget that cut police funding and then a bunch of officers left and by the way They still continue to leave. They're about 10 short of their pre COVID or pre george floyd levels. However, you want to look at it? Well, they ended up they ended up spending more money in the year that they cut their police funding The reason they did that is because they had a bunch of officers leave and they had to pay out overtime So the intent was to cut the budget the impact of them cutting the budget and the policy changes Was that they lost officers to early retirement? So now as a result of this criminal justice reform, which was called defund the police You ended up in a situation where not only did you not actually defund the police because you had to pay it out in Time and a half overtime But you're paying more tired officers that are sticking around on the force More to be less effective because we all know I mean you're a left-leaning guy Overworking your employees does not produce positive results So we actually got worse policing due to this soft on crime policy But it did happen and we did lose officers and a lot of the budget increase after the fact Does not make these people come out of retirement. They don't materialize. So there was an impact Whether it's measured in dollar amount or not So what I would say is that we actually have to go back further in order to understand this problem police officer policing uh departments generally speaking across the united states knew that they were going to come into a a Reduction in the police force for retirements starting around 2018 and they did everything that they could between 2012 And 20 and 2018 to hire more police officers They weren't able to why is that I would say it's a breakdown of trust in society and in policing It seems to me I don't know about the rest of you all but it seems to me that gen z is not about like being police officers Not about joining the military They are a bit maybe a bit more left-leaning or maybe they're just like not worth the risk I don't want to take it But they've police departments knew that this was coming and they weren't able to adjust for it Then we can go back to the ferguson effect So ferguson effect is kind of one of those things that a lot of conservatives like to tout about why there is this this been this Reduction in proactive policing. They pulled back because they don't want to get the the scrutiny of everybody on them Isn't that just the police breaking more trust within society by saying if you don't let us do what we feel is necessary to police crime We're not going to do it So then you fast forward to george floyd crime started to go down Maybe a little bit after the ferguson effect went up it regressed to the mean Which is another reason why maybe the tough on crime policies in the 80s and 90s didn't actually have any impact Because you had a giant increase in the 70s and 80s and then you had it regressed to the mean to so you had that giant participants Fall off, but then yeah, so the ferguson effect broke trust george floyd happened broke trust Yeah, I mean Again, like well the ferguson effect is is more about After you get this public scrutiny and you get these consent decrees that actually are designed specifically to handcuff police You do see an uptick in crime, which by the way, but is that necessarily a bad thing? I mean an uptick in crime Is no no i'm saying handcuffing police because of the actions that they did ferguson specifically had a 20 percent of its city budget come from the enforcement of traffic fines and other kind of Low-level offenses court fees etc in this society We expect people to pay for the crimes that they commit both in in terms of being incapacitated for prison and then after the fact of paying back restitution These are the people that are the poorest in society. They don't have the ability to do that Maybe the incentive structure is just out of whack and that is what's causing this giant decrease in trust More broadly speaking that is leading to these increases in crime For example one of these ways that we might be able to tackle this solution Is rather than having a flat fee for speeding you have it be based on percentage of income or something like that I know that's going to make conservatives go. Oh, that's not fair And a lot of liberals too are probably like that's not going to be fair But it would change the incentive structure to go after not the poorest of people But anybody that's speeding in general and then when you have that you have the uh, you have people The laws being more enforced more equitably and not only that you don't have a person That's sitting in jail because they can't pay 200 bucks because they only make a thousand dollars a week They have 20 bucks. It's still going to hurt them. It's still part of their income It's still going to suck, but it's not going to be a life changing amount of suck Yeah, I mean you would run into equal protection problems under the law and I'm not saying that that's not a thing This this is where we can argue about that But I am saying that this is one possible solution to that they could actually increase I would say that the lack of trust in terms of Ferguson was probably down to the lies about the michael brown incident Like that that probably uh, why were those lies believed? Why were the because the story the fake story got out first and it was being promoted by the media It was an election year. There's a number of reasons why the michael brown story Do you think that it was because that the story it was because the story got only got out first? Or do you believe that people are just naturally not naturally But are more distrustful of police because of all those things that I mentioned with the Ferguson police department Actually just treating its population as an ATM machine in order to get the things and why wouldn't they believe the police police have that We can go we can go all the way back to like 1980s with the thin blue line and that whole documentary In chicago police departments literally ran torture cells. Were anybody held to account during this? No, were the police where the police departments had a cultural enema from the top down to get rid of this rot No, so why would the same institution that has done Participated in all these things be believed I would argue that is actually reasonable for the people that actually experience the stuff to not believe the police officers When they say these things even if it's a completely different people These are we're talking a two generation a generation and a half of difference But the institution is the same it hasn't been reformed enough And it has the same instructive incentive structure who make it to the top of the police structures The people that were there and stayed in from those times So if you're a person that was a beat cop in the 1980s Fast forward to 2000 you've stayed in there. You're you're a sergeant at least You might be a lieutenant Maybe you're the commissioner because you've been there so long and you're a good cop But you didn't tell your friends to not do these things You didn't stand up to the the amount of civil rights that are being violated to people And so for those reasons you have this lack of trust I mean, I would say from the residents of Ferguson the overwhelming majority of them in their testimony Told the truth that actually saw what happened about the michael brown case So they're these people who are being impacted by these ticketing practices The majority of them are told their side of the story, but I didn't say they're going to lie about the police I'm saying they're going to be more the people surrounding the area that we're not we took michael michael brown's friend told the story About his version of events And then the fact that his body was left there for four hours and that was broadcast on the national news And I mean you're you're like distracting from the point I'm saying that the lack of trust in policing from the Ferguson event has to do with the fact that I probably even today A majority of people think that officer darin wilson murdered michael brown when that's not the case You think that that has I mean you have three autopsies that confirm that michael brown went for the gun Was murdered he was charging him he never put his hands up, but people still chant hands up don't shoot In london they chant hands up don't shoot in honor of michael brown when the london police don't even have cops michael brown Never had his hands up. He never surrendered. So this lie not only Made it pervade across america, but it went around the world Do you think the hands up don't shoot is because basically because of michael brown? Yes because of okay I think the michael brown chant of hands up We just disagree from the michael brown case it comes from the michael brown case But the reason people believe that and still and still go with it even despite the fact that they know There's a plenty of people that know that michael brown was an aggressor here that still say hands up don't shoot Why because other instances of policing killing people killing civilians unarmed civilians Even though it discounting people that might have been engaged in violent chuffles with the police because we can all say You know, I have a gun on my hip. I'm rolling around with you I might pull it to shoot you because I don't know Michael brown was on armed because he was in the act of trying to arm himself when he went for the gun So i'm giving you in that moment He was but I already gave you that my point is is that there are instances that break down trust in society to break down Trust with police officers So the