June 18, 2025 • 23 mins
In this episode, Rafael Mangual discusses his journey into the world of crime and justice, influenced by his upbringing in New York City and his father's role as an NYPD detective. He reflects on the themes of his book, 'Criminal Injustice,' which critiques the progressive policies surrounding crime and policing, particularly in the wake of the Ferguson protests. Mangual shares insights on the reception of his work, the importance of addressing public misconceptions about crime, and his personal concerns as a parent. The Karol Markowicz Show is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Wednesday & Friday.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Marcowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
My guest today is Raphael Mangwel. Raphael is a Nick
Oonell Fellow and head of Research for the Manhattan Institute's
Policing and Public Safety Initiative, a contributing editor of City Journal,
and the author of the fantastic twenty twenty two book
Criminal Injustice. Hi, Rafael, so nice to have you on.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
So great to be with you. It works.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I've always been a big fan of your work as well.
We run into each other at events. But I kind
of feel like I don't know enough about how you
got into this world and what made you become a
crime fighter.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Yeah, it's you know, it's a question that I've gotten
a few times, and you know, it was a very
securitist route. I will say, I'm not your sort of
typical think tank scholar. You know, my father was a
was an MIPD detective. I think that had a lot
to do with it. You know, growing up in nineteen
eighties and nineties, New York City was on everybody's minds.
(01:01):
It was on every TV show, the you know which
Brooklyn best one?
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Yeah, so you know, I didn't grow up in the
worst part of Brooklyn.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
I mean, we lived on Ocean Parkway between Church and Cayton,
you know, so relatively.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Nice area, but we were very close to some rough ones.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Especially it was you know, Ocean Parkway returned Church and Cayton.
I hear you that it's not one of the worst
parts of Brooklyn, but many of the listeners listening to
this would be afraid on that block, so you know,
it was so you.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Know, I remember like the WP I X movie on
Saturdays was always like a Charles Bronson movie or something
like that.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Crime was just sort of the theme sure my childhood.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
So I think the combination of just living through that
time where there were, you know, twenty fifteen hundred murders
a year in New York City, knowing that my dad.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Was a cop, you know, so to me he was.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Batman right, and having that experience when I got to college,
I think is really kind of the cocktail that that
sort of set me on the path that I've been
on for the last ten years. You know. When I
got to college, I was introduced to protest culture. I
didn't really understand why kids who I regarded to be
(02:20):
incredibly fortunate, were angry at the world and felt like,
you know, they had to hold a sign in stage walkouts,
and you know, one of the topics that they were
always protesting was, you know, the police, the criminal justice
system writ large. And there's really one moment that kind
of I can sort of trace my my conservative thought
(02:41):
back to and and that was my sophomore year college.
Was in a sociology class and we had a guest speaker.
He was an ex con and he was incarcerated under
the Rockefeller drug laws in New York and came.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
To give a talk about his experience. And it was
really just a diatribe, right.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
It was like the mipd's racist, the criminal systems rigged,
and it's evil and it's terrible. And you know, I
just remember looking around as like two hundred and fifty
people in a lecture hall, and I just remember looking
around and thinking, seeing all these.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Heads nodding, and just you don't actually believe him, do you?
You know, I grew up with guys like that.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
It's like, we all know he's full of it, right, right, No.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
One's buying, but everyone was buying it.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
They weren't buying it, right, They weren't just nodding their
heads to get the A or whatever.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
It was like he was injecting drugs into their veins
and giving them an excuse to fall back on if
their dreams didn't pan out. And I just couldn't identify
with that. But at the same time, and a lot
of people don't know this about me, I was not
a very good student. I did not end up in
college because of my grades. In fact, I didn't even
(03:47):
apply to college. I ended up in college because I
played baseball, and that was it. Had no intention of
going to college when I was in high school. It
was really, you know, a kind of happy accident that
I'm doing and what I do now. So because I
didn't really study very much, because I wasn't, you know,
a bookish kind of kid, I didn't really have a
(04:08):
vocabulary with which to push back right years. And that
was the first time that I felt a genuine sense
of embarrassment that I couldn't engage intellectually who were my
age And I felt really insecure about that.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
And so I.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Remember I went home and I went on asked Jeeves,
which was the search engine of choice.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah Google of its day, pre Google.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
And I just searched like books everyone should read, and
you know, just started researching articles asking you questions about policing.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
And that's how I discovered City Journal and the Manhattan.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
City Really wow.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, by the time I.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Was like twenty years old, I knew what I wanted
to do and then I just had to figure out
how to do it. And so I'm a weird guy
in that sense that I've you know, wanted to work
for a thing, thank since about the time I was
still a teenager.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Wow, that's amazing that you found City Journal. I mean
it's a very important organization. Obviously. I love Manhattan Institute,
one of my absolute favorites, and I love City Journal.
