Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Tappy Thursday, Michael O'Neil. Some of us goobers just have
you on for background noise or to help us sleep
at night. But I did think I heard you say
something about railing against com planning about Excel shutting down
the power and there's just gonna be wind blowing, and
why are they worrying about this? Blah blah blah. And
now I hear the news offer station that there were fires,
(00:22):
there was damage as power outages.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Are we just letting that go? Are you gonna walk
anto that back?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
No?
Speaker 3 (00:29):
I'm not gonna walk any of it back, not at all.
And in fact, what Excel should be doing is strengthening
the grid and the transmission lines. They should be burying
the lines.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
And why all of.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
A sudden they answered this simple question for me, Why
this year, three years after the Marshall fire and maybe
a year after their settlement for hundreds of millions of
dollars for a fire, do we now start getting, Oh,
we're going to shut down the power because we don't
(01:03):
want to cause any fires, now do you? In terms
of I don't know about it, I've not heard of
any fires, but maybe there was because I don't pay
that much attention to that kind of news. Were those
fires caused by xcel? Were they caused by campers? Were
they caused by auto accidents? Were they caused by trains?
(01:27):
What were they caused by? I'm not walking a damn
thing back about it. And if you don't understand the
point that I made about it yesterday, then you go
back and listen to yesterday's first hour podcast about the program,
and then come back at me and try it again.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Is that what you expected Dragon a little bit? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, okay, yeah. Crime stats something that does bug me
for whatever reason. Well, here's why they occupy a very
privileged place in public debate, because one of the things
that we expect out of not so much the federal
We expect the federal government to keep the country safe,
(02:09):
and by that I mean make sure that our enemies
stay offshore. And the don't always do a very good
job of that, but that's ostensibly what they should be doing.
That is not the number one job of the federal
government either. By the way, I hate it when I
hear people say, you know, the job of the federal government,
or the job of any government, is to keep us safe. No,
that is not the job of the federal government is
(02:30):
to protect our rights. We should be responsible for defending ourselves. Now,
we still want law enforcement because law enforcement is primarily
what investigative. They do investigative functions. They don't really do
prevention because if they did prevention, we wouldn't have auto accidents,
(02:53):
we wouldn't have murders, we wouldn't have burglaries, we wouldn't
have robberies, assaults, we wouldn't have drug abuse. So their
job really is investigatory to find out who commited a
crime so that we can then hold them accountable. So
the amount of crime is a measure by which you
and I can determine, particularly at a municipal level or
(03:14):
maybe even at a larger macro level, what is the
state doing to protect us? And crime stats should be
treated as neutral facts, as you know they so we
fall out of reality that's fully formed. But crime data
is not discovered. Have you ever thought about that? Crime
(03:37):
data is not discovered. Crime stats are produced. They're the
product of human judgment, institutional incentives, and guess what political pressure.
So when those political pressures intensify, the accuracy of crime
stats collapses. Now what has folded inside the metropolitan Police
(04:02):
Department in DC under the SUDB. I think she's resigning.
I'm not sure she's actually left yet. Pamela Smith, the
chief in DC, makes everything I just said perfectly clear.
And it also, I think to a great deal, to
a great degree, explains why Trump's federal intervention in DC
(04:23):
did more than just stabilize public safety in the district.
What Trump did was he exposed a deeper pathology that
extends across nearly every major Democrat controlled city in this country.
And I would extrapolate it out and say even every
major Democrat controlled state in this country. The House Committee
(04:46):
Oversight and Government Reforms interim report, which is drawn from
transcribed testimony of eight veteran Metropolitan Police Department commanders, describes
it is. It doesn't a misunderstanding, It doesn't even describe
a clash of management styles. What their testimony describes is
(05:10):
a systematic effort to shape crime stats to protect the
leadership narratives. Now, according to Swarren testimony, Chief Smith fixated
that means her chip blinders on about lowering publicly reported
crime numbers not reduced, not actual reduction in crime numbers,
(05:33):
but in reducing lowering publicly reported crime numbers. Crime lower
crime numbers can be achieved either by making the streets safer,
or you can manipulate the classification systems, and the House
Oversight Committee has now concluded that Chief Smith chose the latter.
(05:53):
These commanders testified that the crimes were subjected to a
novel preclearance regime. Serious incidents were not simply logged based
on facts gathered by the cops that were doing the investigation.
They were elevated up the chain of command, sometimes while
officers are still actually.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
On a scene.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Why were they elevated up to the chain of command because
they wanted the chain of command, wanted to be able
to review and have approval by the Chief's office before
those stats were put into a report. In at least
one case, a shooting initially classified as assault with a
dangerous weapon that was ordered to be downgraded into a
(06:36):
lesser category, and that category, huh guess what, it does
not appear in the city's public crime roll ups. So
classification of crimes, which traditionally follows the evidence, now has
been converted into a political approval process, and the effect
(06:57):
huh predictable. Where did violent crime fell even as people
who lived in the district. You know, there's a phrase,
it drives me nuts at you your lived experience, Well,
the lived experience the people inside the Beltway was, uh,
crime seems certainly seems.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
To be up.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
And then that gets reinforced by the aggressive use of
intermediate and non public categories gun violence incidents. If they
met the statutory elements of violent felonies, they got steered
into labels such as endangerment with a firearm. Burglaries they
(07:37):
get broken apart into unlawful entry. That would be one.
So you have a burglary, somebody breaks in. Oh, let's
break it down. Let's break it down into they broke in,
so that's an unlawful entry. That's a crime. And then
they stole something, so let's put that down as a crime.
