May 23, 2024 • 29 mins
Heather Mac Donald joins the show to discuss the looming crime catastrophe in California. An update on the woman who crashed into cars on the 405 after driving the wrong way on the freeway. Portland District Attorney Mike Schmidt has lost his reelection.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Can if I am six forty you're listening to the
John Cobel Podcast on the iHeartRadio app. We're on from
one until four and then after four o'clock John Cobelt
Show on demand on the iHeart app. And we covered
quite a bit today. Did a thorough examination of Gene
Block testifying as the UCLA Chancellor and making a fool
of himself, and then the outbreak of the new UCLA protests,
(00:24):
and you could if you listen to the podcasts, you
could hear it happening live with Chris Adler on the scene.
Let's go now, I'm gonna go on the phone with
Heather McDonald. We've had around a number of times over
the years. She's a writer at the Manhattan Institute, writes
for the City Journal, and she does a lot of research.
And she has a new piece called California's Looming Crime Catastrophe.
(00:50):
And you may have thought we are living through the
worst of California's crime catastrophe. No, there's more coming potentially
and it would be even worse, and we're going to
get Heather on now to talk about it.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Heather MacDonald, welcome, Thanks.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
For having me on. John. Great to be with you.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
So when I first saw the headline, I'm thinking, now,
what could be worse than what we're living through now?
And then after reading the story, you sold me, man,
this is bad stuff coming now. It can get a
little complicated, So I know you can explain this, so
you know, the average person can understand. There was this
legislative change to the criminal code and it's a lot
(01:29):
of bad guys are potentially going to get resentenced and
maybe get out early. So give us the whole story
as best you can.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Well, this is a law passed in twenty twenty that
basically says that if you're a black criminal, you can
defeat your arrest, your prosecution. You're sentencing by saying that
you're black and alleging that in the past black defendants
were unfairly treated by the criminal justice system. You make
(01:58):
that charge with phonies to sticks again based not on
your current treatment, but on the treatment of people in
the past, and you potentially, under this so called Racial
Justice Act, a get out of jail free card. This
allows people that are currently facing prosecution to defeat their prosecution,
(02:20):
and as of this year, it is now retroactive, so
minority criminals who are now sitting in a California prison
can go to court and say, in the past, California
treated black defendants unfairly, therefore I should be let out.
And the amazing thing about this, John is that it
(02:41):
does not require a defendant to show that he has
been treated unfairly. All he needs to allege is that
other defendants were treated unfairly. This would be like if
you were yourself accused of a crime and the prosecutor said, well, well,
I don't have to prove that you're guilty, but I
(03:02):
know that in the past people of your same race
were guilty, Therefore you're guilty. This is just as much
a travesty of due process of law and justice as
such a prosecution would be.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
I realized you just said this, but I just have
to say it out loud again because it's so insane.
So a black defendant can come to a judge and
say that other people of my race have been treated
unfairly and prosecuted unfairly, therefore I have too, and I
deserve a new sentence.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
And that's right. And he doesn't have to prove.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
He doesn't even in any way have to indicate that
he was treated wrongly. It's just that other people at
another time who happened to share his skin color were
treated unfairly.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Say any listener, any listener who has any trace of skepticism,
would say, you are lying, but I am telling you
for batim. They actually said it is too hard. That
the drafters of this law, a San Jose Congressman Ash
Calraw and his supporters said it's too hard to prove
(04:16):
discrimination in an individual case. That was the standard by
a Supreme Court president that if a defendant wants to
say I'm being treated with racial discrimination, he has to
show that he particularly has been treated with racial discrimination.
It's not enough to say that in the past black
(04:37):
defendants were mistreated. The law explicitly, deliberately overturns that precedent
and says, no longer does a defendant need to show
that the police officer who arrested him was biased, that
the prosecutor was biased, that the judge was biased. They
could all be immaculately colorblind. And John, that is the
(04:58):
case in almost all the criminal justice is in today,
and he still gets off free.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
You mentioned and you wrote about this Supreme Court decision
which said that you the defendant has to prove that
you suffered discrimination when you were convicted of a crime. Well,
if that is a Supreme Court case that stands as law,
how does this California law even exists, let alone be implemented.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Well, this gets into sort of the legal fictions of
the law, and it gets very complicated. The Supreme Court
case McCleskey v. Camp, and anybody went to law school
probably knows the case from nineteen eighty seven is if
you are suing under the equal protection clause of the Constitution,
and you're saying I suffered a constitutional violation and therefore
(05:48):
I should have redressed under the fourteenth Amendment. This law,
it's a California state statute, and so a defendant can say,
I'm not making a constitutional equal protection claim, I'm making
a state law claim under the Racial Justice Act, and
(06:09):
therefore the state gets to create completely new standards.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
For this and this and this is going to hold.
This is I know this law passed several years ago.
This is actually going to stick.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
It's been sticking. The decisions that have been coming out
of California courts are absolutely appalling. John. They allow the
defense bar, They allow public defenders to demand a decade's
worth of documents from overwork to District Attorney's offices in
(06:42):
order to make these phony statistical claims. This is a
way leaving aside just the fact of the ridiculous standard
of proof, which is zero. It's a way of burying
District Attorney's offices under document requests that they have no
funding to fulfill. The state legislature appropriated money for the
Public Defenders Offices to bring Racial Justice Act complaints. It
(07:08):
appropriated no money to District Attorney's offices to try and
respond to these complaints.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Can you continue for another segment, of course, Okay, We'll
continue with HEATHERN. McDonald from the Manhattan Institute, and she
writes in the City Journal about California's looming crime CATASTROPHOIX.