reason why people to me believe those hands up don't shoot isn't just because the lie got out first And that's probably part of it But it's also because of all these other instances that I mentioned Well, what other instances you just said there are other instances There's about there's about 250 or so people killed by the police every year that are unarmed and not necessarily involved in altercations of those Roughly unarmed. There's like a thousand total. Are you sure about that? There's there's I am 90 percent sure Well, well for argument's sake. Let's bring it down to 100. It the point is that it is it is not it is a Good percentage of the people who are killed by police are unarmed and are and are not a Necessarily a lethal threat to the police officer or those around them I mean, I just want to point out that one out of seven people popping for warrants. You said 14 percent That's really low But for some reason like the nine unarmed black people that get killed a year on average By the way unarmed includes like michael brown actively trying to arm yourself Or if you're in a car that's if you're in a car driving at the police Yeah, it does go look at the breakdowns of any given year of these cases. No, no. I'm saying I don't think it included I don't think it. Yeah, he's listed as somebody's unarmed because he didn't get ahold of the gun Uh, you also have um people driving their vehicle at the police So when you actually look at these specific cases of like the actual unarmed people Even if it's like nine or like 11 or 13 in a really bad year when you break them down It's usually like three that are even debatable on whether or not it was justified Which I don't think is a lot. I don't think that's the the reason why people are distrustful of the police I do think people on the left who have convinced people and by the way, you can look at polling on this The more left-leaning you are the more likely you are to believe that 10 000 unarmed black people specifically are killed by the police We can talk about the knowledge of the us about every number of different things Or famously if you're if you're that tiktok influencer jeremy and you're debating my buddy nuance bro on a twitter space You're likely to believe that a third of the black population gets killed each and every year While being unarmed by the police. He's a page. He's probably a page shill But we can talk about how many I mean, but that's like but that's but that's an influencer He's platformed and he is helping breaking down trust in society as well Yes, but I think it's the lies about law enforcement that contribute more By people who are softer on criminals rather than rather than the actions of law enforcement that are leading to this distrust I think is what the way that police act in their day to day There's things that we need to do that. I'm sure most conservatives would agree with one thing is called quotas Should there be quotas of how much you go out and like give someone a speeding ticket or you know Stop lawyering or something. No, I don't think anybody agrees with that. That's stupid That is that is going out and looking for minor infractions in order to accost people that are just trying to live their lives Yeah, they might have j walked or they might have sped like who who hasn't who hasn't done who hasn't sped in here Right, I've gotten three speeding tickets because I because there's a bunch of speed traps in texas Everybody in texas knows this right you'll be going 55 miles an hour and bam it hits 35 Cop right there should I've gotten a speeding ticket probably But should they go out and like actively look for all this stuff when there does those traps in order to get this Money to fund their their departments. No that should not be done And all these things contribute to the lack of distrust and we haven't even gotten into like many of the economic I actually don't disagree with you on these ticky tack violations and all that In fact, one of the things I said in the opening about broken windows is that it's kind of been bastardized to be Enforced every small crime. That's why I brought up the specific crime of fair invasion Because what you're trying to go after are downstream effects of these petty crimes like crimes of disorder And by the way, like as somebody on the left should be in favor of broken windows policing because it's basic premise Is environment is environment impacts behavior So if if you're what they're trying to do is clean up the environment that people live in make it seem like people care about it Make it seem like it's orderly so that people act orderly like, you know There's a bunch of studies about brutalist architecture on how people who live in these buildings are more likely to kill themselves The boston city capital was built with brutalist architecture And there's like drug dealing happening right in front of it and they couldn't figure out a way to get rid of it And it's because people see the building it looks like crap and they think nobody cares It looks kind of abandoned even though it's the city capital So crimes seem to concentrate there in a way that it didn't before so i'm fine with like not enforcing every You know every registration Expiration or whatever every single time I think the cops should give people warnings because if you get a warning You tend to feel better about that interaction But that doesn't mean that the that doesn't mean that the design of broken windows is flawed just because people copy it incorrectly So when when not and I said this at the in my opening broken windows policing As stated by the two people that wrote the similar The ailantic article that did it and then the studies afterwards did not want it to be used in the practice that it is But it is used in this practice and this is what people generally speaking consider to be tough on crimes policies So if we actually want to implement broken windows policing as it was originally intended Then we should do things like investing in communities investing in public and architecture that Disrupts crime putting public spaces looking at things looking at ways that Criminality is impacted by the environment. There's been a study recently I can't quote it because I didn't have it in my notes But I got triggered by it to remember it by what he's been bringing up is that they found that in new york There was a concentration of youth around bodegas And bodegas would attract youth there because you can get your rolling papers. You can get snacks You can hang out with your buddy. It's kind of a cool place to hang out if you're a teenager It doesn't have much else to do right bodegas by law are required to close. I believe at 8 p.m. Eastern standard time What is open 24 7 gas stations gas stations are spread all over the place If you're a if you're a criminal that has a turf war with somebody you go to their you go to their uh Their gas station that might cause an altercation So one of the things that we could possibly do is remove that unjust law that requires bodegas to close early earlier than gas stations increase more fairness in society increase more uh Better business practices allow the free market to actually dictate where these things go And then maybe that will actually help reduce crime This isn't to say that I think that those people should not be charged with the crimes for getting into a fight shooting at each other Killing innocent people or each other they should absolutely be hammered by this But that is not to say that the approaches that left-leaning people take such as myself with these things are actually soft on crime It's being smart on crime. Yeah I have no idea what you just said like so we should make we should make bodega stay open later So no, like people stop shooting each other at gas stations by law and start shooting each other at the bodega No by law Bodegas are required to close at a certain time If you just eliminated that law then the people would still hang out at those bodegas If there is a turf kind of situation where a lot of us will agree in this room that a lot of crime is getting related Is related to things such as honor culture and beefs and stuff like that And then you don't have to go into other people's Turfs in order to just do what it is and that's just hang out Then maybe that will have a positive impact on crime meaning reducing crime Again, this isn't to say that we should not hammer people that are engaging it But we can do things that actually Stopped crime from happening in the first place and these might be one of those solutions to it. I'm not saying it's a perfect solution I'm not saying this is what we should I don't understand how it's a solution at all like so Okay, so because the bodega is closed because the bodega is closed the people at the gas station So we open the bodega. Okay, so this should be shoot at let me let me let me explain this real quick Should be fairly easy to understand so bodega one in area a Is owned by area a gang bodega two Owned bodega bodega two is an area b and it's owned owned quote-unquote By gang a or gang b gang a and gang b have beef They they always they always fight for whatever reason right you have a gas station between those two that is open 24 7 That's the only gas station in the area that those both of those groups can go to So when the bodega is closed and they don't have a place to hang out and get the things that they need Rolling papers, etc. They both go to that that increases the likelihood of them meeting and that increases the likelihood of beef happening And crime and other things if you got rid of the law which i'm sure most conservatives would agree with Is probably