So burglaries get broken apart into their subsets.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Each moved removed the.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Incident a burglary from the headline numbers, which obviously dominate
the press coverage and dominate the political talking points.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
The crime didn't.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Disappear, It got relocated into a blind spot where you
couldn't see it, or where it didn't make any difference.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Oh, it was unlawful entry. I mean if I tell you.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
That my home got burgled and they they stole all
the tamer's jewelry and stole all of my electronics, and
stole all of my vinyl and kidnapped my dogs.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
You think that was pretty serious.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
But if I told you that someone unlawfully entered my
home and that's what gets reported by you know, the
local local local cops, that's okay, somebody and lawfully entered.
Or if I just report a theft somebody stole my
leaf blower, Oh well, okay, it sucks to be you.
(09:00):
That's a lot different than a burglary because that's a
break in and stealing.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Well, that's what they would do.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
They would take a burglary and they break it down
into those substats, and so then when you're looking at
the top line, people are like, oh, crime's not as bad.
Some people might want to claim that well, that's just
bureaucratic zealousness or over zealousness. Well, the testimony before the
House Oversight Committee kind of stops that charitable interpretation because
(09:33):
these commanders described a culture of fear, and that fear
was enforced through public humiliation and retaliation. So mandatory crime
briefings became rituals of shame. If you had, if you
were in a briefing and you were reporting rising numbers,
(09:54):
then you got attacked as well. You've personally have failed.
One commander described as as atonements for our sins, and
then others testified that they were actually berated in front
of their peers and civilians. So those who were reporting
the bad news or questioned the classifications didn't found themselves transferred,
(10:15):
They got demoted, they got sidelined, they got they got
put on a desk somewhere. Those patterns, according to these witnesses,
was widely understood inside the department. So over time, you know,
if if your boss treats something a certain way, and
(10:35):
if you you know, you're having a meeting with the
boss and the boss asked you, you know, how are
things working, and you talk about, well, you know, this
is broken, and that's broken, and this isn't working, and
that's not working, and then you get chewed out for
reporting that. As you know, the first time, everybody might
be shocked. Second time, third time, Oh I see a pattern.
(10:56):
Fourth time, I'm not gonna say anything. I'm not gonna
say anything at all. That's survival within the bureaucracy. That's
survival within the corporate structure. Your survival dependent upon producing
the favorable dashboards that get reported to the public. And
probably what I thought, what I think is probably the
most damning testimony concerned truth itself. Now, remember we're talking
(11:20):
about law enforcement. Now, I know that law enforcement can
lie to you. It's constitutionally permissible for law enforcement to lie.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
But there's a difference.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Between lying to a witness or a suspect trying to
gather further information, as opposed to lying on formal reports
that get dispersed out to the public. Well, these commanders
testify that nearly during nearly two years of all the
news stories about rising violence inside the Beltway, the chief
(11:53):
visited at least one high crime district once, I think one.
The leadership attention instead was overwhelmingly directed toward daily numbers
and the optics. She didn't want to sustain engagement with
the officers that were actually confronting the violence on the street.
So that sends a message too. The dashboard, what I
(12:17):
have to go put out every month or every quarter
about crime stats, that was more important than the people
on the streets, That was more important than the action
the reality of what was happening on the street. So
the chairman of the House Oversight Committee Firesom Jim Comber.
I think he was absolutely right when he described Smith's
(12:38):
resignation not as voluntary, but as inevitable. Once the commanders
testified under oath, the structure collapsed. I think the Trump's
decision to place the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control
and then deep deploy the DC National Guard following his
August fourteenth executive order in which he declared crime an emergency,
(13:03):
I think again, he wasn't just addressing public safety. I
honestly believe that he knew he was creating the conditions
under which the truth could surface, because these commanders testified
that the federal surge functioned as a genuine force multiplier
(13:25):
and it relieved the operational strain that they were working under.
And that testimony runs head on with critics that argued
that the surge was always unnecessary and why would they
Why were you, if you remember, why were they arguing
that this.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Surge was unnecessary?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Because they kept pointing The cabal would always point to, oh,
look the crime stats for DC are improving. Well wait
a minute, if if those stats are engineered. Then the
policy debate that were having about crime in major cities
is built on sand, It's on shaky ground. But I
(14:09):
think there's a deeper lesson, and the deeper lesson is
a structural lesson. Crime data is vulnerable to manipulation because
of how the incentives are arranged. And we talked about
incentives a lot, subsidies and incentives, Well, an incentive can
be something other than monetary. And this is a fairly
(14:30):
I think familiar phenomenon. When a metric in particular becomes
the target, the metric itself itself becomes the target. Then
that metric stops measuring what it was supposed to measure.
And I think that policing is particularly susceptible because classification
(14:51):
decisions are discretionary, they're made very rapidly, and those decisions
are largely invisible to the you've you've I mean, let's
just play TV.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
For a moment.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
You're you're watching a crime series and they walk up
on a crime scene and somebody says, yeah, well we
got a homicide here, it looks like we got a
wet we got a murder case, or well, oh you
walk up and you get a call because you're responding to,
you know, Hillary Clinton's house in Georgetown and someone's broken in. Oh,
(15:27):
before the press gets here, let's just call it a
unlawful entry, and then we'll just describe it as some theft.