I think she explained it extremely well. We will talk
more on it when we come back.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
We continue now with Heather McDonald, writer and a researcher
for a Manhattan Institute. It writes for the City Journal.
She's authored many books and many articles. Her latest piece
is entitled California Is Looming Crime Catastrophe. The easiest way
to explain this is, if you are a convicted black felon,
you can go to court now for resentencing based on
(08:05):
racial bias. Not against you, but in the past there
was bias against maybe other people in your racial group.
You don't need any evidence that had happened in your
particular case, just they used statistical evidence from other people,
maybe from a long time ago. This really got through
(08:26):
the legislature somehow, and we're going to talk with more
about this with Heather. Heather, I mean, from what I'm
reading here, this thing got through the legislature and wasn't
even debated publicly, and it seems like not everybody in
Sacramento even knew this got through.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Yeah, it was the last minute deal after the George
Floyd race riots. And they used, you know, questionable parliamentary
procedures such as gutt and the mend where you take
one law that's sort of gotten through committees but it's languishing,
and then you take out the text and you put
in new text. And the police unions were diverted with
(09:06):
other things and this past, and the author himself says, well,
they didn't really know what we did, but now they
sure do. And the defense bar, the ACLU representative have said,
this is the potential to unravel an unjust system. This
is the dawn of a new era. They are the
defense bar and the race activists are just absolutely ecstatic
(09:31):
about this law. And John, you've been you gave it
actually too much credulity. You've presented it in far too
positive a way. There's two problems. There's the problem first
that it does not require a defendant to show that
his particular prosecution has been racially biased. But the statistical
(09:53):
evidence itself that he's allowed to present to allege that
in the past there wereroblems in the criminal justice system
is completely phony. It is completely statistically weak unjustified, because
in order to show that there's been racial bias in
the past, you need to show that let's say a
(10:15):
group of black defendants and a group of white defendants
were equally situated, they committed crimes of equal heinousness, they
had criminal histories of equal heinousness, and yet the black
defendants received much worse sentences. If that were the case,
then you could start to say, boy, that looks like
(10:36):
that we've got a problem here. But in order to
make that judgment that there was racial bias in the
treatment of these two groups. They need to be similarly situated.
They need to have the same criminal histories. They need
to have committed crimes of equal severity. Those two requirements
have been thrown out. There was a landmark ruling in
(10:57):
twenty twenty three out of Contra Costa County in California v. Wyndham,
where the judge basically said, there's no showing here that
we have equal histories. But I am not going to
assume that blacks commit worse crimes than anybody else. Therefore,
I'm going to assume there's racial justice even though you
have not shown that the two groups are similarly situated.
(11:21):
And so now all a defense attorney needs to do
is get together a comparison group for black defendants. They
can be made up of completely differently situated groups, and
if they have different sentences, that's going to prove by
us that is not a legitimate process. It is a
violation of the most basic rules of comparing like to like.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Is there any way to get this reversed or thrown
out by a court? With all that you explain here,
it seems like somebody would have filed a lawsuit about
it to stop it.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
I agree, because it you would think it would present
various problems of equal protection, not under the case we
were talking about before, but now going forward, that black
defendants get to make arguments that are not available to
other people. But there's been no there's been no cases
filed so far. I know a few groups in California
(12:20):
now that I've alerted people to this that are looking
into it. But would I would hope, but I'm not
sure there've been.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
I just would think that most people, black, white, and
every other possibility would agree that you should be sentenced.
You should be convicted and sentence based on what you did,
not the color of your skin. That should have nothing
to do with the conviction or the sentencing. I think
that would get overwhelming support from the public. That's why
it's hard to believe that this would stand well.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
This law is the realization of the academic theory of
systemic racism and critical race theory. There's lots of people
in academia who believe that everything about the criminal justice
system is systemically racist, and so it's superfluous to prove
in any individual case actual bias because we just know
(13:11):
that bias is baked into the system. So there's a
lot of people who believe that, but I agree with you,
there's a lot of people who don't.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
And of course any people in academia who are in
that business believe in it, or at least they're making
good money believing in it. But any normal person listening
right now, black or white, would say this is nuts.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Well, I hope that if somebody doesn't take this to court.
It seems to me that this is a good case
for a referendum to repeal this law because the public.
It's not even the public who's unaware of it. When
I was researching this, most lawyers in the state are
unaware of it. It's been operating underneath the radar. But
(13:53):
you've had rulings like if a police officer uses the
phrase high crime area to describe a crime area as
one of the factors that went into his decision to
make a stop of a federal felon on parole with
a gun in his car, that is a sign of
racial bias, according to race expert Dante King. So and
(14:15):
if a judge says, well, I don't really think there's
an it's necessarily going to be the case that every
group commits crime at equal rates. That grounds for disqualifying.
A San Diego Superior Court judge said, I'm not sure
I believe the criminal justice system is systemically biased, and
(14:35):
I need more proof that you know there's discrimination against
black defendants, and then that their higher rates of incarceration
is not a response to their higher rates of criminal offending.
Side note that is the case. The reason blacks are
in prison at much higher rates is because they commit
crime at much higher rates in California. In Los Angeles,
(14:56):
for example, blacks are homicide suspects at fifty seven times
the rate of whites. Anyway, the San Diego judge who
expressed a sentilla of skepticism about the academic theory of
systemic racism has now been disbarred from hearing Racial Justice
Acted cases because unless you're on board with critical race
(15:17):
theory as a judge, now that means you are not
really legitimately part of the criminal justice system. This thing
is moving very fast, John, and it's time that we
start speaking the truth about crime, criminal offending, criminal victimization.