All their stuff is so good. But and I was
a conservative in college. I was a political person. But
even I don't think I knew about City Journal. It's
not like a giant you know, I read like National Review,
(05:16):
I read like Weekly Standard at the time. But that's
really really impressive. So what is your book about? What
do you try to get into it in your book?
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah, Criminal Injustice was you know, it kind of grew
out of everything that had been happening in the post
Ferguson era, Right, I mean, you know, I've been at
the Manhattan Institute since twenty fifteen, and that was when,
you know, things had really started to take a downturn.
You know, the US saw a homicide spike on a
national level that year. We saw another one the following year.
In twenty sixteen. I had just moved back to New
(05:51):
York from Chicago, which in twenty sixteen saw a massive
homicide spike. The last few weeks in Chicago, I was
actually caught in the middle of a shooting while sitting
in a bar with my wife then fiance, So you know,
all of this stuff was kind of swrolling around in
my mind and that was why I was, you know,
writing so passionately.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Throughout those years about this issue.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
But then twenty twenty hit and it was like collectively
lost its mind on crime. You had people saying, you know,
defund the police and actually trying to do it. You
had these mass you know, releases of jail in mats
and prisoners, and I just remember thinking, like, how does
anyone expect this to go any other way? And I
realized that you know, books had been written, you know,
(06:36):
articles had been written, but it was like there was
a very obvious It was very obvious to me that
we had forgotten our history, right, that the nineteen nineties
crime decline, which to me I still regard as sort
of the greatest achievement in urban American history. How we
achieved that was forgotten. People grew uncomfortable with the posture
that you needed to take to keep crime under control,
(06:59):
and the reason that they were giving in terms of,
you know, why we should dismantle the criminal justice system.
We're defaying it or take power away from it all
came back to the race issue. And that really threw
me for a loop and drove me kind of crazy
because it was exactly the very people, the very communities
(07:20):
that these you know, sort of progressive activists said that
they were representing that were suffering the brunt of the
crime increases the result of their policies.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
So obvious, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
And so I just really wanted to bring that point
home before we you know, got past the tipping point,
although you could argue that we had already reached it
by then. You know.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Unfortunately, books, as you know, don't come out with great speed.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Yeah, So you might finish a book, you know, in
one year, but it might take another year. And some
change before it actually hits shelves, especially back in twenty twenty,
because there was all this stuff going on with lumber
and paper and you know.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Oh yeah, I remember that very well. Our book was
delayed also because of the paper.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
The paper. Yeah, it was why.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
I like, my book was printed in one country and
then shipped to another country to be bound and then ship.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
As wild you know.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
But but that was really the driving force. I wanted
to make the point that decarceration was a bad idea,
that depolicing was a bad idea. I wanted to attack
the assumptions undergirding those bad ideas, and I really wanted
to drill home the point that the communities that were
most vulnerable to crime in the places that adopted the
(08:34):
sort of progressive line on these issues, those were exactly
the very communities that people were speaking about through organizations
like Black Lives Matter and the NAACP and you know,
the Progressive Prosecutor movement. It was like, no, actually, if
you care about these communities, you have to address the
one thing that is affecting them more than anyone else, right,
(08:54):
I mean, like the black homicide rate by twenty twenty
was like ten times that white homicide rate for men.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
That's you know, that's crazy.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Would never accept that kind of disparity in any other
negative outcome, absolutely, right. And so I mean just look
at COVID, right, I mean, like there was the second
we realized there was a racial disparity in how COVID
affected certain groups of people, right, we immediately started creating
racial hierarchies for the dispensation of COVID, vaccines and drugs.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Right.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
And yet when it comes to the problem of homicide,
people lose their nerve. And I think that has to
do with you know, this idea that incarcerating people is bad,
that putting them in handcuffs, even by force, is bad.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
And I think at the root of that.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Is just a misunderstanding of how often those things happen, right,
I mean you ask that American like, yeah, they hear constantly,
you know, mass incarceration, mass incarceration. They think that everybody's
in prison in this country, and the reality is is that,
you know, the typical state prisoner in the US has
about a dozen prior arrests and about half a dozen
(10:01):
prior convictions. You know, this whole idea that we're denying
people second chances and that we just need.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Right. No, they get second, third, fourth chances in most places.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
You know, it's crazy, you know.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
And on top of that, not only do they have
those insane criminal histories, but the vast majority of them
are there for violence, which is another thing that boggles
people's mind because they think everybody's there for you know,
half a granders and they're only spending about sixteen months
behind bars before they're released. When you know, again people
(10:34):
have it in their head that you know, everyone's doing