Really downplays the seriousness of the crime. And in all
those little small changes in the labels that I'm describing,
that produces a large change in the narrative. And then
when you've got those conditions, the leaders don't need to
(15:50):
issue the orders to falsify the data. It becomes what
I would describe as anticipatory compliance, and it works. The
subordinates learn what outcomes are rewarded with which outcomes are punished,
and so they adapt. The DC scandal matters because it's
(16:12):
not unique. I think it's representative. There are scores of
documented reasons that crime data cannot just be blindly trusted.
Five major city examples I think underscore how systemic and
consequential this manipulation can be. In New York City, felony
(16:36):
crimes are routinely maybe I should say were routinely, were
routinely downgraded or not recorded at all, under intense constat
pressure that produced an artificial narrative of declining crime, while
the victims and the cops on the street understood that
violence was actually being hidden.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
In Los Angeles, tens of thousands of violent.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
Assaults gets classified as just minor incidents, so that cuts
me the reported violent crime numbers by more than a third,
and that allows the mayor to go out and claim progress.
But that progress is ephemeral. The progress is actually non existent.
It certainly doesn't exist on the street because all you've
(17:19):
done is the crime still occurs. You've just reclassified it
now Chicago officials, Chicago has presided over widespread reclassification of
murders and serious offenses, with crimes literally not figuratively, literally
disappearing from the books because the mayor wanted to sustain
(17:41):
a political storyline of dramatic crime reduction. Philadelphia the same thing.
Philadelphia actually supported thousands of sexual assault report reports by
shunting them into non crime categories. That falsely inflates clearance rates,
and it understates the prevalence of rape for years, and
then that distorts public understanding and of course the worst
(18:04):
thing of all when it comes to rape and denies
the victims justice. Phoenix interestingly illustrates the same logic in reverse,
they're in Phoenix. They inflated the kidnapping stats because they
wanted to get additional federal funding and political attention. So
(18:26):
manipulation cuts both ways, depending on the incentives. Is the
incentive that you're trying to get more money, because if
your crime rates are down, why would you be begging
the feds or the state or anybody else for more money.
But it's the incentive is that, oh, you want to
get more money than show the crime stats are up.
(18:48):
Crime stats if you believe them, hang ike.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
The NBC reading the inflation numbers actually audibly guessed at
how how low it is two point seven, which is
way better than expected. It's the lowest since twenty twenty one.
So for Everybay whining that Trump hasn't lowered prices, he's
crushed inflation from what Biden did to us.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
There's a fascinating graph on the front page of today's
Wall Street Journal in which it shows, you know, inflation's
bouncing around, you know, two three, four percent over the past,
you know, several decades, and then we get to twenty twenty,
and then you talked about al Gore's hockey stick. It
just shoots straight up one more intended consequence, in my opinion,
(19:44):
of the global shutdown during COVID, and then it remains
up during the Biden years, and then it just starts
to drop like a rock. If I don't know whether
I can uh pull that and make that.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Are you looking for that chart by chance? Dragon? Yeah?
But if it's Wall Street Journal, then they are going
to be I think.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
I think though if I gift the unlocked article, I
think that allow you to download the chart I will
try and find some other charts to maybe, just because
it really is fascinating when you when you visualize it,
it's it really is amazing. Now, don't get me wrong,
I understand that a lot of prices of many things
are still high and it will take time if ever
(20:31):
to get those down. But to Alex's point, inflation has cratered.
But the problem is your dollar has devalued, so you're
still spending more dollars for the same can of pork
and beans. That's that's where people look at prices and go, oh,
(20:52):
prices are outrageous.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Globalize the adfada. Can we finally.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Recognize that that might actually be a call for anti
Jewish violence?
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Huh? Could we possibly do that asking for a friend. Finally,
the left.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Is showing some interest in freedom of speech, finally, And
all it took was for some cops to clamp down
on those cries for.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Violence against Jews.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Now they've been turning a blind eye when cancel culture
was running riot on campuses think Columbia University, and when
gender critical women were gagged for well, just speaking the
truth about biology. And then when people lost their jobs
after this thing Islam but stifling jeophobic speech, well that
(21:47):
was a step too far, yes, And now the left
is up in arms. Well, at least that's the news
that the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police have promised
firmer action against chance like globalize the Dafada. In the
aftermath of the massacre of the Jews at Bondi Beach,
(22:09):
they said, well, the context has changed. I don't mean
to laugh, because there's a serious topic, but are you
freaking kidding me? So it takes the slaughter of Jews
and a couple of dirt bags screaming globalized the end
of Fada for you to finally realize that, oh wait
a minute, this might actually be a call to violence.
(22:30):
So for now on, at least, according to the Metropolitan
Police and the Greater Manchester Cops. The Greater Manchester Police.
Anybody that hollers globalize the Endofada in a targeted way
can expect to have uh cuffs put on you. And
it's happened. Two people were arrested in London last night
(22:53):
for racially aggravated public order offenses after allegedly I'll just
use the word allegedly bellowing for globalizing the in Nevada. Overnight,
the digital left has gone from the falling over the
cancelation of feminists who say you can't have a penis
and be a lesbian, to now they're wringing their hands
(23:14):
over Britain's descent into Spasi like lunacy. We're being censored,
They're wailing, we're being censored. Let me say this, if
your supposed love of liberty and freedom of speech only
kicks in the gear when anti Jewish speech is curtailed,
(23:37):
I don't think it's freedom of speech that.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
You really love. It's hunting Jews.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
You're not defending the British people's hard worn, hard won
liberty to utter or to speak. You're defending the right
of a noisy mob in Kafia's to cause really great
distress to Jews in London by barking for more intifadas
just two years after an intifada left more than one
(24:06):
thousand Jews dead in Israel. Again, let me be perfectly clear, globalized,
the Intifada is a call for anti Jewish violence. An
apologist for that hateful slogan say that intafada just means
an uprising. It's just an uprising, and then they point
(24:27):
to images of of course Palestinian kids that are throwing
stones at the Israeli defense forces during the first Intafada
of the late nineteen eighties, and then the.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
BBC joins in too.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
The first Intifada was quote a largely unarmed and popular uprising.