We do have racial disparities and incarceration. Nobody can deny
that the facts are there. But the facts are also
(15:40):
there that blacks are victimized at much higher rates, and
they're committing crime at much higher rates. In Los Angeles again,
blacks commit robbery at thirty six times the rate of whites.
How do we know that it's not the allegedly racist police,
it's the victims of and witnesses to those robberies, who
are themselves, often minorities, giving descriptions to the police. The
(16:04):
bodies don't lie. Black juveniles are shot at one hundred
times the rate of white juveniles in the post George
Floyd race riot era. The bodies don't lie. Who's shooting
those black juveniles at one hundred times the rate at
which white juveniles are being shot other blacks. If whites
were shooting blacks at that rate, we would be hearing
(16:26):
about that every single night on MSNBC and CNBC, and
we're not because it's not happening. Biden's story go ahead.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
No, I just have to have to take a break
out to do the news. I thank you for coming on,
and we'll talk again about this, all right. Thanks done,
all right, Heather McDonald from the City Journal and the
Manhattan Institute.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI AM.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Six forty five everywhere on the iHeartRadio app Connway coming
up at four o'clock. If you missed today's show, you
ought to hear what we just did with Heather McDonald
from a city journal in the Manhattan Institute about this
law that got snuck in a few years ago, and
it's going to allow some violent felons to get resentenced.
(17:14):
It takes a little bit to explain, so I would
listen to the podcast the three o'clock hour when you
get a chance. Do you remember the woman who crashed
into all the cars on the four or five going
the wrong way?
Speaker 2 (17:28):
You love to see her picture.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Oh, she's got the craziest picture after the crashing into
those bloody face, bloody face eyes bugging out. I judge people,
if their eyes bug out, you do. Yeah, that is
a sign of insanity. I don't know, well drug squads.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
That what if somebody's really scared.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
But it just means they're all jacked up emotionally, right. Yeah,
and at the sight of bugged out eyes, I run,
I get out of the room.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah. In fact, you don't have bugdad eyes. I'll tell
you if you get them though.
Speaker 5 (18:04):
Okay, thanks please do, because I don't think that's an.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Attractive look on me, because then you'll be scary.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Well, the La Times did a profile with a lot
of details on this woman's life. Her name is Lisa
Ann Heflin, and she came here all the way from Oakville, Missouri,
just to commit all the damage that she committed. We
should go back to how this started. It was four
point thirty in the morning on Friday, and she was
(18:31):
living in her car. I'll tell you how she got
here and it ended up in her car. But she
was in her car and she started screaming, and the
other homeless people I they called police.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
They were scared. Yes, well they saw the eyes.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
So they went to third and Rose Avenue in Venice,
of course, and she started arguing with police, and she
was standing next to a white van parked diagonally toward
the curb, said one homeless guy who was living in
his van. She woke me up from a dead sleep
yelling in the middle of the street, and police tried
(19:08):
to calm her, but she continued to continued to argue.
A second person, Janis James, a musician, living in her
car around the corner.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
All the witnesses are people who live in their cars.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Saw the woman jump into the van, read the engine
several times. Pulling out of the parking lot, Florida, reverse
rammed the police suv, knocked the suv back about three feet,
and then she sped down the street fifty miles an
hour and the police started to chasing her. She's driving erradically,
crashing into other police vehicles. Finally got onto the four
(19:46):
h five and went in the wrong direction before crashing
into two other cars and a tractor trailer.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
And that's the part that we all saw on television,
white the chase. Okay, what led up to that moment?
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Well, she, by the way, she's charged with ten counts
of assault on a peace officer, four counts assault with
the deadly weapon, one count of fleeing, driving recklessly, one
count of hit and run, driving one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars worth of damage, nine cops injured, and five
police vehicles smashed up. That is some morning the lady had.
(20:21):
She's a mother of four. She left all her kids
behind in Missouri.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
She's a mother of four.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Uh huh. Her kids range from elementary school to teenager.
She did not have full custody of them. Sounds like
maybe a marriage busted up. I do want to talk
to the husband. I can't imagine what was going on there.
She decided she was going to drive out to la
and she chronicled her journey on Facebook, X and TikTok
(20:53):
and in her post, she's wearing her hair long and dark.
Now when you saw her her her hair was very
short and colored reddish.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Looked like maybe something.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Yeah, some of it looks like dyed pink unless that's
the light, she wrote in her TikTok bio Chasing my
dreams as a California daydreamer. She had photos of her
kids on social media, and her friends started posting saying,
have you heard from you in almost a week? Getting worried,
hope you're okay. She wrote dozens of messages a day,
(21:28):
links to videos to Eminem, Tupac, Shakur, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg.
This lady was a rap fiend. Then she started writing
crazy in capital letters. I got news for you. That
road you don't follow the laws of jay walking illegal
might be the death of you. I read that verbatim.
(21:49):
Do not come speak to me for any reason, she
wrote in capital letters and then she started comparing herself
to Tupac Shakur and Eminem and claimed she was persecuted,
started arguing about music on the radio, started making comments
about attempted murder on the road and other threats. Accused
unnamed people of doing terrible things to get closer to
(22:09):
cozying up to celebrities. She ended with the question do
you like my van? One of one of the guys
in the neighborhood, who was living in his car, said
she appeared to be under the influence of drugs and
was incoherent at times. You can't help but to speak
someone like that when you're all parked close together. Do
(22:38):
you know when people lose their minds? They come here?
They don't they don't. They don't go to Montana the weather.