unfair to the bodegas and let them allow them to be open 24 7 Then you have less instances of gang a and gang b actually meeting up and causing that crime to happen in the first place Again, this isn't a perfect solution It's not the only thing that we should do But these are the kind of things that we should think about when we're actually talking about being tough on crime being Smart on crime in order to reduce and eliminate it for happening in the first place I mean look i'm in favor of bodega's opening later I mean it's really difficult for me to get the things that I need because they close early I don't I don't know. Maybe I I'm just not I'm not smart enough to understand this But I do think maybe here's a crazier theory Let's say like you have gang a and by the way, they don't own the bodegas. Yeah, that's why I said owning quotes I didn't see the quotes, but like let's say gang a right is in like cell block a And gang b is in like cell block b. Are you are you going to never like interact at the at the gas Are you going to arrest them before they do crime? I mean usually they're like No, I know but are you going to arrest them before they participate in crime? Well, no, we don't we don't have Crime it didn't work out. I saw that tom cruise movie So if you're not going to arrest them before they commit crime then you can only arrest them when they commit crime When is the most likelihood? When is the most likely in scenario where they're going to commit crime when they're just let when they're just kind of I don't know peddling drugs on the street or when they To do crime that people most people actually care about I don't think most people care about selling a loose cigarette Selling a joint. I don't think most people care about that. So not that we shouldn't enforce it I'm just saying I don't think most people care when we're talking about serious crime It's going to be when they actually interact because that's when they're going to get violent. That's when they're going to settle beef That's when they're going to do the honor culture thing. Oh you you over there You've said some shit on fucking tick tock and now I got a now I got to represent and and go over there and be like hey You know you fucking said some shit about me. So I'm going to kick your ass That is more than they're more like but wouldn't like the gangs have their own like gas stations in their territory Like I again, this was a this was a this was a loosely analogy in order to demonstrate the point Okay, all right. So we get in this town where there's two gangs two bodegas in one gap. It's just to explain how this situation works I'm sure everybody understands now. All right I don't but that's fine I know uh, so shawn one of the questions that I have for you is uh, do you believe that poverty has any Do you believe poverty itself is a contributed contributor to crime? It can be for sure. Okay. So if I were to say that, uh, within sorry I'm trying to pronounce. Yeah, uh, disbandy. So, uh, my my non see disbandy did a study where she looked at Excuse me where she looked at ssi payments prior to the 1996 welfare reform and after the 1996 welfare reform and prior to the 1996 welfare reform people got grandfathered in so they didn't have to do this thing but prior to that No, when they had no child that had ssi supplemental secure social security supplemental, uh, insurance Basically for people with disabilities getting money. They didn't have to go and reapply for it in adulthood people after 1996 did People after 1996 applied for it. Many were denied The amount of increase in crime by that sector of the people was about 33 percent There was 33 percent more likely to engage in crime generally violent violent crime Whatever it was they were more likely to to seek out crime and do it in order to supplement their income Would you say that it is a soft on crime policy to eliminate that re-sign up for uh for for ssi insurance? I mean, yeah, I mean you could do that if you want like but is that a soft on crime policy? I don't think so. So would you say that's being smart on crime? That's like tackling crime in a way that Who who is getting this payment? Like what what what are any number of different elements from like uh extreme autism or I don't think the autists are like committing. No, but i'm saying it can be any number of different things Is this like for like mentally ill mentally ill? I think that's like distinction because we are also simultaneously Like closed down a lot of like mental institutions And like places where these people could go and I would be in favor of not only Opening those but also getting rid of this change in standard because the old standard if you were mentally unwell For you to be incarcerated against your will which would be a tough on crime policy Was that if you could not take care of yourself, you were removed from society And by the way, the asylum set abuses that are real and legitimate that people should talk about But now the new standard is only after you're a danger to yourself or others So now we're in this circumstance And i'm sure you've heard this like very manipulated stat where somebody who's mentally ill is more likely to be victimized By a criminal than be the perpetrator. That's true in general But if you're on the streets and you're homeless, you're actually 35 times more likely to be the perpetrator not the victim So I would pull these people off the streets I don't know if these are the same people that are getting social security disability Or if the reason why they need social security disability as an income supplement Is because this alternative which is basically incarceration for being very mentally unwell has been removed So then why why would you say that the left broadly speaking is soft on crime when the left Such as myself understands that all these things contribute to crime and create the environment Would you be in favor of changing the standard to if you can't take care of yourself and you're mentally unwell You should be institutionalized against your will Institutionalized maybe not but there's other ways that we can go soft on There's other ways that we can go about this we can create holistic centers for people to get the help that they need Homeless people we have this study that was done in utah and it was a very successful program where they got people that were homeless Sorry, they got people homeless homes first before requiring them to do anything and it had a massive Positive impact on their lives in the community because they were off the streets They were getting the help that they need and they had wraparound services At these homes at these apartment buildings They were giving them what they needed and they didn't require them to actually Participate in this they were they were there it was offered people once they get some sort of stability or like Oh, maybe my life doesn't have to suck forever So I can go get the help that I need because it's actually being offered If we did this if we extrapolate that to prisons a lot of people in prison are mentally unwell There are a large uh the undiagnosed mental Population within prisons. We're talking at everything from bipolar schizophrenia the whole gamut of stuff drug abuse everything They get put in prison. What do we do when uh reform when criminal reform happened? We got rid of some of these Uh these long-term services that criminals and others that were mentally unwell Addicted to drugs. We got rid of them. We stay we're not going to give you these things We're not going to give you we're not going to give you training We're gonna require you to show up to parole every week and and demonstrate you have a job and pay us money All these things are considered tough on crime, but they don't actually do anything to reform the criminal They just basically create this entire cycle of recidivism that happens again and again and again So if I am going to say that we're not soft on crime because we want these things Would you agree that that's that is partly at least partly the craze Well, so about your housing first thing so Listen, I'm gonna break the bad news to you Like if you take those studies beyond five years like the boston study The data tends to fall apart around them. Does that happen after the the policies are cut because they are so successful And just so you don't think they don't I just I just want to I just want to talk about why Because like a lot of these people do have a bunch of different Like you know ailments and illnesses and whatnot and sure like you'll have better improvement Like a lot of the like a lot of the thing that I find hilarious is they'll be like We reduced homelessness among this population that we gave housing first by like 60 percent I'm like, well, it should be a hundred percent if you put them in a home to start with the program But whatever but in the boston study after after five years when they followed up with these people 50 percent of them were dead Like they died because they have underlying drug conditions and all these other issues that need to be treated And I'm still not even a hundred percent even with that failure rate the housing first thing I just want them to build like quonset huts Which cost eight grand way less money and then bring the services to them rather than what they do in california Where they spend five hundred thousand dollars on a one bedroom apartment It's still not complete and now they're estimating it's going to be eight hundred thousand dollars But we can we can argue about the the incentive structures around but the idea that we need to have this stuff Be like voluntary like if you're so mentally unwell