That is a spectacularly reductive understanding of the First Intifada.
And I think more importantly that into Fada was nearly
forty years ago. Most of the Israel haters in the
Islamo left freak showing they're out on the streets right
(25:03):
now weren't even alive at that time. And in the
intervening decades, and the Fada has come to mean one thing,
and one thing only, apocalyptic violence against Jews carried out
by armies of anti Semites. Now, the Second Intifada was
really an orgy of fascist like violence. Hundreds of Israeli
civilians were burned to death in nightclubs, pizza restaurants, hotels.
(25:27):
They got blown up by bus, blown up on buses,
they got gunned down. And their crime, oh, their crime
was they were Jews in the Holy Land.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Hamas is an Islamo.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Fascist outfit founded with the express intention it's in their
mission statement. Again, I don't mean to lie, but AMAS
has a mission statement. You know, their mission statement is
the annihilation of the Jewish nation. And so then Hamas
acted on their Nazi like dream with its racist.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Violence of the seconda You ought.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
To be very wary of anybody who downplays the fact
that this more recent Dafada, it lasted until two thousand
and five, consisted of ceaseless acts of Islama savagery. And
then you fast forward to October seven, considered by some
to be an Intelfada, that was.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
The worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
So do they expect us to believe that when leftists
and Islamis hit the streets in the wake of that atrocity,
and said globalized the intefada that they were talking about
some harmless stone throwing from the nineteen eighties. Are we
really that stupid?
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Good morning, Michael Brown.
Speaker 5 (26:42):
I like when we're making fun of people talking about
the weather, because I'm really sick of people seriously talking
about the weather because I am just observing the weather
and it's really really cold.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Blah blah blah. Alaska.
Speaker 5 (26:55):
Here's what I want to say, Michael, and Draggon, this
one's for you.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Get on with it. Dragon.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
I were laughing about the talk back about the fires
those You think, you're not sure, but you think most
of those fires right on the Eastern Plain. Yeah, yeah,
so toss cigarette, freight train, spark from a car, any
number of things could have cause those fires. Yeah, but
up where they were really worried about it.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
No, no, not at all.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
Back to globalize the afada. And by the way, we're
sorry that it's cold up there. And now so I
didn't get.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Dark too, You're not sorry at all. What are you
talking about? I just like to lie to a JAG officer,
fair enough, okay.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Just for anybody to say globalize the end Offada after
October seventh, I think what you're doing is you're really
relishing in the mass killing of Jews. And then to
shout glory to our martyrs, as one of the radicals
on the campuses did, that's praising the racist killers.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
It is Hamas.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
And then if you're chanting from the River to the Sea,
you're expressing support for Hamas's dream of truly annihilating, eradicating
the world's only Jewish nation. And now they're doing it
again after the massacre at Bondi.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yesterday.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
The youngest victim of that at anti Semitic horror, ten
year old Matilda, was bury. At the same time, people
in London were chanting globalized the Intifada. The rules of
journalistic decorum really, or actually the FCC rules don't allow
(28:45):
me to say what I think about those people. Because
for those of us who really do believe in free
speech for everyone, those arrests are nothing to celebrate. But
here here's the thing. Jews had been begging you to
stop chanting, friends of Fauda, and then you ignored them,
(29:09):
and worse, you accuse them of weaponizing their feelings, trying
to end to the end of silencing any criticism of Israel.
You accuse them of cynicism and self interest, a charge
the left never lays the door of any other ethnic minority.
If you had listened to Jews, if you had considered
(29:30):
them your equals, deserving your respect, you wouldn't be in
that situation.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
It should not.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
Have taken police action to stop the chant of globalize,
the end of Fauda. The left should have had the
decency to retire that sick, bigoted chant when the Jews
asked them to do so in the first place.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
But you didn't. I don't know what.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
I don't even know what the context was of Dragon
I talking talking about crime, talking about crime, and I
and I mentioned that this morning the now America's Newsroom,
that's the name of the show, America's Newsroom. That's what
I now hear when I drive into the studio in
the morning on on Fox, on Sirius. And I was astonished.
(30:17):
Take that back. I wasn't styished. I was disheartened that
the first three or four news stories were crime stories.
You have Brown University, you had the Rob Reiner and
his wife's murder, Nick Reiner, you had Bondi Beach and
oh then the the scientists from m I T that
(30:39):
was murdered in Boston or Cambridge, wherever he lived. Those
are the four lead stories. And much like you talk
about the weather, when it comes to the crime, I'm
kind of like the same with weather, I am about
the crime.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Move on, move on.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
It's not like other people don't get murdered or other
people don't get assassinated.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
But here.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
We seem to or the left seems to want to
ignore that it's racist, it's anti semitic. And while the
other speech you still want to clamp down on. When
the Manchester cops finally clamp down on globalizing the ind
of FADA, you hmm, you're picking and choosing, because globalizing
(31:34):
the into FADA really is an incitement to violence, and
that speech. Forget that it's Manchester.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Let's just think.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
About the little old USA. Speech that incites violence is
not protected. Oh, you can say it, but it's not protected.