ten twenty years. So you know, you combine that with
the misapprehensions about you know, policing and police use of force,
and I just felt like there was a massive gap
in public knowledge between you know, what the public thought
they knew in reality, but there was also a lot
of passion behind their policy prescriptions and the support for it,
(10:57):
and you know, passion mixed with ignorance.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
This is a real doctail.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
And so you know, I don't pretend to be someone
who can control the passions of the masses, but you know,
I wrote the book with the hope that I could
at least fill some of those knowledge gaps and address
some of the ignorance on that issue.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
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Speaker 1 (12:46):
Now. So three years later, in twenty twenty five, looking
back at your book, Criminal Injustice, do you feel like
you've won some number of battles that you were fighting.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
In that book? I do, I do.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
I can't tell you how many. I mean, Look, I
got a bunch of calls and emails and outreach from
you know, the people you'd expect, right, you know, police
organizations and prosecutor organizations, and all that was great. You know,
Republicans in Congress began having me testify on a regular
basis that you know. All of that was was good
(13:23):
and important. But the thing that was most gratifying to
me were the emails that I would get from somebody
who was not politically aligned, you know, from you know,
the high school teacher who said, you know, I saw
this and we've been talking about you know, BLM and
all this stuff in our history class, and I'm gonna
you know, I'm gonna I'm going to sign an excerpt
(13:43):
from your book because it really moved me and it
made me think twice about this. It was, you know,
the opportunities to engage with people on the other side
more directly. I got to debate people like Chase of
Woudin and you know, go out to Berkeley and debate
police abolitions, and you know, being in spaces where I
was going to reach audiences that I didn't always get
the opportunity to reach. And I felt like, you know,
(14:07):
that book and you know, the tour and its reception
was part and you know, maybe even helped create the
kind of tie turn that I think we're seeing now.
If you just look at the last election cycle, I mean,
it was kind of a one eighty on the crime
issue compared to you.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Know, twenty Nobody supported defunding the police. Nobody. They couldn't
find anybody who ever supported that crazy idea.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
And you had, you know, you know, Pamela Price, the
progressive prosecutor in Oakland, was recalled along with the anti
police mayor in Oakland, Shang Tao. You had George Gascone,
the radical prosecutor in Los Angeles, lose his reelection bid
to Nate Hockman, who ran on a sort of generic
tough on crime platform. California passed Proposition thirty six, rolling
(14:53):
back Proposition forty seven, reinstituting penalties for theft, you know
in various drug effic and says you had states around
the curd of Arizona past you know, ballot initiative one
of them, you know, would would give taxpayers a rebate
if the government failed to clear homeless encampments. Colorado passing
(15:14):
you know a truth and sentence.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
I mean, it was like and.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
The rhetoric difference. I mean, the fact that Gavin Newsome
is looking for the person who did.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
This, you know exactly.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
He can't find who supported these policies. Who was that
crazy person exactly?
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Yeah, Well, I think I feel like everyone just kind
of took a pill at the same time and just
ran on a bad trip.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
That's what it felt like watching from the outside in.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
But you know, but I do think that there's definitely
been a vibe shift, and I think I think part
of what's created that is that, you know, people like myself,
my colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, we've been able to
bring a lot more attention to you know, the problems
with the progressive policy prescriptions on crime.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I mean, you know, and it's not that.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
Hard to do, in part because, like when you have
a really bad no offense, almost inevitably the case that
the person who did it has you know, ten, fifteen,
twenty thirty prior arrests, highlighting that and you you know,
you make it clear that those aren't one offs, that
these are part that that's part of a systematic problem.
(16:15):
You know, regular people will always ask the question, you know,
when they see a story about a guy who committed
a double homicide and had thirty prior arrests, the first
question that any regular person will.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Ask is why was he out? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (16:30):
And I was he on our street?
Speaker 4 (16:32):
Right?
Speaker 3 (16:32):
And that's a question that they they've always asked. The
problem was that they thought for a long time that
people like that were always locked up. They thought, you
know that the guy with the long rap sheet, that
that was a one off. Our work really helped push
the idea that no, actually they are the rule, not
(16:54):
the exception. And you know, I'm hopeful that it will help,
you know, bring us back to the center on this issue,
and that that vibe shift will last for a good
long time.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitch Show. What do you worry about?
Speaker 2 (17:17):
I worry about my kids?
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Actually, you know that is uh yeah, it took about
two nanoseconds for that answer to pop into my head
when you ask that. It's one thing they don't tell
you about being a parent, which is amazing. I love
every bit of it. But I worry about my kids
more than I thought I would realize how much you
(17:39):
stress over all the possible outcomes with every actor. It's like, okay,
he's got swimming lessons, like you immediately start.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Thinking, oh my goodness, what if you try?