that you prefer living on the streets And by the way, they've tried this in in san francisco They initiated arrests and they offered 30 people help in the first week zero percent uptick Then in the second week they had 90 people arrested. They offered 90 of them help Guess what zero percent uptick unless there is some level of force attached with it You're not going to get these mentally unwell drug addictive people off the streets I want to help them if you have a mental illness Like I feel horrific. I feel horrible for you. It's a disaster If you are severely addicted to drugs, I don't want to enable you like so many left-wing cities do Like in los angeles, they're giving people crack pipes, which is absurd to me The original reason that they gave them needles was because you're trying to reduce hiv transmission That's not the same for crack sites or have shown to have various different impacts that are Well, they don't even do the use sites. They do the needle exchanges So those end up all over the streets and you end up with more problems from that because you're basically Supplying and enabling this population with no force attached to have them get any help It's it's all modeled supposedly after the portuguese model But the original portuguese model that was successful is far closer to what i'm advocating for than what they're doing now Which is the current one where they're like, ah, here's the needles If you want help come back to us if you're mentally unwell then like sign up Just just be sane enough to fill out like this paperwork for like 10 minutes and then come back Like you have to attach force to them and that involves changing the standard from a danger to yourself or others To if you can't take care of yourself, we we should go back if we don't want Like i have this crazy idea in terms of crime policy if we want the crime rates of 2019 Then we should go back to the policies of 2019 If we want the mental health care or the mental health policies or less mental health Mentally ill people on the streets like we had in the 50s Then we should go back to the standard for committing people that we had in the 1950s There's all sorts of ethical issues with the standard that we had in the 50s Women were being given lobotomies because they didn't like their husband. That's that's treatment. I'm talking about putting I'm talking about yes, but but if we criminalize if we say that if if we say that we're going to Forcibly Institutionalize people because they are unwell then we can create a Incentive structure to do that just to get them out the streets rather than get them the help that they need They're saying that you're in favor of a softer approach. No, this is not a softer This is not soft on this is not soft on crime I would say that this is being smart on the situation because to me when I hear tough on crime I'm hearing throw the book at somebody. I'm hearing lock them up be as strict as you can They committed a crime. I don't give a fuck what they did or what the kind of situation they're in I don't care if they're on drugs. I don't care if they're having a mental break. Well, that is true I don't care right so like if you if you rate somebody I don't care if you had a sad child so if Sean is saying that he doesn't care and that but he wants to see People to be institutionalized for having these kind of situations, right? Then what then that is kind of incongruence to me I am saying to let's have let's have a situation where for the sake of argument for I'm gonna believe Sean, whatever He just said about the whole uh, the the uh, the safe use sites and all that stuff Let's say that he is correct and there was zero uptick without force Then I am willing to use some modicum of force to do it But not put them in prison because we're talking about any level of crime We're talking about Drug use all the way to like if they kill somebody. Yes, they have to go away Not necessarily the prison which would be which if they're mentally unwell Going to prison would be a tougher on crime situation than going to an institution Assuming the institutions actually ran correctly So if Sean is correct, then I would consider that to be a softer approach on crime Then what most current what most conservatives would actually adhere to so when I say I don't care I don't care what you did to the like if you break into my house Like I don't care how your childhood was like if you're talking about mental Yeah, if you're mentally if you're mentally unwell, which is a different thing then Yeah, if you have a condition But I want to actually have the power to get these people off the streets because I don't think it's Good for them to leave them there and on top of that they well, I said institutionalized like Well, that's not personal Yeah, well, that's now we're talking about mentally ill people. I'm sure I was I would be fine to send them to an institution But we need to change the standard to actually make that doable But overall like let me be clear if you commit a crime like and you are You're a sane person making a rational choice. I don't care Like I don't want to hear your backstory about how you're Aladdin and you're trying to steal the bread for your starving family No sympathy for you at all whatsoever You broke the rules of our society and if you want to raise social trust in our society Then that has to have consequences people need to know that that is wrong And we need to stop blurring the lines between the criminal and the victim This idea that we're just punishing people because they're poor. It's like no There are plenty of poor people that don't steal like this idea that being in poverty makes you of Immoral character or lower character is not true. It's actually more denigrating to the poor than than my View of it, which is you're still accountable for your own actions. Oh, and I'm not going to say that there's no There's no personal accountability. Of course, it's personal accountability If you do something heinous, you should be held to account But we are talking about society at large not individuals and society at large when we see where crime actually happens What precipitates it? It's usually it's usually poverty some sort of mental illness, etc And if we want to tackle I mean it's a usually mental illness that like that's a factor Sometimes you know what I'm saying though. I'm saying to these there are more here than just a criminal being like Oh, I'm just going to go rape somebody today Right, I don't think I don't think people rate because they're like bank accounts. Hello. No, but they're maybe you have We have a we have a we have systems In place that create the conditions where crime can expand Okay, and if we have systems in place where we Narrow those downs where there are less bad choices that look like to be good choices And more good choices for people to pick from the likelihood of a person picking a bad choice decreases Yeah, I like I said, I don't think it's I don't think it's down to circumstances And I will say again the crime creates poor circumstances in these areas Like we even see this with different populations in these specific areas like Asians will go to the same schools that we say are failing everybody Or and like there's no way to be successful in all that but because they have a culture that has a system of values That values are more likely to live in in neighborhoods that have the same conditions Are they more likely to live even if they're in well, I'm not saying more likely. I'm talking about poor Asians specifically So are poor asian neighborhoods more likely to live in poor areas than rich Oh, sorry. Let's let's rephrase this So from the study that I referenced in at the beginning of my opening Rand looked at the racial gap between crime The thing that with the racial gap between white and black people went down about about 60 percent Or so when just counting for economic factors and then the other 40 percent is neighborhood makeup So if we're going to look at the things that create a culture of crime, we have to look at those other factors Are asian people more likely than what's in that broad category of neighborhood makeup? single single parent households the concentration of poverty itself and Hold on So 60 percent is poverty, but then in the neighborhood makeup the concentration of poverty Think about it So if you are a person that lives in a rich area even if you're poor You're more likely to have a network of support that is going to lead you to better better decisions If you're living in an area where the network of support is low everybody's poor, no one knows how to get ahead in life and no one knows how to actually mentor and things like that. And this isn't to say that people there don't have any idea, it's just less likely to. That's going to look like that the only other news for advancement are going to be things that we all know that people talk about, sports, music, crime. Like this is what we see, we hear this on a daily basis from people. Those are how you get out of the hood. You become a sports star, you deal drugs until you save enough money and hide it enough so where you can get out. Or you become some sort of other entertainer. Education, everybody, you know, so and so down the block was educated and look at him, he still ended up dead because he still lived here. So you have to get out, you have to get your money, right? These are common refrains that we hear in society. I don't understand why this is such a controversial thing. I mean, you said a lot of words, but like not a lot of substance in there. But I guess what I could take from that is that, yes, the culture has an impact on it, because