Tappy Thursday, Michael O'Neil. Some of us goobers just have
you on for background noise or to help us sleep
at night. But I did think I heard you say
something about railing against com planning about Excel shutting down
the power and there's just gonna be wind blowing, and
why are they worrying about this? Blah blah blah. And
now I hear the news offer station that there were fires,
(00:22):
there was damage as power outages.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Are we just letting that go? Are you gonna walk
anto that back?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
No?
Speaker 3 (00:29):
I'm not gonna walk any of it back, not at all.
And in fact, what Excel should be doing is strengthening
the grid and the transmission lines. They should be burying
the lines.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
And why all of.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
A sudden they answered this simple question for me, Why
this year, three years after the Marshall fire and maybe
a year after their settlement for hundreds of millions of
dollars for a fire, do we now start getting, Oh,
we're going to shut down the power because we don't
(01:03):
want to cause any fires, now do you? In terms
of I don't know about it, I've not heard of
any fires, but maybe there was because I don't pay
that much attention to that kind of news. Were those
fires caused by xcel? Were they caused by campers? Were
they caused by auto accidents? Were they caused by trains?
(01:27):
What were they caused by? I'm not walking a damn
thing back about it. And if you don't understand the
point that I made about it yesterday, then you go
back and listen to yesterday's first hour podcast about the program,
and then come back at me and try it again.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Is that what you expected Dragon a little bit? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, okay, yeah. Crime stats something that does bug me
for whatever reason. Well, here's why they occupy a very
privileged place in public debate, because one of the things
that we expect out of not so much the federal
We expect the federal government to keep the country safe,
(02:09):
and by that I mean make sure that our enemies
stay offshore. And the don't always do a very good
job of that, but that's ostensibly what they should be doing.
That is not the number one job of the federal
government either. By the way, I hate it when I
hear people say, you know, the job of the federal government,
or the job of any government, is to keep us safe. No,
that is not the job of the federal government is
(02:30):
to protect our rights. We should be responsible for defending ourselves. Now,
we still want law enforcement because law enforcement is primarily
what investigative. They do investigative functions. They don't really do
prevention because if they did prevention, we wouldn't have auto accidents,
(02:53):
we wouldn't have murders, we wouldn't have burglaries, we wouldn't
have robberies, assaults, we wouldn't have drug abuse. So their
job really is investigatory to find out who commited a
crime so that we can then hold them accountable. So
the amount of crime is a measure by which you
and I can determine, particularly at a municipal level or
(03:14):
maybe even at a larger macro level, what is the
state doing to protect us? And crime stats should be
treated as neutral facts, as you know they so we
fall out of reality that's fully formed. But crime data
is not discovered. Have you ever thought about that? Crime
(03:37):
data is not discovered. Crime stats are produced. They're the
product of human judgment, institutional incentives, and guess what political pressure.
So when those political pressures intensify, the accuracy of crime
stats collapses. Now what has folded inside the metropolitan Police
(04:02):
Department in DC under the SUDB. I think she's resigning.
I'm not sure she's actually left yet. Pamela Smith, the
chief in DC, makes everything I just said perfectly clear.
And it also, I think to a great deal, to
a great degree, explains why Trump's federal intervention in DC
(04:23):
did more than just stabilize public safety in the district.
What Trump did was he exposed a deeper pathology that
extends across nearly every major Democrat controlled city in this country.
And I would extrapolate it out and say even every
major Democrat controlled state in this country. The House Committee
(04:46):
Oversight and Government Reforms interim report, which is drawn from
transcribed testimony of eight veteran Metropolitan Police Department commanders, describes
it is. It doesn't a misunderstanding, It doesn't even describe
a clash of management styles. What their testimony describes is
(05:10):
a systematic effort to shape crime stats to protect the
leadership narratives. Now, according to Swarren testimony, Chief Smith fixated
that means her chip blinders on about lowering publicly reported
crime numbers not reduced, not actual reduction in crime numbers,
(05:33):
but in reducing lowering publicly reported crime numbers. Crime lower
crime numbers can be achieved either by making the streets safer,
or you can manipulate the classification systems, and the House
Oversight Committee has now concluded that Chief Smith chose the latter.
(05:53):
These commanders testified that the crimes were subjected to a
novel preclearance regime. Serious incidents were not simply logged based
on facts gathered by the cops that were doing the investigation.
They were elevated up the chain of command, sometimes while
officers are still actually.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
On a scene.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Why were they elevated up to the chain of command because
they wanted the chain of command, wanted to be able
to review and have approval by the Chief's office before
those stats were put into a report. In at least
one case, a shooting initially classified as assault with a
dangerous weapon that was ordered to be downgraded into a
(06:36):
lesser category, and that category, huh guess what, it does
not appear in the city's public crime roll ups. So
classification of crimes, which traditionally follows the evidence, now has
been converted into a political approval process, and the effect
(06:57):
huh predictable. Where did violent crime fell even as people
who lived in the district. You know, there's a phrase,
it drives me nuts at you your lived experience, Well,
the lived experience the people inside the Beltway was, uh,
crime seems certainly seems.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
To be up.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
And then that gets reinforced by the aggressive use of
intermediate and non public categories gun violence incidents. If they
met the statutory elements of violent felonies, they got steered
into labels such as endangerment with a firearm. Burglaries they
(07:37):
get broken apart into unlawful entry. That would be one.
So you have a burglary, somebody breaks in. Oh, let's
break it down. Let's break it down into they broke in,
so that's an unlawful entry. That's a crime. And then
they stole something, so let's put that down as a crime.
