(upbeat music)
- What we're seeing increasingly across the district
is not only unacceptable in violent, it is dangerous, and it is illegal. And we're looking at the parents to make sure that they understand,
“that they are responsible for the up people”
that is going on in this district that is impacting everyone who lives here. That was U.S. Attorney for DC, the name Puro, responding to a fresh instance of teenage violence in her city.
And cities across the country, teenagers are gathering to commit violent crimes on mass in the name of social media cloud. - Heather McDonald joins us today to discuss the team take over trend,
what's feeling it and what can actually be done to stop it. I'm daily wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Hal.
This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
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with people who really want the role. Try it for free at zipprocouter.com/wire. That's zipprocouter.com/wire. Joining us now is Heather McDonald, author of The War on Cops and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute,
where she's a contributing editor of City Journal, a woman with many titles. Heather, great to have you on. Great to be with you, John. Thank you.
So we've had a recent rash of teenage degenerate to behave your, to put it one way, street takeovers and ramming cops in Chicago. There were some young Jewish girls assaulted by young Palestinian activists in New York.
And more of this kind of stuff. You've studied crime trends for decades. When you look at recent incidents, particularly involving young people in major cities, what stands out to you the most right now?
The sheer repetition of it. We have a very convenient oblivion to the fact that this has been going on for decades. Now they're called teen takeovers. They used to be called flash mobs or wilding.
And I guess it's just a function of the media needing to have a new story. This is completely standard in 2020. You had the mayor of Chicago lowering all the draw bridges to the loop and downtown Chicago to try and prevent
the barbarian hoards coming over from the other side of the rivers because the looting was so bad. The attacks were so bad. You have spring break periodically in Florida where people were getting shot.
You've had the flash mobs in Los Angeles where teens are rampaging through 7/11s, grabbing everything in sight, the street takeovers. Philadelphia, you've had the same mobbing. So this is a long standing problem.
And nobody wants to talk about what the causes are, which is black family breakdown. And the fact that a lot of these kids are not being socialized and the criminal justice is terrified really to do anything about it.
Now you mentioned family breakdown. Have there also been other changes too, for example, things like policing or anything having to do with schools?
“Or would you say family structure is the main issue here?”
Well, the schools have been absolutely denature, demobilized, as far as being able to impose discipline in the classroom. And that's a an a suit question, Georgia, because for especially under the Obama administration
continuing under Biden, there was this phony conceit
That if schools disciplined black students at a higher rate,
that's because the teachers were racist or the principles were racist, which is the most ludicrous idea, there's no more left-wing profession than teachers in this country. As we've seen numerous times with the celebrations
of Charlie Kirk's murder and Luigi Manjoni's murder. And Ed School is just one long marination in white privilege theory. But the idea was is that if black kids are getting disciplined at a higher rate, it's because of systemic racism.
And so the Obama administration
suits schools to make them basically get rid of discipline
because the up to options, you can continue with so-called disparate impact and actually meet out justified consequences. Or you can just throw up your hands and say, OK, in order to avoid disciplining black students, we're going to not discipline anybody.
“And that's what schools have been doing.”
And if there's no structure in the home, if you have something called multi-partner fertility, a very antiseptic term from sociology, that means one boyfriend after another, moving through the home and a mother has children
by several different males, if that situation is chaotic, the child's only hope for learning self-control, self-discipline-different gratification, is in the school, is in the classroom.
But teachers now have been told they can't do that.
So, but that again is a long-standing change. None of this is new. Policing obviously has been under one prolonged assault since the Ferguson riots saying that if they arrest black juveniles or black criminals that they're racist
and so the pressure is on them not to intervene at all because they don't want another, you know, George Floyd riot or Ferguson riot in their city. So there's a big pressure to just watch and be passive rather than proactive.
- Now, what about social media? How does that play into some of the crime trends that we've seen? - It does, I mean, we've been hearing endlessly that these are organized on social media, but I think that's a dead end to go down.
It's irrelevant.
These have been happening before
there were social media to the same extent. I've heard a proposal to somehow hold the media companies responsible if they promote the videos that are inevitably taken. The trophy videos of people beating up
on innocent pastors' buy and tripping apple stores bear. Again, Americans turn their eyes away from the real problem, which is the failure to socialize a very large number of overwhelmingly black young people.
“That's what we have to focus on, although I have to say,”
I want to be too pessimistic here, Georgia, but we've been focusing for decades and not much has changed. It's up to the parents themselves. It's up to the community leaders to say,
we're sick of this, start obeying the law, control your kids, don't let them run the streets at night. - Now, you mentioned 2020, the George Floyd riots, and how we really saw a peak in anti-cop rhetoric there. But I did want to highlight, this is continuing.
We saw the Los Angeles City Council vote unanimously to end pre-textual police stops by the LAPD. Any police stops that end up often finding real criminal behavior, and we want to stop those, because it leads to more often minority arrests.
We're also seeing similar language from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. He says law enforcement is a sickness in Chicago that he wants to eradicate. Have we seen any letting up at all of the defund the police
“narrative as it just taken on more different rhetoric?”