you're like the mindset of these people is like, Oh, that guy got an education. So it's like not worth it. I don't know. I don't know the specifics of origin of the culture. Would you say that it is more likely for that culture to exist in an area with a high concentration of poverty, or one that does does not have as high a concentration? Well, I would what I was trying to say is that if you have poor Asians or historically poor Jewish people or poor other minority groups that have face discrimination or whatever in the same areas going to these same schools, they're not living in the same areas. That's why we have this 60 a lot of times. Why we have this 40% compare that if you're going to the same school as you're living in the same area. No, not with the law. Are you denying everything else? No, are you so now you're denying that zip code school like zip determines what public school you zip code determines what public school you go to. But my if you if there's four zip codes that go to the same public school, not all of them are going to be as highly concentrated in poverty as as so in these circumstances that I'm trying to say of where they go to the same school they live in the same neighborhood. Are you denying that there's disparities between when we even when we control for those other factors when we control for that the the vast majority of the rest of the gap is 60% 60% is just the income and the wealth of the particular family. The other 40% is these other factors that make up this situation that other 40% I mean, look, I don't I haven't read the specific study that you're referencing. So you could literally say anything and like I don't have a rebuttal for it. But sounds like it doesn't make sense that they would say that they would say 60% is poverty. But 80% of the remaining 40% is concentration of poverty. Like that doesn't make any sense to me, but it goes away entirely. So we're talking we're talking going we're talking 60% being attributed to just the income and wealth of the particular family in question. And the other 40% being the people that they surround themselves with. This is why you have people that live in poor communities that are that are middle class and up, but they live in a poor community. For example, there's a lot of black people that tend to live in poor communities, end up adopting similar situations, even though they are more what they have more wealth. Alright, I mean, I like I want to move on from this study. I don't I haven't read it. So it's a pointless like a little loop. You have another question because you have a little list of highlights. Oh, no, I was highlighting that because I have a I have a stigmatism. So it's hard for me to follow lines. Okay, I was just I was just asking if you had something else. Do you have any questions for me? No, not really. At most politically biased, malicious. Is the is the US justice system incompetent and at most politically biased slash malicious. Is it incompetent? I mean, it depends. Like we don't have one solid justice system like crime is a local issue. Like most of your police departments are local. There are statewide police. Obviously, you guys are well aware of like, you know, federal agencies like the FBI, but there's only like 4000 or something like special agents at the FBI. So they're not as broad as they're like representative media. So certain like justice systems are completely incompetent. I think the like I talked about the New York one, I think the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office is completely incompetent. Larry Krasner is a disaster. And one of the things that we've seen under his I'm not going to prosecute anybody. I'm going to downcharge all of this because I have to fight like old school racism that's in the system that like one day he's going to win that fight. Like there's no metrics for when he does but he is going to win it. And you see homicides going to record numbers in terms of raw numbers and the highest murder rate that we saw in Philadelphia since I believe 1996. So like, I think that system is incompetent. There's a bunch of little systems across the country that are incompetent. But as far as politically biased, I mean, I feel like that's like off on a whole separate tangent that has nothing to do with what we're talking about. So shame on you for that prompt. To answer the question, I think that I'm not comfortable saying that there's incompetence. But I am I am comfortable enough to say that there is a large level of ineffectiveness with policing and prosecuting in general. And I say that because the clearance rate for most crimes is abysmal and it has been since the creation of modern policing going back to around believe the 1940s you would say or so someone modern policing came came into being. I'm sure sure. Okay, for argument's sake, we'll just say it's the 40s. Because what is it? So petty for theft. And for most levels of theft, it's only around 25%. The people that commit theft are arrested. For murders, murders used to be the highest. That was at 78%. And I think it's dropped to roughly 60%. Or maybe even lower might be 40% now over over the last five or six years. And I think that the reason why we have these kind of level of ineffectiveness is going back to some of the things that I mentioned, we have a lack of trust within society. We also have some issues. Well, I'll give you like snitches get stitches or one of those situations where we probably shouldn't say that too much, right? But we also have this large trust deficit. Generally speaking, in American society, and I think that contributes to it. Because why would you go? Why would you if you don't trust the police to actually do the job correctly, or not to harass somebody? Why would you report a petty crime that you saw? Maybe you don't want to see that person dead, not saying that's the reality. But if that's what people believe, and that's going to impact the level of clearance rates. Yeah, I mean, for clearance rates for thefts are lower than I think even like the most like petty thefts are probably lower than you're even giving them credit for. As far as homicides, I in and around 60 to like maybe high 60s, depending on on like what year you're looking at. I think that's about right. But that's because homicide is like the easiest crime to solve. Most of the time, somebody's killed by somebody that they know, you have a dead body. So there's no dispute on whether or not this person is actually dead. Like it's pretty straightforward. That's why historically it has the higher clearance rate. But one of the things that we've been seeing is drops in clearance rates for homicide specifically in left wing cities that that that push these soft on crime laws. And one of them now granted, it's also one of the most corrupt series so much so that HBO made a whole series on it, which is Baltimore. They've seen their their clearance rate drop below 30%. That's a part of the reason why that's also happening. And that includes special clearance where the person who who what you call it who did the murder gets killed and then they figure out that that person who's already dead so they don't have to make the arrest that it's below 30%. And the reason why is because murders just went up so dramatically in that area that they're completely overwhelmed. So yeah, the clearance rate is going to go down in in a bunch of places when you see a dramatic spike, because they're not equipped to handle investigating all these different homicides. But you said that is Baltimore is one of the most corrupt cities in the US. So if the corruption was less, do you think people will be more likely to go to the police and report any level of crimes? And if you believe that people don't just graduate to murder suddenly that they also do lower offenses, do you think that would have a positive impact on the clearance rates? If that trust was in general. I mean, I think if you were to like prosecute people in Baltimore, like when they actually do get arrested, because it's not like they're not arresting enough in Baltimore, but if they're not pursuing it, they had DA Marilyn Mosby, who created a unit specifically to let people out like of prison. But if we have all these district attorneys that are running on letting people out of prison, like getting criminals off of consequences. And again, this is a left wing thing. There's not a lot of right wing guys that are like, I'm going to release. But if there's been a 30 if this study that I cited earlier is correct, and there's been a 30% decrease with non prosecution, non prosecution of these kind of offenses and going to diversion programs or other things, is that soft on crime? Or is that being. Yeah, I don't necessarily believe that though. Well, you don't have the study in front of you, so I'm going to give you the benefit of doubt. But if you had the study and read it, and you were able to do it, would that if you would that possibly. If that was true, like then, I mean, I guess what I would look at the misdemeanors and maybe they're not worth prosecuting like that could be true. But you said you don't like that problem. You guys have a lot of fun with it. All right, so the next one, what is the best solution to prevent each of the following crimes? Shocklifting, fentanyl and other drugs, violent crime. I'll go ahead and take this one first. So with fentanyl, specifically drug rehabilitation programs, getting the people that they need, getting the people to help that they need. People don't just take fentanyl. They take other drugs are laced with fentanyl. And if you have that kind of situation, you're going to end up getting less people