They don't go to Nebraska, North Carolina.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
They come here with sunny California. They go to.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Venice because they figured out in Venice there are no laws.
Nobody's gonna stop You gonna meet other crazy people who'll
be happy to argue with you in the streets at
four in the morning.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
O my god, have you have you ever gone to
Rose Street?
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yes?
Speaker 5 (23:03):
I have yet, yet I know somebody that that owned
a salon owns well they may still it might it
may be a rental.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Uh yeah, I don't know what it's like now, but
it was one of the worst places in Venice for
a long time.
Speaker 5 (23:20):
And those homes on the canals, they're so expensive.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
But then you're wow, and you know, the only the
only thing that made any sense in this whole story
was Tracy Park, the city councilman, councilwoman, and she's my
city councilwoman, and she wrote, this is the failed social
experiment unfolding in real time. This is not a housing crisis,
(23:44):
it's a behavior crisis. We need the resources and legal
tools tools to get unstable, dangerous people out of our neighborhoods.
Those who are a few services continually cannot choose to
remain on the streets, terrorizing neighborhoods and endangering lives. And
that's the key to this is you can't let this
crazy lady live in the street and act like a lunatic.
(24:07):
You have to force her into some kind of treatment
program or jail. And the day they do that in
Los Angeles is the day a lot of this stuff
goes away. You just have the guys with the guns
show up and say sorry, you can't live like this.
People want to sleep in the neighborhood. You got your choice.
You go to a mental health clinic or you go
to jail. You choose. It's not hard, it's really easy.
(24:30):
And it is a failed social experiment. All right, more
coming up.
Speaker 4 (24:34):
You're listening to John Cobbels on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Conway's coming up in just a few minutes. Well, here
is good news. If it could happen in Portland, it
could happen anywhere. We talked about it earlier this week,
and it's official now as of yesterday. The district Attorney
Mike Schmidt in Portland, Oregon, specifically, it's Multnoma County lost.
And Mike Schmidt was the George Gascone of Portland. He
(25:03):
was one of these neutered Weiener millennial hipster guys with
the beard and the glasses, the whole look right. And
he cut the number of prosecutions where they usually averaged
about sixteen thousand a year to six thousand. And it
has been the worst disaster in Portland, which was like
(25:24):
San Francisco, formerly a nice city.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Homicides hit a record high.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
They had to declare a state of an emergency because
all the people dead in the streets from fentanyl. The
cops quit in huge numbers, and they all blamed it
on Mike Schmidt because of his anti police rhetorican policies.
Not only that, twenty two thousand people moved out of
(25:52):
Portland because they'd had enough. So the replacement is Nathan Vasquez,
a centrist and a former Republican.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Does this sound familiar? This is going to be a
story in.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
LA when Nathan Hawkman beats Gascone and his campaign was
to end public drug use and drug dealing, repair relations
with the police, and return the District Attorney's office to
prosecuting crimes. Oh hold on, grab my heart, nearly lost consciousness. Yes,
(26:30):
we have a district attorney and wants to prosecute crimes.
So now Chesaboudine got kicked out in San Francisco and
in Portland you've got Mike Schmidt has been kicked out
by the voters. And will LA make three in November?
If they do it in Portland and San Francisco, they're
going to do it here because, believe it or not,
(26:50):
we were only half as crazy as those two.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Suits and there is no Conway. There's no Conway. I
was lying, it's Mark Tomash.
Speaker 6 (26:58):
Yeah, well Conway is away, so I am going to
be sitting in. Although I loved your show, I almost
wish you could just continue. Yeah, good insights, you got
good gas, you.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Got a good you know, back and forth, going for
the right price. It's radio.
Speaker 6 (27:16):
We're all for sale.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah I know. Yeah, that's what I always tell people.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Did you do this? Would you do that? I said,
there's a price on everything.
Speaker 6 (27:22):
UCLA, I asked, Matt. I just passed from the hallway
met Money Smith from KLAC.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
I said.
Speaker 6 (27:28):
He said, oh, you're here for Conway. I said, yeah,
does he want to come in, you know, just step through?
He said, I only do paid appearances. So it's very
much in keeping with what you just said.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Oh, he hosted a couple of days, I know, and
so he started getting paid for this. This is and
it's like he's not going back to being an unpaid guest.
Speaker 6 (27:46):
Sure the double dipping he's gotten used to it U
c LA. This has been testimony that was much anticipated
by the Chancellor, the testimony before Congress. So Steve Gregory
has monitor every second of it. But we're certainly aware
of the broad strokes, but the actual back and forth,
we'll talk a little bit about that. These are the
pro Palestine Yeah, protesters, of course.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
That was entertaining testimony today.
Speaker 6 (28:11):
And once you yeah, I mean, I don't know how
these university presidents and chancellors don't think.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
He was getting hit from both sides. He was getting
hit from right and the left there, which.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Because there's not a right or left.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
No, because the Jews and the Palestinian kids were all
getting beat up.
Speaker 6 (28:28):
Sure, yeah, truy, and you go, I don't know and
wrapped up in it is everything wrong, you know? So
the federal government agreeing to a fifteen million dollars fine
for the disasters to railment at East Palestine, Ohio. Yes,
the other Palestine, Yeah, and the other Palestine did no,
no protesters, but lawyers involved in that one. Pico Rivera's
(28:50):
in the news. The DMV's in the news are going
to big all right, John, let's get it going.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Thompson in for Conway. Michael Krazer has the news live
and he can't.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Fight twenty four hour newser Hey, you've been listening to
the John Cobalt Show podcast. You can always hear the
show live on KFI Am six forty from one to
four pm every Monday through Friday, and of course anytime
on demand on the iHeartRadio app
Can if I am six forty you're listening to the
John Cobel Podcast on the iHeartRadio app. We're on from
one until four and then after four o'clock John Cobelt
Show on demand on the iHeart app. And we covered
quite a bit today. Did a thorough examination of Gene
Block testifying as the UCLA Chancellor and making a fool
of himself, and then the outbreak of the new UCLA protests,
(00:24):
and you could if you listen to the podcasts, you
could hear it happening live with Chris Adler on the scene.