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Right, so, so, yeah, I worry about my kids. That
is the thing that consumes me. You know, it's not
debilitating obviously, right right, you know, but but yeah, it's
whatever decisions I'm making throughout the day, I'm almost always
trying to think about how is it going to affect
my kids? How is it going to help my kids?
(18:11):
You know, worrying about their safety, worrying about you know,
their future and the opportunities that they're going to have,
and you know, getting them into summer enrichment programs, just making.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Sure they have a better life than I had. You know,
it's that's the.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
That's the sort of barometer that I keep holding myself to.
And that's actually one of the things that's made parenting easier, right,
because it's like I don't agonize over decisions as much
as I might otherwise, because it really just comes down
to is this better for them than not? You know,
and that's usually a pretty easy decision to make.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
So so, yeah, my.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Kids, what advice would you give your sixteen year old self? Like,
what does Raphael at sixteen need to know that he didn't?
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Raphael at sixteen needed to know a lot. Raf at
sixteen was not on the best path. Like I said,
I was not a very good student, wasn't didn't really
know what my future was going to be. Sort of
rough plan back then was, you know, graduate high school
if I could, and you know, joined the military and
(19:15):
then figure out some kind of you know, blue collar job,
become a firefighter or cop or.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Something like that.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
And you know, there's nothing wrong with that, but I
just didn't really feel like I had directions, So I
would say it wasn't that wasn't smart, right, like I was.
Clearly I was smart, which is part of the problem huge.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Ego, and so I think the piece of advice I
would give is is take school more seriously. I closed
a lot of doors that.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
I could have opened instead, and my life could have
gone very differently. I mean, look, things turned out really well.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
I figured it out.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Obviously, I'm very happy with with where I am, but
I do feel like it took me a lot longer
to get here, in part because I never developed the habits,
the attitudes, the discipline.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
They it's hard when you're smart, that's really I tell
this to my kids all the time, because it's easy
to skate a lot of the time when you're smart
and you don't learn how to work hard. Especially in
my middle stone. I tell them all the time that
I know lots of smart people, lots of really smart
people who didn't get anywhere in life because they didn't
work and they didn't learn how to work. And unless
(20:29):
you do that, it doesn't matter how smart you are.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
It's exactly right. And skating was, you know something. I
took pride in same.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Same straight B student my whole life, with no effort.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
I I remember failing all four quarters of biology in
high school. Wow, and the teacher smugly, you know, telling
me something along the lines of, I'll see you in
summer school. I knew that if you've got an ever
better on the regions, that they couldn't send.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
You to summer school.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Oh, you're like, I got to And.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
So I just crammed for two weeks and I got
like an eighty seven or something like that, and uh,
finding her the first day of school the next year,
and I was like, Hey, I was summer school.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
So that was you. I just had a bad kicked
out of class all the time. I would get to
school all the time.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
I just you know, I didn't take advantage of the
opportunities that were that were out there, and that I've
always felt guilty about that, in part because my parents
worked really hard to move us from Brooklyn to Long Island,
and so, you know, always felt a little guilty about that.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
And here with your best tip for my listeners on
how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
You know, this is one of these questions where you'rettempted
to kind of put on your Internet guru hat.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Do it?
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Put on that hat?
Speaker 2 (21:46):
You know, I don't know. I was trying to think
about what I would say.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
You know, there are two things that I always tell people,
So I'm going to cop out and I'm going to.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Give you two instead of one.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
All right, let's go too.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
One is, you know, I don't think people realize how
much downtime they have that could be more productive, and
that's really changed. So you know, your commute home, your
gym time, your shower time, throw on a podcast. Like
the new media landscape is awesome, and there's so much informative.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Stuff out there.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
There are books that you can listen to, audiobooks. There's
so much of your downtime that you could be learning
something while doing the thing that you're doing, whether it's
like doing dishes or cleaning the house or you know,
going for a walk for the dog, Like, take advantage
double that time up and listen to something educational that
is pretty grul And then the other thing is is
(22:38):
go to the gym. You know, I've had a weird
relationship with the gym. I was an athlete in high
school and college, but after college there were periods of
years where I didn't do anything athletic, and you know,
especially during COVID and you know, with the book coming out.
There was like a four year period where I just
(22:59):
I was completely out of shape and I felt awful
all the time, and it was constantly stressed out, and
I forgot how much being in shape can help, just
you know, with your ability to deal with stress, with
how you feel, with your confidence level. You know, it's
like you have an opportunity to do something a few
(23:20):
days a week and you'll consistently see progress if you
do it. And it's just this like little reminder that
you know work is going to pay off no matter what, and.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
You know it's a getaway for me.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
It's been you know, a really good stress management tool,
and you know that has the bonus of keeping you healthy.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Yeah, I've heard of the gym. I just never quite
get there. Maybe I will after this show.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
It's easy to drive past. It's easy. It's easy to
miss it. You know, I saw you a long time.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Thank you so much. He's Rafel mind Well. Check out
his book Criminal Injustice. Thank you so much, traf Well,
thank you really appreciate it.