So burglaries get broken apart into their subsets.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Each moved removed the.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Incident a burglary from the headline numbers, which obviously dominate
the press coverage and dominate the political talking points.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
The crime didn't.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Disappear, It got relocated into a blind spot where you
couldn't see it, or where it didn't make any difference.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Oh, it was unlawful entry. I mean if I tell you.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
That my home got burgled and they they stole all
the tamer's jewelry and stole all of my electronics, and
stole all of my vinyl and kidnapped my dogs.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
You think that was pretty serious.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
But if I told you that someone unlawfully entered my
home and that's what gets reported by you know, the
local local local cops, that's okay, somebody and lawfully entered.
Or if I just report a theft somebody stole my
leaf blower, Oh well, okay, it sucks to be you.
(09:00):
That's a lot different than a burglary because that's a
break in and stealing.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Well, that's what they would do.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
They would take a burglary and they break it down
into those substats, and so then when you're looking at
the top line, people are like, oh, crime's not as bad.
Some people might want to claim that well, that's just
bureaucratic zealousness or over zealousness. Well, the testimony before the
House Oversight Committee kind of stops that charitable interpretation because
(09:33):
these commanders described a culture of fear, and that fear
was enforced through public humiliation and retaliation. So mandatory crime
briefings became rituals of shame. If you had, if you
were in a briefing and you were reporting rising numbers,
(09:54):
then you got attacked as well. You've personally have failed.
One commander described as as atonements for our sins, and
then others testified that they were actually berated in front
of their peers and civilians. So those who were reporting
the bad news or questioned the classifications didn't found themselves transferred,
(10:15):
They got demoted, they got sidelined, they got they got
put on a desk somewhere. Those patterns, according to these witnesses,
was widely understood inside the department. So over time, you know,
if if your boss treats something a certain way, and
(10:35):
if you you know, you're having a meeting with the
boss and the boss asked you, you know, how are
things working, and you talk about, well, you know, this
is broken, and that's broken, and this isn't working, and
that's not working, and then you get chewed out for
reporting that. As you know, the first time, everybody might
be shocked. Second time, third time, Oh I see a pattern.
(10:56):
Fourth time, I'm not gonna say anything. I'm not gonna
say anything at all. That's survival within the bureaucracy. That's
survival within the corporate structure. Your survival dependent upon producing
the favorable dashboards that get reported to the public. And
probably what I thought, what I think is probably the
most damning testimony concerned truth itself. Now, remember we're talking
(11:20):
about law enforcement. Now, I know that law enforcement can
lie to you. It's constitutionally permissible for law enforcement to lie.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
But there's a difference.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Between lying to a witness or a suspect trying to
gather further information, as opposed to lying on formal reports
that get dispersed out to the public. Well, these commanders
testify that nearly during nearly two years of all the
news stories about rising violence inside the Beltway, the chief
(11:53):
visited at least one high crime district once, I think one.
The leadership attention instead was overwhelmingly directed toward daily numbers
and the optics. She didn't want to sustain engagement with
the officers that were actually confronting the violence on the street.
So that sends a message too. The dashboard, what I
(12:17):
have to go put out every month or every quarter
about crime stats, that was more important than the people
on the streets, That was more important than the action
the reality of what was happening on the street. So
the chairman of the House Oversight Committee Firesom Jim Comber.
I think he was absolutely right when he described Smith's
(12:38):
resignation not as voluntary, but as inevitable. Once the commanders
testified under oath, the structure collapsed. I think the Trump's
decision to place the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control
and then deep deploy the DC National Guard following his
August fourteenth executive order in which he declared crime an emergency,
(13:03):
I think again, he wasn't just addressing public safety. I
honestly believe that he knew he was creating the conditions
under which the truth could surface, because these commanders testified
that the federal surge functioned as a genuine force multiplier
(13:25):
and it relieved the operational strain that they were working under.
And that testimony runs head on with critics that argued
that the surge was always unnecessary and why would they
Why were you, if you remember, why were they arguing
that this.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Surge was unnecessary?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Because they kept pointing The cabal would always point to, oh,
look the crime stats for DC are improving. Well wait
a minute, if if those stats are engineered. Then the
policy debate that were having about crime in major cities
is built on sand, It's on shaky ground. But I
(14:09):
think there's a deeper lesson, and the deeper lesson is
a structural lesson. Crime data is vulnerable to manipulation because
of how the incentives are arranged. And we talked about
incentives a lot, subsidies and incentives, Well, an incentive can
be something other than monetary. And this is a fairly
(14:30):
I think familiar phenomenon. When a metric in particular becomes
the target, the metric itself itself becomes the target. Then
that metric stops measuring what it was supposed to measure.
And I think that policing is particularly susceptible because classification
(14:51):
decisions are discretionary, they're made very rapidly, and those decisions
are largely invisible to the you've you've I mean, let's
just play TV.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
For a moment.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
You're you're watching a crime series and they walk up
on a crime scene and somebody says, yeah, well we
got a homicide here, it looks like we got a
wet we got a murder case, or well, oh you
walk up and you get a call because you're responding to,
you know, Hillary Clinton's house in Georgetown and someone's broken in. Oh,
(15:27):
before the press gets here, let's just call it a
unlawful entry, and then we'll just describe it as some theft.
Really downplays the seriousness of the crime. And in all
those little small changes in the labels that I'm describing,
that produces a large change in the narrative. And then
when you've got those conditions, the leaders don't need to
(15:50):
issue the orders to falsify the data. It becomes what
I would describe as anticipatory compliance, and it works. The
subordinates learn what outcomes are rewarded with which outcomes are punished,
and so they adapt. The DC scandal matters because it's
(16:12):
not unique. I think it's representative. There are scores of
documented reasons that crime data cannot just be blindly trusted.