Let's go now, I'm gonna go on the phone with
Heather McDonald. We've had around a number of times over
the years. She's a writer at the Manhattan Institute, writes
for the City Journal, and she does a lot of research.
And she has a new piece called California's Looming Crime Catastrophe.
(00:50):
And you may have thought we are living through the
worst of California's crime catastrophe. No, there's more coming potentially
and it would be even worse, and we're going to
get Heather on now to talk about it.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Heather MacDonald, welcome, Thanks.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
For having me on. John. Great to be with you.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
So when I first saw the headline, I'm thinking, now,
what could be worse than what we're living through now?
And then after reading the story, you sold me, man,
this is bad stuff coming now. It can get a
little complicated, So I know you can explain this, so
you know, the average person can understand. There was this
legislative change to the criminal code and it's a lot
(01:29):
of bad guys are potentially going to get resentenced and
maybe get out early. So give us the whole story
as best you can.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Well, this is a law passed in twenty twenty that
basically says that if you're a black criminal, you can
defeat your arrest, your prosecution. You're sentencing by saying that
you're black and alleging that in the past black defendants
were unfairly treated by the criminal justice system. You make
(01:58):
that charge with phonies to sticks again based not on
your current treatment, but on the treatment of people in
the past, and you potentially, under this so called Racial
Justice Act, a get out of jail free card. This
allows people that are currently facing prosecution to defeat their prosecution,
(02:20):
and as of this year, it is now retroactive, so
minority criminals who are now sitting in a California prison
can go to court and say, in the past, California
treated black defendants unfairly, therefore I should be let out.
And the amazing thing about this, John is that it
(02:41):
does not require a defendant to show that he has
been treated unfairly. All he needs to allege is that
other defendants were treated unfairly. This would be like if
you were yourself accused of a crime and the prosecutor said, well, well,
I don't have to prove that you're guilty, but I
(03:02):
know that in the past people of your same race
were guilty, Therefore you're guilty. This is just as much
a travesty of due process of law and justice as
such a prosecution would be.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
I realized you just said this, but I just have
to say it out loud again because it's so insane.
So a black defendant can come to a judge and
say that other people of my race have been treated
unfairly and prosecuted unfairly, therefore I have too, and I
deserve a new sentence.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
And that's right. And he doesn't have to prove.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
He doesn't even in any way have to indicate that
he was treated wrongly. It's just that other people at
another time who happened to share his skin color were
treated unfairly.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Say any listener, any listener who has any trace of skepticism,
would say, you are lying, but I am telling you
for batim. They actually said it is too hard. That
the drafters of this law, a San Jose Congressman Ash
Calraw and his supporters said it's too hard to prove
(04:16):
discrimination in an individual case. That was the standard by
a Supreme Court president that if a defendant wants to
say I'm being treated with racial discrimination, he has to
show that he particularly has been treated with racial discrimination.
It's not enough to say that in the past black
(04:37):
defendants were mistreated. The law explicitly, deliberately overturns that precedent
and says, no longer does a defendant need to show
that the police officer who arrested him was biased, that
the prosecutor was biased, that the judge was biased. They
could all be immaculately colorblind. And John, that is the
(04:58):
case in almost all the criminal justice is in today,
and he still gets off free.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
You mentioned and you wrote about this Supreme Court decision
which said that you the defendant has to prove that
you suffered discrimination when you were convicted of a crime. Well,
if that is a Supreme Court case that stands as law,
how does this California law even exists, let alone be implemented.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Well, this gets into sort of the legal fictions of
the law, and it gets very complicated. The Supreme Court
case McCleskey v. Camp, and anybody went to law school
probably knows the case from nineteen eighty seven is if
you are suing under the equal protection clause of the Constitution,
and you're saying I suffered a constitutional violation and therefore
(05:48):
I should have redressed under the fourteenth Amendment. This law,
it's a California state statute, and so a defendant can say,
I'm not making a constitutional equal protection claim, I'm making
a state law claim under the Racial Justice Act, and
(06:09):
therefore the state gets to create completely new standards.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
For this and this and this is going to hold.
This is I know this law passed several years ago.
This is actually going to stick.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
It's been sticking. The decisions that have been coming out
of California courts are absolutely appalling. John. They allow the
defense bar, They allow public defenders to demand a decade's
worth of documents from overwork to District Attorney's offices in
(06:42):
order to make these phony statistical claims. This is a
way leaving aside just the fact of the ridiculous standard
of proof, which is zero. It's a way of burying
District Attorney's offices under document requests that they have no
funding to fulfill. The state legislature appropriated money for the
Public Defenders Offices to bring Racial Justice Act complaints. It
(07:08):
appropriated no money to District Attorney's offices to try and
respond to these complaints.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Can you continue for another segment, of course, Okay, We'll
continue with HEATHERN. McDonald from the Manhattan Institute, and she
writes in the City Journal about California's looming crime CATASTROPHOIX.
I think she explained it extremely well. We will talk
more on it when we come back.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
We continue now with Heather McDonald, writer and a researcher
for a Manhattan Institute. It writes for the City Journal.