to use it if they are actually for lack of a better term cured of their drug addiction. And thus, thus reducing the amount of fentanyl that's flowing the system because there's less demand for it. Oh, for shoplifting? Oh, shop, yeah, thank you for, appreciate it. So shoplifting, that one's actually a bit harder to do. I'm not one of those people that believe everybody that commits a low level offense is just a lad in stealing for bread. I don't believe that. There is a need to prosecute people for it. But if it's a first offense, diversion programs show to be effective. Maybe they need some sort of, I don't know, rehabilitative services, getting them to understand the victim and all that other kind of mumbo jumbo that some people don't believe in. And maybe they'll reform them without having to send them to prison. But if you have a repeat offender, if somebody has shoplifted, I don't know, 300 times or even lower than that, but just absurdity to make the point, that person should be in prison. And then what was the violent crime overall? Violent crime overall. Violent crime, you have to have trust in society for people to report it. And then you have to have people, you have to have police actually being able to solve those cases. I'm gonna take them out of order and do fentanyl last. So shoplifting is pretty straightforward. You have to prosecute repeat offenders. It's not that complicated. I know I sound like I come with the same solution for a lot of things, but the numbers in terms of shoplifting are so dramatic and absurd. And I live in New York City, so I apologize for all the New York City examples, but I think this needs to be said. And I will actually use California as an example after this. So in New York City, since the George Floyd incident, the Black Lives Matter riots, a bunch of different criminal justice reforms, we've seen a 77% increase in retail theft. And out of all the thefts, which you would presume are going up if you're believing that it's due to economic distress, it's only this one that we've seen the dramatic spike. And we saw no such dramatic spike in this particular theft at retail locations in 2008, the greatest recession since the Great Depression, which you would think if the economic shock is what is causing this and not the policy that we would see something similar there, it's nothing of the sort. I have a great chart not on me right now from John Jay College of Criminal Justice that shows how dramatic this is. And when you go into the people that are actually getting arrested and being released, what you find out is that there are 327 people that represent a third of all the retail theft arrests each and every year. So you could get rid of a third of the retail crime if you just prosecuted these 300 people. And again, it's not that they're committing one or two or whatever, the total number of arrests are over 6,000 a year. And again, it's just on these 327 people. And if you go to different cities, what you'll find is you'll have the same kind of situation. But what makes this worse is because we softened the penalties on this, it's now an avenue for organized crime. So now you have to develop these federal units, which is what they're working on in order to break down these organized retail theft operations and they're trying to target sales online. And like this problem has spiraled completely out of hand, but the thing is at the low level, the people that they're using to get the merchandise, the reason that's such an enticing position is because you won't face consequences for it. In the state of California, they actually have a law that prevents you if you commit any of these crimes from going to prison at all. You have to be sent to the county jail. But the thing is there's no room in the county jail. So what ends up happening is you get churned out on the streets and you can see case after case, person after person, repeated offender after repeat offender that they get arrested, they get released the same day and they're stealing from another store the same day. It's an absurdity. You have to crack down on it. This is not a mystery. We used to have people stealing from stores before. This is how we dealt with it from before. As far as violent crime, like you need to increase police patrols. You need to have proactive policing. I'm a big fan of data-driven policing. So you have Comset as a program where you're sending officers to areas that are hotspots for criminality. The Kansas City experiment back in the 90s shows us that officers on the beat can disrupt and disperse criminal activity. That's what you wanna do. And that will work for that. And again, if you commit crimes that are not maybe super serious felonies, like in your repeat offender, maybe you don't get 27 chances. Maybe we actually hold you. We stop releasing you early and all that. As far as fentadol, this is gonna be my most controversial position. Maybe, I don't know, whatever, it doesn't matter. So, one of the biggest problems with the opioid crisis in the United States of America is we had a bunch of people get addicted to opioids over the course of decades, due in large part to the fact that people thought they were harmless and we have a general culture of ignorance in the United States of America where people believe that if it's prescribed by a doctor, it's automatically safe. And you actually see this kind of pattern of behavior outside of opioids with antibiotics. How many of you guys know somebody that when they get sick, they get antibiotics? They take half of them, they feel better, and then they stop taking the antibiotics. That's a lack of medical education and that really messed us up. Plus we had the over-marketing of these more addictive than heroin kind of opioids that were told to us to not be addictive at all. So then we have the expansion of what you call, of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act under the Obama administration. That led a whole bunch of new people to have access to these drugs that didn't have it before. And you can look at it, they were getting these drugs, it was absolutely insane. Then the Obama administration did something that honestly I would have probably done in that same position, so it's no shade to Obama, which was they decided to go after these pain doctors that were prescribing these pills to all these different people. But the problem with that is they immediately cut off the supply. So all of a sudden we had hundreds of thousands of people in this country who used to manage their addiction through their prescription, get cut off all at the same time. They go to street heroin, they end up that obviously doesn't end up being enough, fentanyl's cheaper, that starts getting rushed in and now we're feeding these addicts that we created as a society, fentanyl. So what I would do, and this is gonna sound crazy, is that if you're addicted to pills for the interim, I would continue prescribing you the pills and get you off of that in a rehabilitation program, not cut you off cold turkey, get you off the streets. If you could still function and go to work, then we have to work on that problem, because sometimes delay is preferable to error, to error, which is the Thomas Jefferson quote, and I think that would be the best thing that we could do right now. It's just kind of delay the problem, try to get people through rehab. If you're new, then we have all the restrictions to prevent you from getting opioids, but if you're already addicted, we should supply you through the medical system, because if you're getting your opioids there, chances of them being laced with fentanyl, extraordinarily low, and then we figure out what we're gonna do later. I think that's fair. All right, well, thank you both speakers. We're gonna kick it into our Q&A, so if anybody's got questions, just make a lineup right here, coming back from the other there. I'll give myself a little more cool here. All right, questions. I think I have a lot of stake in the game. I actually had a brother get killed by the police, another brother died from a marijuana-laced fentanyl, third brother who's homeless on the streets with schizophrenia, and he should be institutionalized, because he will not take his place. Anyways, okay, so, but my question overall is, it seems like you pointed out a thing with SSI, that there was less criminal behavior that the people remained on the SSI. It seems like that people are earning the income, they have some type of stake in the game, and maybe a UBI would be that type of solution. You give that to everybody, so everybody has a stake in the game. Maybe that would reduce crime overall. I don't necessarily disagree with that. I have a little bit of fuzziness on UBI. I used to support it and I stopped supporting it. I keep going back and forth on it, but the particular study in question basically said, what did people maintain the income that they had? Well, about 33% of them or so decided to do some form of crime, whether that was prostitution or theft or joining gangs, and then they stuck to it. They didn't, like if they had, they became like, for lack of a better way to phrase this, they became experts at doing that crime and making money that way. So if they had just maintained their income, they probably wouldn't have been criminals. I did have it. I did have a second part to that question. Come on, take a moment. All right. Come on up. You're a question. So, I mean, it's okay if I asked you to let me know, but since we don't have a lot of people online. Cool. So we focus, cool. Yeah, we focused a lot on criminal municipalities, local police, this kind of thing. Would either of you have an opinion