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Marcowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
My guest today is Raphael Mangwel. Raphael is a Nick
Oonell Fellow and head of Research for the Manhattan Institute's
Policing and Public Safety Initiative, a contributing editor of City Journal,
and the author of the fantastic twenty twenty two book
Criminal Injustice. Hi, Rafael, so nice to have you on.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
So great to be with you. It works.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I've always been a big fan of your work as well.
We run into each other at events. But I kind
of feel like I don't know enough about how you
got into this world and what made you become a
crime fighter.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Yeah, it's you know, it's a question that I've gotten
a few times, and you know, it was a very
securitist route. I will say, I'm not your sort of
typical think tank scholar. You know, my father was a
was an MIPD detective. I think that had a lot
to do with it. You know, growing up in nineteen
eighties and nineties, New York City was on everybody's minds.
(01:01):
It was on every TV show, the you know which
Brooklyn best one?
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Yeah, so you know, I didn't grow up in the
worst part of Brooklyn.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
I mean, we lived on Ocean Parkway between Church and Cayton,
you know, so relatively.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Nice area, but we were very close to some rough ones.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Especially it was you know, Ocean Parkway returned Church and Cayton.
I hear you that it's not one of the worst
parts of Brooklyn, but many of the listeners listening to
this would be afraid on that block, so you know,
it was so you.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Know, I remember like the WP I X movie on
Saturdays was always like a Charles Bronson movie or something
like that.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Crime was just sort of the theme sure my childhood.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
So I think the combination of just living through that
time where there were, you know, twenty fifteen hundred murders
a year in New York City, knowing that my dad.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Was a cop, you know, so to me he was.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Batman right, and having that experience when I got to college,
I think is really kind of the cocktail that that
sort of set me on the path that I've been
on for the last ten years. You know. When I
got to college, I was introduced to protest culture. I
didn't really understand why kids who I regarded to be
(02:20):
incredibly fortunate, were angry at the world and felt like,
you know, they had to hold a sign in stage walkouts,
and you know, one of the topics that they were
always protesting was, you know, the police, the criminal justice
system writ large. And there's really one moment that kind
of I can sort of trace my my conservative thought
(02:41):
back to and and that was my sophomore year college.
Was in a sociology class and we had a guest speaker.
He was an ex con and he was incarcerated under
the Rockefeller drug laws in New York and came.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
To give a talk about his experience. And it was
really just a diatribe, right.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
It was like the mipd's racist, the criminal systems rigged,
and it's evil and it's terrible. And you know, I
just remember looking around as like two hundred and fifty
people in a lecture hall, and I just remember looking
around and thinking, seeing all these.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Heads nodding, and just you don't actually believe him, do you?
You know, I grew up with guys like that.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
It's like, we all know he's full of it, right, right, No.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
One's buying, but everyone was buying it.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
They weren't buying it, right, They weren't just nodding their
heads to get the A or whatever.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
It was like he was injecting drugs into their veins
and giving them an excuse to fall back on if
their dreams didn't pan out. And I just couldn't identify
with that. But at the same time, and a lot
of people don't know this about me, I was not
a very good student. I did not end up in
college because of my grades. In fact, I didn't even
(03:47):
apply to college. I ended up in college because I
played baseball, and that was it. Had no intention of
going to college when I was in high school. It
was really, you know, a kind of happy accident that
I'm doing and what I do now. So because I
didn't really study very much, because I wasn't, you know,
a bookish kind of kid, I didn't really have a
(04:08):
vocabulary with which to push back right years. And that
was the first time that I felt a genuine sense
of embarrassment that I couldn't engage intellectually who were my
age And I felt really insecure about that.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
And so I.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Remember I went home and I went on asked Jeeves,
which was the search engine of choice.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah Google of its day, pre Google.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
And I just searched like books everyone should read, and
you know, just started researching articles asking you questions about policing.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
And that's how I discovered City Journal and the Manhattan.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
City Really wow.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, by the time I.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Was like twenty years old, I knew what I wanted
to do and then I just had to figure out
how to do it. And so I'm a weird guy
in that sense that I've you know, wanted to work
for a thing, thank since about the time I was
still a teenager.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Wow, that's amazing that you found City Journal. I mean
it's a very important organization. Obviously. I love Manhattan Institute,
one of my absolute favorites, and I love City Journal.
All their stuff is so good. But and I was
a conservative in college. I was a political person. But
even I don't think I knew about City Journal. It's
not like a giant you know, I read like National Review,
(05:16):
I read like Weekly Standard at the time. But that's
really really impressive. So what is your book about? What
do you try to get into it in your book?