She's authored many books and many articles. Her latest piece
is entitled California Is Looming Crime Catastrophe. The easiest way
to explain this is, if you are a convicted black felon,
you can go to court now for resentencing based on
(08:05):
racial bias. Not against you, but in the past there
was bias against maybe other people in your racial group.
You don't need any evidence that had happened in your
particular case, just they used statistical evidence from other people,
maybe from a long time ago. This really got through
(08:26):
the legislature somehow, and we're going to talk with more
about this with Heather. Heather, I mean, from what I'm
reading here, this thing got through the legislature and wasn't
even debated publicly, and it seems like not everybody in
Sacramento even knew this got through.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Yeah, it was the last minute deal after the George
Floyd race riots. And they used, you know, questionable parliamentary
procedures such as gutt and the mend where you take
one law that's sort of gotten through committees but it's languishing,
and then you take out the text and you put
in new text. And the police unions were diverted with
(09:06):
other things and this past, and the author himself says, well,
they didn't really know what we did, but now they
sure do. And the defense bar, the ACLU representative have said,
this is the potential to unravel an unjust system. This
is the dawn of a new era. They are the
defense bar and the race activists are just absolutely ecstatic
(09:31):
about this law. And John, you've been you gave it
actually too much credulity. You've presented it in far too
positive a way. There's two problems. There's the problem first
that it does not require a defendant to show that
his particular prosecution has been racially biased. But the statistical
(09:53):
evidence itself that he's allowed to present to allege that
in the past there wereroblems in the criminal justice system
is completely phony. It is completely statistically weak unjustified, because
in order to show that there's been racial bias in
the past, you need to show that let's say a
(10:15):
group of black defendants and a group of white defendants
were equally situated, they committed crimes of equal heinousness, they
had criminal histories of equal heinousness, and yet the black
defendants received much worse sentences. If that were the case,
then you could start to say, boy, that looks like
(10:36):
that we've got a problem here. But in order to
make that judgment that there was racial bias in the
treatment of these two groups. They need to be similarly situated.
They need to have the same criminal histories. They need
to have committed crimes of equal severity. Those two requirements
have been thrown out. There was a landmark ruling in
(10:57):
twenty twenty three out of Contra Costa County in California v. Wyndham,
where the judge basically said, there's no showing here that
we have equal histories. But I am not going to
assume that blacks commit worse crimes than anybody else. Therefore,
I'm going to assume there's racial justice even though you
have not shown that the two groups are similarly situated.
(11:21):
And so now all a defense attorney needs to do
is get together a comparison group for black defendants. They
can be made up of completely differently situated groups, and
if they have different sentences, that's going to prove by
us that is not a legitimate process. It is a
violation of the most basic rules of comparing like to like.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Is there any way to get this reversed or thrown
out by a court? With all that you explain here,
it seems like somebody would have filed a lawsuit about
it to stop it.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
I agree, because it you would think it would present
various problems of equal protection, not under the case we
were talking about before, but now going forward, that black
defendants get to make arguments that are not available to
other people. But there's been no there's been no cases
filed so far. I know a few groups in California
(12:20):
now that I've alerted people to this that are looking
into it. But would I would hope, but I'm not
sure there've been.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
I just would think that most people, black, white, and
every other possibility would agree that you should be sentenced.
You should be convicted and sentence based on what you did,
not the color of your skin. That should have nothing
to do with the conviction or the sentencing. I think
that would get overwhelming support from the public. That's why
it's hard to believe that this would stand well.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
This law is the realization of the academic theory of
systemic racism and critical race theory. There's lots of people
in academia who believe that everything about the criminal justice
system is systemically racist, and so it's superfluous to prove
in any individual case actual bias because we just know
(13:11):
that bias is baked into the system. So there's a
lot of people who believe that, but I agree with you,
there's a lot of people who don't.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
And of course any people in academia who are in
that business believe in it, or at least they're making
good money believing in it. But any normal person listening
right now, black or white, would say this is nuts.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Well, I hope that if somebody doesn't take this to court.
It seems to me that this is a good case
for a referendum to repeal this law because the public.
It's not even the public who's unaware of it. When
I was researching this, most lawyers in the state are
unaware of it. It's been operating underneath the radar. But
(13:53):
you've had rulings like if a police officer uses the
phrase high crime area to describe a crime area as
one of the factors that went into his decision to
make a stop of a federal felon on parole with
a gun in his car, that is a sign of
racial bias, according to race expert Dante King. So and
(14:15):
if a judge says, well, I don't really think there's
an it's necessarily going to be the case that every
group commits crime at equal rates. That grounds for disqualifying.
A San Diego Superior Court judge said, I'm not sure
I believe the criminal justice system is systemically biased, and
(14:35):
I need more proof that you know there's discrimination against
black defendants, and then that their higher rates of incarceration
is not a response to their higher rates of criminal offending.
Side note that is the case. The reason blacks are
in prison at much higher rates is because they commit
crime at much higher rates in California. In Los Angeles,
(14:56):
for example, blacks are homicide suspects at fifty seven times
the rate of whites. Anyway, the San Diego judge who
expressed a sentilla of skepticism about the academic theory of
systemic racism has now been disbarred from hearing Racial Justice
Acted cases because unless you're on board with critical race
(15:17):
theory as a judge, now that means you are not
really legitimately part of the criminal justice system. This thing
is moving very fast, John, and it's time that we
start speaking the truth about crime, criminal offending, criminal victimization.