about whether or not we are soft on white collar crime? That'd be the one first question. Second question is to Cypher. If the left was soft on crime, what would that look like in your opinion? And then if any of those things he mentions is happening, Sean, could you tell us whether or not they are? Yeah, I do believe that, generally speaking, we are kind of soft on white collar criminals. We can take tax cheats, for example. People that cheat on their taxes, generally speaking, are allowed to pay the taxes back. Hunter Biden is one of these situations. Where he paid his taxes back, he's not going to be prosecuted because he paid those taxes. We have seen this as well in other kind of situations. For example, there was massive triple P loan fraud. And then we just forgave all the triple P loans for everybody and say, wash your hands of it. We're going after it now under Biden, but under Trump it wasn't being done. There wasn't any oversight. So these are kind of things that we can see here. Bernie Madoff was one of the only people that got hung, strung up for stop manipulation, despite the fact that 2008 was participated by a giant fraud scheme within the derivatives market, et cetera, so I think that we are. As far as what would soft on crime look like, according to me, I think it would just be not necessarily caring about it pretty much at all. Or doing things that are actually counterproductive that lead to more crime increases rather than doing things that are effective. As for white collar crimes, definitely. Almost nobody went to jail for 2008. If you look at Ronald Reagan, who's supposed to be super more pro-business than what Barack Obama ran on, a bunch of people went to jail for the savings and loan debacle. So as far as like not caring about criminality, I do think, which is what he said would be a vision of soft on crime, I do think we have a lot of policies that just don't seem to care about criminality that they want to ignore it. If crime goes up, they want to say, oh, well, it's not as bad as the 1990s, let's not change anything, which is true, but I don't think the standard should be the worst period in American history. All right, thank you for your question and your question. Fair enough, so I think if you look across the entire United States, you'll find that where crime is the highest is where your policies from liberal politicians are the greatest. Mentioned San Francisco, mentioned Pittsburgh, mentioned New York City, mentioned Austin, I'll just pull up the stats for Austin, 52% higher crime than the rest of Texas and 74% higher crime than the rest of America, that's just in Austin. And so how do we, if we can't do it in this debate and we can't link in this debate, the policies that sound good on paper, because let's agree that helping people and all these lovely, like why go after the person, I think the example used was stole a bottle of water, why go after those people when we can be nice to them and help them and give them all the help they need. But when do we ever link those? What sounds good doesn't work in practice. Back to your point of higher crime, we should change the policy. Yeah, so I think what we have a lot of situations is that a lot of people just rely on intuition rather than looking at things that what works. Hey, the broken window policing sounded great to everybody. It sounded great to lefties during the timeframe. It started great to conservatives. You're throwing the book at them and you're also doing things in a system that reduce the chances of criminality for happening in the first place. For example, fixing broken windows, right? You tackling disorder stuff. But when you look at the policies that when you actually go back to study it, no one knows what the studies are. No one, a lot of people don't pay attention to that. Once you already have something that's in the Zetgeist, people are more likely to follow that Zetgeist. To kind of answer the question a bit better though, is that we have to actually look at the kind of things that are effective and actually target those positions. So for example, if we know that not prosecuting certain crimes leads to a reduction of crime, we shouldn't prosecute them as far as people going to jail. But we should get them into diversion programs. That should be done. If we know that income inequality and wealth inequality are contributing to crime, then we should do something to help alleviate that. The liberal cities are also typically speaking the most wealthy cities, but also the most wealth inequality cities. New York is huge on this. San Francisco is huge on this. There is a massive housing crisis in the United States. There's not things being done for a number of different reasons, and I think that we should actually start doing those things to alleviate these problems. I will also say, yeah, people have pointed out that some of the worst places in the United States of America seem to have, like local municipalities seem to have like long-term democratic rule. I remember there was a Washington Post article where they brought up like the 50 worst cities in terms of crime, and two of them had independent mayors. The rest of them were like democratic mayors. But the cities that people tend to talk about, and I mentioned San Francisco, I believe in this, and New York City, those are actually on the safer end. In fact, New York City is probably safer if you're in this room than where you live. Like it's gotten worse compared to New York City, but like they have had like breakups and change in leadership and all that. But the long-term most like dangerous places in the United States of America, your St. Louis, your Detroit, New Orleans, which is coming up there, but it would be Baltimore. Like those are democratic hotspots where they've tried a lot of these like diversion programs and a lot of this like ridiculousness in my opinion, and it just, like a lot of it just doesn't seem to work. Yeah, and to that point, just to piggyback off of it, there are other- I remember this, ask for income inequality cities. Like if you rank the highest cities in terms of income inequality against the highest cities in terms of criminality, they're gonna be completely different lists. Like New York is one of the safest big cities. It's in the top three of the most unequal cities. So like if the income inequality was driving that crime, then like this would not be the case. I think it's Minneapolis and in Missouri actually have higher murder rates than Chicago right now, and we also have other situations on that as well. So we can't just say that it's necessarily one party's political policy versus another, and whether or not there's other systems in play. All right, well thank you guys and your question. I remember, thank you. So it has to deal with the violence. It seems like if you look at the actual violent crimes, I more care about violent crimes. I do a lot of them are petty crimes, but it's something like 90 to 92% or 88% of all those crimes are committed by men. And I believe there's a link behind the ability of men to cope with anxiety in their life. And when you commit violence or you exercise or whatever like that, you receive dopamine rushes to help you overcome that anxiety. And like you pointed out earlier, I think was correct that a lot of people in these poor neighborhoods don't have that support network to teach them to raise these children to develop proper coping mechanism. And I think the right wing, the left wing, I hope everybody can agree that these children, when they're growing, we need to catch them young to teach these young men how to grow up to be productive adult men in society, that they engage in their coping mechanisms, not through violence and attacking other people, but through sports, mental activity, studying, finding other, doing debates like this, finding other ways to compete to get that dopamine rush. I'd like maybe a discussion about violence and men. Unless you wanna go. Oh yeah, so for sure, and if you wanted to narrow it even more, it would be men ages 15 to 23 are the overwhelming majority of that. And if you can prevent these people from becoming criminals in that timeframe, so this would go to your mentoring point, chances of them taking up criminality after the fact are extraordinarily low. I will take objection with one point that you made where you're like, I don't care about nonviolent crime and your focus is on violent crime. We mentioned Bernie Madoff. Bernie Madoff ruined more people's lives than most serial killers. He never punched anybody in the face. So I really wish we would change the language to victimless crimes versus crimes with victims. Yeah, sorry. I was gonna say that's not a criticism of you, it's just a common thing that people say without really understanding what it means. And that's fair. I think that theft crimes and stuff will lead to violence too, so. Yeah, and to piggyback off of what Sean said, typically speaking, men do age out of crime by the age of 32 or so. That's been a proven thing since criminology in the 60s where this was studied. And there are things that left policy has done to help with this. After school programs showed a dramatic decrease in the amount of criminality among those age groups because they had something to do and they were getting the support that they needed. There's also left-leaning policies in school with social-emotional support learning that's being attacked right now by some sectors of society as we'll get into it because it's a separate debate. But that is something that the left is also trying to do to teach people coping mechanisms and the like. So I think those are things we should