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah, Criminal Injustice was you know, it kind of grew
out of everything that had been happening in the post
Ferguson era, Right, I mean, you know, I've been at
the Manhattan Institute since twenty fifteen, and that was when,
you know, things had really started to take a downturn.
You know, the US saw a homicide spike on a
national level that year. We saw another one the following year.
In twenty sixteen. I had just moved back to New
(05:51):
York from Chicago, which in twenty sixteen saw a massive
homicide spike. The last few weeks in Chicago, I was
actually caught in the middle of a shooting while sitting
in a bar with my wife then fiance, So you know,
all of this stuff was kind of swrolling around in
my mind and that was why I was, you know,
writing so passionately.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Throughout those years about this issue.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
But then twenty twenty hit and it was like collectively
lost its mind on crime. You had people saying, you know,
defund the police and actually trying to do it. You
had these mass you know, releases of jail in mats
and prisoners, and I just remember thinking, like, how does
anyone expect this to go any other way? And I
realized that you know, books had been written, you know,
(06:36):
articles had been written, but it was like there was
a very obvious It was very obvious to me that
we had forgotten our history, right, that the nineteen nineties
crime decline, which to me I still regard as sort
of the greatest achievement in urban American history. How we
achieved that was forgotten. People grew uncomfortable with the posture
that you needed to take to keep crime under control,
(06:59):
and the reason that they were giving in terms of,
you know, why we should dismantle the criminal justice system.
We're defaying it or take power away from it all
came back to the race issue. And that really threw
me for a loop and drove me kind of crazy
because it was exactly the very people, the very communities
(07:20):
that these you know, sort of progressive activists said that
they were representing that were suffering the brunt of the
crime increases the result of their policies.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
So obvious, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
And so I just really wanted to bring that point
home before we you know, got past the tipping point,
although you could argue that we had already reached it
by then. You know.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Unfortunately, books, as you know, don't come out with great speed.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Yeah, So you might finish a book, you know, in
one year, but it might take another year. And some
change before it actually hits shelves, especially back in twenty twenty,
because there was all this stuff going on with lumber
and paper and you know.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Oh yeah, I remember that very well. Our book was
delayed also because of the paper.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
The paper. Yeah, it was why.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
I like, my book was printed in one country and
then shipped to another country to be bound and then ship.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
As wild you know.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
But but that was really the driving force. I wanted
to make the point that decarceration was a bad idea,
that depolicing was a bad idea. I wanted to attack
the assumptions undergirding those bad ideas, and I really wanted
to drill home the point that the communities that were
most vulnerable to crime in the places that adopted the
(08:34):
sort of progressive line on these issues, those were exactly
the very communities that people were speaking about through organizations
like Black Lives Matter and the NAACP and you know,
the Progressive Prosecutor movement. It was like, no, actually, if
you care about these communities, you have to address the
one thing that is affecting them more than anyone else, right,
(08:54):
I mean, like the black homicide rate by twenty twenty
was like ten times that white homicide rate for men.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
That's you know, that's crazy.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Would never accept that kind of disparity in any other
negative outcome, absolutely, right. And so I mean just look
at COVID, right, I mean, like there was the second
we realized there was a racial disparity in how COVID
affected certain groups of people, right, we immediately started creating
racial hierarchies for the dispensation of COVID, vaccines and drugs.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Right.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
And yet when it comes to the problem of homicide,
people lose their nerve. And I think that has to
do with you know, this idea that incarcerating people is bad,
that putting them in handcuffs, even by force, is bad.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
And I think at the root of that.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Is just a misunderstanding of how often those things happen, right,
I mean you ask that American like, yeah, they hear constantly,
you know, mass incarceration, mass incarceration. They think that everybody's
in prison in this country, and the reality is is that,
you know, the typical state prisoner in the US has
about a dozen prior arrests and about half a dozen
(10:01):
prior convictions. You know, this whole idea that we're denying
people second chances and that we just need.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Right. No, they get second, third, fourth chances in most places.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
You know, it's crazy, you know.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
And on top of that, not only do they have
those insane criminal histories, but the vast majority of them
are there for violence, which is another thing that boggles
people's mind because they think everybody's there for you know,
half a granders and they're only spending about sixteen months
behind bars before they're released. When you know, again people
(10:34):
have it in their head that you know, everyone's doing
ten twenty years. So you know, you combine that with
the misapprehensions about you know, policing and police use of force,
and I just felt like there was a massive gap
in public knowledge between you know, what the public thought
they knew in reality, but there was also a lot
of passion behind their policy prescriptions and the support for it,
(10:57):
and you know, passion mixed with ignorance.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