Is that what's happening? - No, it has led up, but not sufficiently, and there has not been enough of a discourse in that is affirmatively in the opposite direction saying that the police, there's no organization
that cares more about Black Lives and police departments. They are putting themselves online every single day to try and protect the thousands of law-abiding, hardworking, black residents of high crime neighborhoods. And when the police back off, very predictably we've seen
this again and again after moments of mass hysteria about phony police racism, crime goes through the roof. In 2020, after the George Floyd riots, we had the largest single increase in homicide in this nation's history, 29%.
Everybody's celebrating now that crime is coming down, but it's coming down from an unprecedented high. So it's a little early to celebrate, as far as I'm concerned, when you still have these completely grotesque assaults that are going on in cities by drug-addicted mentally ill,
people who should be in prison or in mental institutions.
Nevertheless, though crime remains
at a completely unacceptable rate, but property crime, the assaults, there has been baby steps towards giving secret permission to the cops to try and be a little bit more proactive
to do a little bit more of the essential broken windows policing
nevertheless, there's a lot more that could be done. - So even in some of these high crime cities or these deep blue cities, the officers are being deputized to do that or where is that advice coming from?
“- Yeah, I think places like Baltimore, Detroit, Trenton,”
they have given some cover to their officers, but brought in center are the brand in Johnson's, you know, we've heard about a contextual stop is a stop that has stopped a black or Hispanic person and found drugs or weapons.
The cops are going where the crime is, they're getting the 9/11 calls, they're using their powers of observation to try and assess out suspicious behavior, those are legitimate stops,
a very left-wing criminal professor,
criminal law professor of mine at Stanford Law School, once in an unguarded moments that there's nothing more important that the police can do to lower gun crime than these types of investigative stops as they're called in Los Angeles.
- Now, how much can we trust the crime stats that we're being given? I understand that sometimes they just reclassify certain crimes to massage the numbers a little bit, is that something that you've seen go on?
- It's a ledge, it's a ledge for Washington, you see, it's been a ledge for New York. That is probably going on, this is one of the drawbacks of the fantastic accountability
revolution that began under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
in William Bratt and which put rightful pressure on police commanders to lower crime in their precincts and to show results and a certain percentage of managers in that situation are going to feel under such pressure that they are going to massage things
and figure out ways to reclassify felonies as misdemeanors that having been said, I'm not going to claim that the crime drop that is being touted by the mainstream media is completely phony, murders don't lie,
you can't hide the bodies and those are down from the George Floyd highs, but there's still way too high. - What about police recruitment? There's a lot of focus on that a few years back,
are we still seeing a lot of these departments bleeding officers or our measures like in Florida really having an effect where they're recruiting
“like PD officers giving them really great benefits?”
What is this sort of evening out in different areas or are we seeing red states with a larger police force? What are we seeing on that front? - I can't necessarily speak to the red states, but I will say that the big cities are still really leading,
Los Angeles is bleeding there. Los Angeles is perennially under staff. They are lean and mean and they need, like the thousand more cops, the mayoral debate with Karen Bass, she's objecting to the fact
that her opponent wants to hire more cops rather than hire more social workers as if these reckless social workers have a clue how to stop crime. It's a complete waste of money. New York needs more cops, Chicago needs more cops.
And yes, cops still feel under the gun. They still feel underappreciated. They're not particularly persuaded by Zora Mandami in New York City who occasionally sends out minor, appropriately sounds in the context of what is in fact still,
and a worldview that views the police as the oppressor and criminals as the victims. - If the current policies continue and these trends continue, what do you expect crime and policing in some of these major cities to look like a few years down the line?
- Well, they're gonna have fewer people to police because people are leaving. It is just incompatible with a civilized society that you can have the shoplifting that's going on. The FBI is started collecting data on this
and it just goes up and up and up. There's no improvement in New York. The drug stores still have things underplexed glass.
“And that is, you have to have security of property.”
You have to be able to walk to the subways and not worry about getting pushed into the tracks or into a subway car or down the stairs by a lunatic, who should not be there with a criminal record
Of a dozen to two dozen to three dozen arrests.
Those criminals are not being put in prison,
but the same reason as everything else,
“disparate impact, the criminal justice system”
has decided it would rather not put anybody in jail than put in, put blacks in jail disproportionately,
notwithstanding that sadly,
their crime rates justify exactly that disproportion. And a lot of people are just going to say, this is not necessary.
“We should not accept that this degree of crime”
of property theft, of disorder, of threat, is a normal part of city life. Rudolph Giuliani in the '90s, he'd struck back against that assumption, all the criminologists said, "Oh, well, we just have to accept that America is a violent place
and you can't do anything about low and crime."
“Even the police used to say that the FBI's annual crime report,”
the uniform crime reports, had a disclaimer throughout the '80s saying, "Well, we all know the police can't do anything about low and crime because that's because of racism and inequality." And Giuliani and friends, nope, sorry, we're low and crime.
The police are going to bring safety and it worked. And we've forgotten that lesson, we've forgotten the lesson
that enforcement is way to have a second best solution
to the breakdown of socialization and the family. And so people who can leave are going to leave. Well, all of this really does help contextualize where we're seeing this mass exodus out of a lot of these big cities, particularly in the blue states.
Heather, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, John, and Georgia. That was author and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Heather MacDonald. And this has been a week-end edition of Morningwire.