do. Obviously drug overdoses is a huge problem here in the United States, especially with fentanyl. I think you mentioned something about treatment and all that stuff. We've been doing a lot of that already here in the United States. But what do you think about a model like they do in Singapore where they do the death penalty for drug traffickers? Do you think that if you were able to scare enough people from importing drugs and having harsh penalties on that front that it could potentially save a lot of sides on both ends, whether it be people who are engaging in the drug trade and murder, like I have a lot of good downstream effects. Yeah, I personally do not believe in the death penalty, but even aside from that aspect, we know that deterrence actually typically doesn't work because most people are not thinking that they will be caught. So if we want to actually kind of tackle this situation, the best way to do it is to increase the likelihood of people that will get caught for engaging in the crimes that we care about. And that can be a number of different things, focusing on those crimes or even putting more police officers on the street, which shows a positive correlation to decreasing in homicide rates. Yeah, I mean. Do you think it's Singapore? I don't think it does work in Singapore. I think Singapore, the reason that Singapore has a low drug usage is probably more cultural than cultural and other things that Singapore does, such as giving people just housing, integrating ethnic groups within societies and doing all these other things that bolsters trust and that sort of stuff. It does work in Singapore. I would not go that far. Singapore is a police state, but yeah, it definitely works. I go look at their crime or anything versus us. But there's a lot of things that we would not tolerate in America that they did. And that's why I probably would not advocate for that. And when I say probably, I mean definitely. But to the point that you're trying to make, and I do think this should be highlighted, if I can pull a point out of that. A lot of times when we talk about criminality or any issue, there's this obsession with root causes, like underlying causes and all that. But the thing is sometimes the most efficient way, oftentimes the most efficient way to address a problem is to do it at the symptom level, not at the root cause level. And a perfect example of this would be earthquakes. If I gave you $10 billion to do with earthquakes, we know the root cause of earthquakes is shifting tectonic plates beneath the surface of the earth. So would you spend that money on trying to control those tectonic plates? No, because that would be a waste of money. We can't do it. We don't know what the downstream consequences are. But you would probably spend that money on earthquake proofing, which addresses the symptoms. So even though I don't believe in executing the drunk traffickers, like that's not a root cause argument, that is a symptom argument. But sometimes those arguments are valid. But you do agree that deterrence doesn't work. A deterrence works if it's swift and certain that you will be punished, but most people don't think they're gonna get caught. So like. We'll have to move to our next question there, fellas. We do have to close our poll before we end, so we'll get to our final question. Hi, so I guess my question is, I heard both of you basically say that career criminals should always be going to prison. Nobody's arguing against that, right? But when people are going to prison though, it seems to be a college of just learning more crimes. So if we had proper prison reform in this country, I would be curious what would that look like and would that change your answers on how people are prosecuted? Because it seems like once somebody goes into prison, it's kind of game over from there. That's, you know, I mean, statistically they're just gonna be repeat when they get out, right? So keeping people out of prison, for low level crimes is obviously ideal, but if we had proper prison reform, but how would that change your guys' stance on? If we had rehabilitation programs that were proven to work and that ended up being the more effective route to go about getting a crime reduction, then I think that would be in favor of that. We currently don't and we don't have a lot of data to suggest that how to go about doing that. That said, I think that we do need to have certain things in prisons and society at large that does reduce the likelihood for offensive. So for example, if a person goes to prison, what should happen afterwards? Well, they should get job training. They should get, there should not be check the box. Checking the box does all manner of different things when you're trying to be to get a gainful employment after being released from prison. That is a tough on crime policy in my opinion that should be done away with. We should do other things. Emotional mental health services should be offered in prison in order to actually create an atmosphere where people can then, as we said, for young people be better manage their emotions, their mental state. For the reform question, I think the most important reform that we should do is get rid of a super dense prison population. So I would build more prisons in order to achieve that if you don't want to reduce population. But if you're in like California and you're releasing tens of thousands of inmates, then you shouldn't close the prisons and leave every other inmate very densely populated. Every single negative outcome for prisoners strongly correlates with prison population density. So that would be like the first reform that I would be on board with. But to his point, and he's right about this, we don't know who is going to be rehabilitated. We don't know why a lot of the rehabilitation programs tend to have like a five years of good behavior requirements. So there's selection bias in there. So like I'm in favor of rehabilitation, but like we don't know how to do that. And if it makes you more of a criminal, then like we should probably not release you as quickly. Also, I have to say this. I have to summon dark magician because my friend drew it for me. So that's it. Dark magician. Yeah. It's time to, all right, we won't do it. You have one quick question. Are we able to? Hey, it's Chud. Yeah. Yeah. All right. You're here. Let's get down to the brass tacks. Okay. What percentage of blacks do we need to deport to fix this once and for all? Oh, come on, man. Is that all you've got an answer? Come on. I know what you're getting at, but that's not ethical. So the percentage of the population, it's not a high percentage of any population that's criminal. So if you wanted to deport your way out of this to Liberia, it would be like one to two percent, and specifically of men, so probably one percent of the overall population. Yeah, you're welcome. But we both agree that's not ethical to do, I'm sure. I mean, I like Liberia. Come on. I'm just kidding. I got you. All right. We're going to close it out there. So if you're watching in the audience right now on YouTube, hit the like, share this out, and big round of virtual applause. We have to do the full. Of course. And we'll have an in-house applause for the speakers, and we will do our full. So I'm going to hand it over to the big boss himself. Thank you so much. What we're going to do folks is, if you can put your hand up, if you lean to any degree with the affirmative on is the left soft on crime. It's like 97 people. Great. And for those who would say, no, I don't think it is, you can slip your hand up. In the meantime, if you're watching online, check out Manifold in the description box. They're our sponsor for Debatecon 4. We really do appreciate them. You can vote on nearly anything on Manifold. Check it out. Create your own prediction markets. It's all play money. And also folks, want to remind you if you haven't yet, hit that subscribe button. Well, plenty more debates, including two coming up tonight yet. One with Chud Logic, as well as Leo on whether or not the left has gone too far. And then Trump or Biden, who is best for America's future, with Destiny and Sean coming up. It'll be our headline event for tonight. And Ryan. I'll give you the mic, Rye. Sure thing. So before we did the poll, before the show began, 78% of the people in the room voted that it is too soft. Afterwards, we had 75%. So we saw a 3% decrease. So that would be in favor of... The left is not soft. The numbers... So we had less people vote the second time around. We had 14 to 4 the first time. And then we had 12 to 4 the second time. So there's still only 4 in the room that did vote that the left is not soft. So we'll put that... I'm going to help you guys put those statistics into perspective. Sure. Excellent. Well, we'll get it closed up and then we're going to have another debate here in just a little bit. So, yeah, hit the notifications, everybody, if you're watching online. And yeah, if you guys need a little recess, there's some food back there. There's an area downstairs. They'll let you hang out in the pool area, but there's an area behind the glass there with the seating. You can hang out there. It's no problem. And like I say, feel free to help yourself with the snacks in the back. The VIP dinner is back, actually. And then, otherwise, if you're not a VIP ticket buyer, you can go wherever you want. And then we're just going to be back in about just over an hour. So, hour and 10 minutes will be the next debate start. Very cool. Just for everybody's awareness, I stream under crowd-sourced politics, not Cypher. Yeah, promo my stuff, bro. Come on, James. Thank you for being good support.