This is a real doctail.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
And so you know, I don't pretend to be someone
who can control the passions of the masses, but you know,
I wrote the book with the hope that I could
at least fill some of those knowledge gaps and address
some of the ignorance on that issue.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
We'll have more with Rafael Manguel. But first, folks, we're
seeing something truly disturbing. Anti Semitism is on the rise
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(11:34):
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Speaker 1 (12:46):
Now. So three years later, in twenty twenty five, looking
back at your book, Criminal Injustice, do you feel like
you've won some number of battles that you were fighting.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
In that book? I do, I do.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
I can't tell you how many. I mean, Look, I
got a bunch of calls and emails and outreach from
you know, the people you'd expect, right, you know, police
organizations and prosecutor organizations, and all that was great. You know,
Republicans in Congress began having me testify on a regular
basis that you know. All of that was was good
(13:23):
and important. But the thing that was most gratifying to
me were the emails that I would get from somebody
who was not politically aligned, you know, from you know,
the high school teacher who said, you know, I saw
this and we've been talking about you know, BLM and
all this stuff in our history class, and I'm gonna
you know, I'm gonna I'm going to sign an excerpt
(13:43):
from your book because it really moved me and it
made me think twice about this. It was, you know,
the opportunities to engage with people on the other side
more directly. I got to debate people like Chase of
Woudin and you know, go out to Berkeley and debate
police abolitions, and you know, being in spaces where I
was going to reach audiences that I didn't always get
the opportunity to reach. And I felt like, you know,
(14:07):
that book and you know, the tour and its reception
was part and you know, maybe even helped create the
kind of tie turn that I think we're seeing now.
If you just look at the last election cycle, I mean,
it was kind of a one eighty on the crime
issue compared to you.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Know, twenty Nobody supported defunding the police. Nobody. They couldn't
find anybody who ever supported that crazy idea.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
And you had, you know, you know, Pamela Price, the
progressive prosecutor in Oakland, was recalled along with the anti
police mayor in Oakland, Shang Tao. You had George Gascone,
the radical prosecutor in Los Angeles, lose his reelection bid
to Nate Hockman, who ran on a sort of generic
tough on crime platform. California passed Proposition thirty six, rolling
(14:53):
back Proposition forty seven, reinstituting penalties for theft, you know
in various drug effic and says you had states around
the curd of Arizona past you know, ballot initiative one
of them, you know, would would give taxpayers a rebate
if the government failed to clear homeless encampments. Colorado passing
(15:14):
you know a truth and sentence.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
I mean, it was like and.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
The rhetoric difference. I mean, the fact that Gavin Newsome
is looking for the person who did.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
This, you know exactly.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
He can't find who supported these policies. Who was that
crazy person exactly?
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Yeah, Well, I think I feel like everyone just kind
of took a pill at the same time and just
ran on a bad trip.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
That's what it felt like watching from the outside in.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
But you know, but I do think that there's definitely
been a vibe shift, and I think I think part
of what's created that is that, you know, people like myself,
my colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, we've been able to
bring a lot more attention to you know, the problems
with the progressive policy prescriptions on crime.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I mean, you know, and it's not that.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
Hard to do, in part because, like when you have
a really bad no offense, almost inevitably the case that
the person who did it has you know, ten, fifteen,
twenty thirty prior arrests, highlighting that and you you know,
you make it clear that those aren't one offs, that
these are part that that's part of a systematic problem.
(16:15):
You know, regular people will always ask the question, you know,
when they see a story about a guy who committed
a double homicide and had thirty prior arrests, the first
question that any regular person will.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Ask is why was he out? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (16:30):
And I was he on our street?
Speaker 4 (16:32):
Right?
Speaker 3 (16:32):
And that's a question that they they've always asked. The
problem was that they thought for a long time that
people like that were always locked up. They thought, you
know that the guy with the long rap sheet, that
that was a one off. Our work really helped push
the idea that no, actually they are the rule, not
(16:54):
the exception. And you know, I'm hopeful that it will help,
you know, bring us back to the center on this issue,
and that that vibe shift will last for a good
long time.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitch Show. What do you worry about?
Speaker 2 (17:17):
I worry about my kids?
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Actually, you know that is uh yeah, it took about
two nanoseconds for that answer to pop into my head
when you ask that. It's one thing they don't tell
you about being a parent, which is amazing. I love
every bit of it. But I worry about my kids
more than I thought I would realize how much you
(17:39):
stress over all the possible outcomes with every actor. It's like, okay,
he's got swimming lessons, like you immediately start.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Thinking, oh my goodness, what if you try?
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Right, so, so, yeah, I worry about my kids. That
is the thing that consumes me. You know, it's not
debilitating obviously, right right, you know, but but yeah, it's
whatever decisions I'm making throughout the day, I'm almost always
trying to think about how is it going to affect
my kids? How is it going to help my kids?