We do have racial disparities and incarceration. Nobody can deny
that the facts are there. But the facts are also
(15:40):
there that blacks are victimized at much higher rates, and
they're committing crime at much higher rates. In Los Angeles again,
blacks commit robbery at thirty six times the rate of whites.
How do we know that it's not the allegedly racist police,
it's the victims of and witnesses to those robberies, who
are themselves, often minorities, giving descriptions to the police. The
(16:04):
bodies don't lie. Black juveniles are shot at one hundred
times the rate of white juveniles in the post George
Floyd race riot era. The bodies don't lie. Who's shooting
those black juveniles at one hundred times the rate at
which white juveniles are being shot other blacks. If whites
were shooting blacks at that rate, we would be hearing
(16:26):
about that every single night on MSNBC and CNBC, and
we're not because it's not happening. Biden's story go ahead.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
No, I just have to have to take a break
out to do the news. I thank you for coming on,
and we'll talk again about this, all right. Thanks done,
all right, Heather McDonald from the City Journal and the
Manhattan Institute.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI AM.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Six forty five everywhere on the iHeartRadio app Connway coming
up at four o'clock. If you missed today's show, you
ought to hear what we just did with Heather McDonald
from a city journal in the Manhattan Institute about this
law that got snuck in a few years ago, and
it's going to allow some violent felons to get resentenced.
(17:14):
It takes a little bit to explain, so I would
listen to the podcast the three o'clock hour when you
get a chance. Do you remember the woman who crashed
into all the cars on the four or five going
the wrong way?
Speaker 2 (17:28):
You love to see her picture.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Oh, she's got the craziest picture after the crashing into
those bloody face, bloody face eyes bugging out. I judge people,
if their eyes bug out, you do. Yeah, that is
a sign of insanity. I don't know, well drug squads.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
That what if somebody's really scared.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
But it just means they're all jacked up emotionally, right. Yeah,
and at the sight of bugged out eyes, I run,
I get out of the room.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah. In fact, you don't have bugdad eyes. I'll tell
you if you get them though.
Speaker 5 (18:04):
Okay, thanks please do, because I don't think that's an.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Attractive look on me, because then you'll be scary.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Well, the La Times did a profile with a lot
of details on this woman's life. Her name is Lisa
Ann Heflin, and she came here all the way from Oakville, Missouri,
just to commit all the damage that she committed. We
should go back to how this started. It was four
point thirty in the morning on Friday, and she was
(18:31):
living in her car. I'll tell you how she got
here and it ended up in her car. But she
was in her car and she started screaming, and the
other homeless people I they called police.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
They were scared. Yes, well they saw the eyes.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
So they went to third and Rose Avenue in Venice,
of course, and she started arguing with police, and she
was standing next to a white van parked diagonally toward
the curb, said one homeless guy who was living in
his van. She woke me up from a dead sleep
yelling in the middle of the street, and police tried
(19:08):
to calm her, but she continued to continued to argue.
A second person, Janis James, a musician, living in her
car around the corner.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
All the witnesses are people who live in their cars.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Saw the woman jump into the van, read the engine
several times. Pulling out of the parking lot, Florida, reverse
rammed the police suv, knocked the suv back about three feet,
and then she sped down the street fifty miles an
hour and the police started to chasing her. She's driving erradically,
crashing into other police vehicles. Finally got onto the four
(19:46):
h five and went in the wrong direction before crashing
into two other cars and a tractor trailer.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
And that's the part that we all saw on television,
white the chase. Okay, what led up to that moment?
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Well, she, by the way, she's charged with ten counts
of assault on a peace officer, four counts assault with
the deadly weapon, one count of fleeing, driving recklessly, one
count of hit and run, driving one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars worth of damage, nine cops injured, and five
police vehicles smashed up. That is some morning the lady had.
(20:21):
She's a mother of four. She left all her kids
behind in Missouri.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
She's a mother of four.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Uh huh. Her kids range from elementary school to teenager.
She did not have full custody of them. Sounds like
maybe a marriage busted up. I do want to talk
to the husband. I can't imagine what was going on there.
She decided she was going to drive out to la
and she chronicled her journey on Facebook, X and TikTok
(20:53):
and in her post, she's wearing her hair long and dark.
Now when you saw her her her hair was very
short and colored reddish.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Looked like maybe something.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Yeah, some of it looks like dyed pink unless that's
the light, she wrote in her TikTok bio Chasing my
dreams as a California daydreamer. She had photos of her
kids on social media, and her friends started posting saying,
have you heard from you in almost a week? Getting worried,
hope you're okay. She wrote dozens of messages a day,
(21:28):
links to videos to Eminem, Tupac, Shakur, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg.
This lady was a rap fiend. Then she started writing
crazy in capital letters. I got news for you. That
road you don't follow the laws of jay walking illegal
might be the death of you. I read that verbatim.
(21:49):
Do not come speak to me for any reason, she
wrote in capital letters and then she started comparing herself
to Tupac Shakur and Eminem and claimed she was persecuted,
started arguing about music on the radio, started making comments
about attempted murder on the road and other threats. Accused
unnamed people of doing terrible things to get closer to
(22:09):
cozying up to celebrities. She ended with the question do
you like my van? One of one of the guys
in the neighborhood, who was living in his car, said
she appeared to be under the influence of drugs and
was incoherent at times. You can't help but to speak
someone like that when you're all parked close together. Do
(22:38):
you know when people lose their minds? They come here?
They don't they don't. They don't go to Montana the weather.
They don't go to Nebraska, North Carolina.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
They come here with sunny California. They go to.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Venice because they figured out in Venice there are no laws.