Five major city examples I think underscore how systemic and
consequential this manipulation can be. In New York City, felony
(16:36):
crimes are routinely maybe I should say were routinely, were
routinely downgraded or not recorded at all, under intense constat
pressure that produced an artificial narrative of declining crime, while
the victims and the cops on the street understood that
violence was actually being hidden.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
In Los Angeles, tens of thousands of violent.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
Assaults gets classified as just minor incidents, so that cuts
me the reported violent crime numbers by more than a third,
and that allows the mayor to go out and claim progress.
But that progress is ephemeral. The progress is actually non existent.
It certainly doesn't exist on the street because all you've
(17:19):
done is the crime still occurs. You've just reclassified it
now Chicago officials, Chicago has presided over widespread reclassification of
murders and serious offenses, with crimes literally not figuratively, literally
disappearing from the books because the mayor wanted to sustain
(17:41):
a political storyline of dramatic crime reduction. Philadelphia the same thing.
Philadelphia actually supported thousands of sexual assault report reports by
shunting them into non crime categories. That falsely inflates clearance rates,
and it understates the prevalence of rape for years, and
then that distorts public understanding and of course the worst
(18:04):
thing of all when it comes to rape and denies
the victims justice. Phoenix interestingly illustrates the same logic in reverse,
they're in Phoenix. They inflated the kidnapping stats because they
wanted to get additional federal funding and political attention. So
(18:26):
manipulation cuts both ways, depending on the incentives. Is the
incentive that you're trying to get more money, because if
your crime rates are down, why would you be begging
the feds or the state or anybody else for more money.
But it's the incentive is that, oh, you want to
get more money than show the crime stats are up.
(18:48):
Crime stats if you believe them, hang ike.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
The NBC reading the inflation numbers actually audibly guessed at
how how low it is two point seven, which is
way better than expected. It's the lowest since twenty twenty one.
So for Everybay whining that Trump hasn't lowered prices, he's
crushed inflation from what Biden did to us.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
There's a fascinating graph on the front page of today's
Wall Street Journal in which it shows, you know, inflation's
bouncing around, you know, two three, four percent over the past,
you know, several decades, and then we get to twenty twenty,
and then you talked about al Gore's hockey stick. It
just shoots straight up one more intended consequence, in my opinion,
(19:44):
of the global shutdown during COVID, and then it remains
up during the Biden years, and then it just starts
to drop like a rock. If I don't know whether
I can uh pull that and make that.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Are you looking for that chart by chance? Dragon? Yeah?
But if it's Wall Street Journal, then they are going
to be I think.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
I think though if I gift the unlocked article, I
think that allow you to download the chart I will
try and find some other charts to maybe, just because
it really is fascinating when you when you visualize it,
it's it really is amazing. Now, don't get me wrong,
I understand that a lot of prices of many things
are still high and it will take time if ever
(20:31):
to get those down. But to Alex's point, inflation has cratered.
But the problem is your dollar has devalued, so you're
still spending more dollars for the same can of pork
and beans. That's that's where people look at prices and go, oh,
(20:52):
prices are outrageous.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Globalize the adfada. Can we finally.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Recognize that that might actually be a call for anti
Jewish violence?
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Huh? Could we possibly do that asking for a friend. Finally,
the left.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Is showing some interest in freedom of speech, finally, And
all it took was for some cops to clamp down
on those cries for.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Violence against Jews.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Now they've been turning a blind eye when cancel culture
was running riot on campuses think Columbia University, and when
gender critical women were gagged for well, just speaking the
truth about biology. And then when people lost their jobs
after this thing Islam but stifling jeophobic speech, well that
(21:47):
was a step too far, yes, And now the left
is up in arms. Well, at least that's the news
that the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police have promised
firmer action against chance like globalize the Dafada. In the
aftermath of the massacre of the Jews at Bondi Beach,
(22:09):
they said, well, the context has changed. I don't mean
to laugh, because there's a serious topic, but are you
freaking kidding me? So it takes the slaughter of Jews
and a couple of dirt bags screaming globalized the end
of Fada for you to finally realize that, oh wait
a minute, this might actually be a call to violence.
(22:30):
So for now on, at least, according to the Metropolitan
Police and the Greater Manchester Cops. The Greater Manchester Police.
Anybody that hollers globalize the Endofada in a targeted way
can expect to have uh cuffs put on you. And
it's happened. Two people were arrested in London last night
(22:53):
for racially aggravated public order offenses after allegedly I'll just
use the word allegedly bellowing for globalizing the in Nevada. Overnight,
the digital left has gone from the falling over the
cancelation of feminists who say you can't have a penis
and be a lesbian, to now they're wringing their hands
(23:14):
over Britain's descent into Spasi like lunacy. We're being censored,
They're wailing, we're being censored. Let me say this, if
your supposed love of liberty and freedom of speech only
kicks in the gear when anti Jewish speech is curtailed,
(23:37):
I don't think it's freedom of speech that.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
You really love. It's hunting Jews.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
You're not defending the British people's hard worn, hard won
liberty to utter or to speak. You're defending the right
of a noisy mob in Kafia's to cause really great
distress to Jews in London by barking for more intifadas
just two years after an intifada left more than one
(24:06):
thousand Jews dead in Israel. Again, let me be perfectly clear, globalized,
the Intifada is a call for anti Jewish violence. An
apologist for that hateful slogan say that intafada just means
an uprising. It's just an uprising, and then they point
(24:27):
to images of of course Palestinian kids that are throwing
stones at the Israeli defense forces during the first Intafada
of the late nineteen eighties, and then the.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
BBC joins in too.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
The first Intifada was quote a largely unarmed and popular uprising.