(18:11):
You know, worrying about their safety, worrying about you know,
their future and the opportunities that they're going to have,
and you know, getting them into summer enrichment programs, just making.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Sure they have a better life than I had. You know,
it's that's the.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
That's the sort of barometer that I keep holding myself to.
And that's actually one of the things that's made parenting easier, right,
because it's like I don't agonize over decisions as much
as I might otherwise, because it really just comes down
to is this better for them than not? You know,
and that's usually a pretty easy decision to make.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
So so, yeah, my.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Kids, what advice would you give your sixteen year old self? Like,
what does Raphael at sixteen need to know that he didn't?
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Raphael at sixteen needed to know a lot. Raf at
sixteen was not on the best path. Like I said,
I was not a very good student, wasn't didn't really
know what my future was going to be. Sort of
rough plan back then was, you know, graduate high school
if I could, and you know, joined the military and
(19:15):
then figure out some kind of you know, blue collar job,
become a firefighter or cop or.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Something like that.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
And you know, there's nothing wrong with that, but I
just didn't really feel like I had directions, So I
would say it wasn't that wasn't smart, right, like I was.
Clearly I was smart, which is part of the problem huge.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Ego, and so I think the piece of advice I
would give is is take school more seriously. I closed
a lot of doors that.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
I could have opened instead, and my life could have
gone very differently. I mean, look, things turned out really well.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
I figured it out.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Obviously, I'm very happy with with where I am, but
I do feel like it took me a lot longer
to get here, in part because I never developed the habits,
the attitudes, the discipline.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
They it's hard when you're smart, that's really I tell
this to my kids all the time, because it's easy
to skate a lot of the time when you're smart
and you don't learn how to work hard. Especially in
my middle stone. I tell them all the time that
I know lots of smart people, lots of really smart
people who didn't get anywhere in life because they didn't
work and they didn't learn how to work. And unless
(20:29):
you do that, it doesn't matter how smart you are.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
It's exactly right. And skating was, you know something. I
took pride in same.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Same straight B student my whole life, with no effort.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
I I remember failing all four quarters of biology in
high school. Wow, and the teacher smugly, you know, telling
me something along the lines of, I'll see you in
summer school. I knew that if you've got an ever
better on the regions, that they couldn't send.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
You to summer school.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Oh, you're like, I got to And.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
So I just crammed for two weeks and I got
like an eighty seven or something like that, and uh,
finding her the first day of school the next year,
and I was like, Hey, I was summer school.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
So that was you. I just had a bad kicked
out of class all the time. I would get to
school all the time.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
I just you know, I didn't take advantage of the
opportunities that were that were out there, and that I've
always felt guilty about that, in part because my parents
worked really hard to move us from Brooklyn to Long Island,
and so, you know, always felt a little guilty about that.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
And here with your best tip for my listeners on
how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
You know, this is one of these questions where you'rettempted
to kind of put on your Internet guru hat.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Do it?
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Put on that hat?
Speaker 2 (21:46):
You know, I don't know. I was trying to think
about what I would say.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
You know, there are two things that I always tell people,
So I'm going to cop out and I'm going to.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Give you two instead of one.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
All right, let's go too.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
One is, you know, I don't think people realize how
much downtime they have that could be more productive, and
that's really changed. So you know, your commute home, your
gym time, your shower time, throw on a podcast. Like
the new media landscape is awesome, and there's so much informative.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Stuff out there.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
There are books that you can listen to, audiobooks. There's
so much of your downtime that you could be learning
something while doing the thing that you're doing, whether it's
like doing dishes or cleaning the house or you know,
going for a walk for the dog, Like, take advantage
double that time up and listen to something educational that
is pretty grul And then the other thing is is
(22:38):
go to the gym. You know, I've had a weird
relationship with the gym. I was an athlete in high
school and college, but after college there were periods of
years where I didn't do anything athletic, and you know,
especially during COVID and you know, with the book coming out.
There was like a four year period where I just
(22:59):
I was completely out of shape and I felt awful
all the time, and it was constantly stressed out, and
I forgot how much being in shape can help, just
you know, with your ability to deal with stress, with
how you feel, with your confidence level. You know, it's
like you have an opportunity to do something a few
(23:20):
days a week and you'll consistently see progress if you
do it. And it's just this like little reminder that
you know work is going to pay off no matter what, and.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
You know it's a getaway for me.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
It's been you know, a really good stress management tool,
and you know that has the bonus of keeping you healthy.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Yeah, I've heard of the gym. I just never quite
get there. Maybe I will after this show.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
It's easy to drive past. It's easy. It's easy to
miss it. You know, I saw you a long time.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Thank you so much. He's Rafel mind Well. Check out
his book Criminal Injustice. Thank you so much, traf Well,
thank you really appreciate it.
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Clay Travis
Buck Sexton
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