Nobody's gonna stop You gonna meet other crazy people who'll
be happy to argue with you in the streets at
four in the morning.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
O my god, have you have you ever gone to
Rose Street?
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yes?
Speaker 5 (23:03):
I have yet, yet I know somebody that that owned
a salon owns well they may still it might it
may be a rental.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Uh yeah, I don't know what it's like now, but
it was one of the worst places in Venice for
a long time.
Speaker 5 (23:20):
And those homes on the canals, they're so expensive.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
But then you're wow, and you know, the only the
only thing that made any sense in this whole story
was Tracy Park, the city councilman, councilwoman, and she's my
city councilwoman, and she wrote, this is the failed social
experiment unfolding in real time. This is not a housing crisis,
(23:44):
it's a behavior crisis. We need the resources and legal
tools tools to get unstable, dangerous people out of our neighborhoods.
Those who are a few services continually cannot choose to
remain on the streets, terrorizing neighborhoods and endangering lives. And
that's the key to this is you can't let this
crazy lady live in the street and act like a lunatic.
(24:07):
You have to force her into some kind of treatment
program or jail. And the day they do that in
Los Angeles is the day a lot of this stuff
goes away. You just have the guys with the guns
show up and say sorry, you can't live like this.
People want to sleep in the neighborhood. You got your choice.
You go to a mental health clinic or you go
to jail. You choose. It's not hard, it's really easy.
(24:30):
And it is a failed social experiment. All right, more
coming up.
Speaker 4 (24:34):
You're listening to John Cobbels on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Conway's coming up in just a few minutes. Well, here
is good news. If it could happen in Portland, it
could happen anywhere. We talked about it earlier this week,
and it's official now as of yesterday. The district Attorney
Mike Schmidt in Portland, Oregon, specifically, it's Multnoma County lost.
And Mike Schmidt was the George Gascone of Portland. He
(25:03):
was one of these neutered Weiener millennial hipster guys with
the beard and the glasses, the whole look right. And
he cut the number of prosecutions where they usually averaged
about sixteen thousand a year to six thousand. And it
has been the worst disaster in Portland, which was like
(25:24):
San Francisco, formerly a nice city.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Homicides hit a record high.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
They had to declare a state of an emergency because
all the people dead in the streets from fentanyl. The
cops quit in huge numbers, and they all blamed it
on Mike Schmidt because of his anti police rhetorican policies.
Not only that, twenty two thousand people moved out of
(25:52):
Portland because they'd had enough. So the replacement is Nathan Vasquez,
a centrist and a former Republican.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Does this sound familiar? This is going to be a
story in.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
LA when Nathan Hawkman beats Gascone and his campaign was
to end public drug use and drug dealing, repair relations
with the police, and return the District Attorney's office to
prosecuting crimes. Oh hold on, grab my heart, nearly lost consciousness. Yes,
(26:30):
we have a district attorney and wants to prosecute crimes.
So now Chesaboudine got kicked out in San Francisco and
in Portland you've got Mike Schmidt has been kicked out
by the voters. And will LA make three in November?
If they do it in Portland and San Francisco, they're
going to do it here because, believe it or not,
(26:50):
we were only half as crazy as those two.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Suits and there is no Conway. There's no Conway. I
was lying, it's Mark Tomash.
Speaker 6 (26:58):
Yeah, well Conway is away, so I am going to
be sitting in. Although I loved your show, I almost
wish you could just continue. Yeah, good insights, you got
good gas, you.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Got a good you know, back and forth, going for
the right price. It's radio.
Speaker 6 (27:16):
We're all for sale.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah I know. Yeah, that's what I always tell people.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Did you do this? Would you do that? I said,
there's a price on everything.
Speaker 6 (27:22):
UCLA, I asked, Matt. I just passed from the hallway
met Money Smith from KLAC.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
I said.
Speaker 6 (27:28):
He said, oh, you're here for Conway. I said, yeah,
does he want to come in, you know, just step through?
He said, I only do paid appearances. So it's very
much in keeping with what you just said.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Oh, he hosted a couple of days, I know, and
so he started getting paid for this. This is and
it's like he's not going back to being an unpaid guest.
Speaker 6 (27:46):
Sure the double dipping he's gotten used to it U
c LA. This has been testimony that was much anticipated
by the Chancellor, the testimony before Congress. So Steve Gregory
has monitor every second of it. But we're certainly aware
of the broad strokes, but the actual back and forth,
we'll talk a little bit about that. These are the
pro Palestine Yeah, protesters, of course.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
That was entertaining testimony today.
Speaker 6 (28:11):
And once you yeah, I mean, I don't know how
these university presidents and chancellors don't think.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
He was getting hit from both sides. He was getting
hit from right and the left there, which.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Because there's not a right or left.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
No, because the Jews and the Palestinian kids were all
getting beat up.
Speaker 6 (28:28):
Sure, yeah, truy, and you go, I don't know and
wrapped up in it is everything wrong, you know? So
the federal government agreeing to a fifteen million dollars fine
for the disasters to railment at East Palestine, Ohio. Yes,
the other Palestine, Yeah, and the other Palestine did no,
no protesters, but lawyers involved in that one. Pico Rivera's
(28:50):
in the news. The DMV's in the news are going
to big all right, John, let's get it going.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Thompson in for Conway. Michael Krazer has the news live
and he can't.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Fight twenty four hour newser Hey, you've been listening to
the John Cobalt Show podcast. You can always hear the
show live on KFI Am six forty from one to
four pm every Monday through Friday, and of course anytime
on demand on the iHeartRadio app
The John Kobylt Show News
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John Kobylt
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