That is a spectacularly reductive understanding of the First Intifada.
And I think more importantly that into Fada was nearly
forty years ago. Most of the Israel haters in the
Islamo left freak showing they're out on the streets right
(25:03):
now weren't even alive at that time. And in the
intervening decades, and the Fada has come to mean one thing,
and one thing only, apocalyptic violence against Jews carried out
by armies of anti Semites. Now, the Second Intifada was
really an orgy of fascist like violence. Hundreds of Israeli
civilians were burned to death in nightclubs, pizza restaurants, hotels.
(25:27):
They got blown up by bus, blown up on buses,
they got gunned down. And their crime, oh, their crime
was they were Jews in the Holy Land.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Hamas is an Islamo.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Fascist outfit founded with the express intention it's in their
mission statement. Again, I don't mean to lie, but AMAS
has a mission statement. You know, their mission statement is
the annihilation of the Jewish nation. And so then Hamas
acted on their Nazi like dream with its racist.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Violence of the seconda You ought.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
To be very wary of anybody who downplays the fact
that this more recent Dafada, it lasted until two thousand
and five, consisted of ceaseless acts of Islama savagery. And
then you fast forward to October seven, considered by some
to be an Intelfada, that was.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
The worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
So do they expect us to believe that when leftists
and Islamis hit the streets in the wake of that atrocity,
and said globalized the intefada that they were talking about
some harmless stone throwing from the nineteen eighties. Are we
really that stupid?
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Good morning, Michael Brown.
Speaker 5 (26:42):
I like when we're making fun of people talking about
the weather, because I'm really sick of people seriously talking
about the weather because I am just observing the weather
and it's really really cold.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Blah blah blah. Alaska.
Speaker 5 (26:55):
Here's what I want to say, Michael, and Draggon, this
one's for you.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Get on with it. Dragon.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
I were laughing about the talk back about the fires
those You think, you're not sure, but you think most
of those fires right on the Eastern Plain. Yeah, yeah,
so toss cigarette, freight train, spark from a car, any
number of things could have cause those fires. Yeah, but
up where they were really worried about it.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
No, no, not at all.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
Back to globalize the afada. And by the way, we're
sorry that it's cold up there. And now so I
didn't get.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Dark too, You're not sorry at all. What are you
talking about? I just like to lie to a JAG officer,
fair enough, okay.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Just for anybody to say globalize the end Offada after
October seventh, I think what you're doing is you're really
relishing in the mass killing of Jews. And then to
shout glory to our martyrs, as one of the radicals
on the campuses did, that's praising the racist killers.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
It is Hamas.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
And then if you're chanting from the River to the Sea,
you're expressing support for Hamas's dream of truly annihilating, eradicating
the world's only Jewish nation. And now they're doing it
again after the massacre at Bondi.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yesterday.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
The youngest victim of that at anti Semitic horror, ten
year old Matilda, was bury. At the same time, people
in London were chanting globalized the Intifada. The rules of
journalistic decorum really, or actually the FCC rules don't allow
(28:45):
me to say what I think about those people. Because
for those of us who really do believe in free
speech for everyone, those arrests are nothing to celebrate. But
here here's the thing. Jews had been begging you to
stop chanting, friends of Fauda, and then you ignored them,
(29:09):
and worse, you accuse them of weaponizing their feelings, trying
to end to the end of silencing any criticism of Israel.
You accuse them of cynicism and self interest, a charge
the left never lays the door of any other ethnic minority.
If you had listened to Jews, if you had considered
(29:30):
them your equals, deserving your respect, you wouldn't be in
that situation.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
It should not.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
Have taken police action to stop the chant of globalize,
the end of Fauda. The left should have had the
decency to retire that sick, bigoted chant when the Jews
asked them to do so in the first place.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
But you didn't. I don't know what.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
I don't even know what the context was of Dragon
I talking talking about crime, talking about crime, and I
and I mentioned that this morning the now America's Newsroom,
that's the name of the show, America's Newsroom. That's what
I now hear when I drive into the studio in
the morning on on Fox, on Sirius. And I was astonished.
(30:17):
Take that back. I wasn't styished. I was disheartened that
the first three or four news stories were crime stories.
You have Brown University, you had the Rob Reiner and
his wife's murder, Nick Reiner, you had Bondi Beach and
oh then the the scientists from m I T that
(30:39):
was murdered in Boston or Cambridge, wherever he lived. Those
are the four lead stories. And much like you talk
about the weather, when it comes to the crime, I'm
kind of like the same with weather, I am about
the crime.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Move on, move on.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
It's not like other people don't get murdered or other
people don't get assassinated.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
But here.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
We seem to or the left seems to want to
ignore that it's racist, it's anti semitic. And while the
other speech you still want to clamp down on. When
the Manchester cops finally clamp down on globalizing the ind
of FADA, you hmm, you're picking and choosing, because globalizing
(31:34):
the into FADA really is an incitement to violence, and
that speech. Forget that it's Manchester.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Let's just think.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
About the little old USA. Speech that incites violence is
not protected. Oh, you can say it, but it's not protected.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Betrayal: Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a brand new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack. And make sure to check out Seasons 1-4 of Betrayal, along with Betrayal Weekly Season 1.