Show-Me Institute Podcast
Addressing Crime in Our Cities with Charles Fain Lehman
In this episode, Susan Pendergrass speaks with Charles Fain Lehman, fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about his recent report titled "Doing Less with Less Crime and Punishment in Washington, DC." They explore the factors contributing to the rise in violent crime and public disorder, the impact of reduced law enforcement capacity, the broader implications for public safety, potential reforms to improve the criminal justice system, strategies for better resource allocation, and more.
Produced by Show-Me Opportunity
- Broadcast on:
- 27 Aug 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) - Thank you so much for joining us. Joining me on the Show Me In Stu podcast, Charles Lehman of Manhattan Institute. I appreciate you coming here to talk about something that we talk about quite regularly. Show Me In Stu, which is crime, crime in our cities because Missouri has a couple of cities that have serious crime problems. And you just did a really interesting analysis of Washington DC recently, which I appreciate you coming to talk about. So thanks for joining us today. - Absolutely. Thank you for having me on. Glad to be here. - Of course. So I lived in DC through part of the '80s and the '90s. And when it was kind of the murder capital, I remember the murder capital phrase, but also it seemed like they brought in a chief of police and I don't remember her name, Chip Blontair. And she seemingly made some major changes and crime began to decline, is that right? - Yeah, I mean, what I would say is that DC enjoyed the urban renaissance of the 1990s and early 2000s, lots of other cities did. And then the caveat to that is that, look, DC has, you know, you think that cities have been different underlying propensities to violence and a lot of what's going on. There is often, do you have an entrenched gang culture and do the gangs perpetuate themselves? When you look at, you know, when you look at gang violence in major cities, it's often guys are today fighting beasts from 40, 50 years ago. And so like DC still has the same gangs and the same gang problems. The markets have moved. They're more suppressed, but the intrinsic tendency is still there. - Sure. And so then I also lived in the city of St. Louis. And I guess when I lived in DC, I felt a little bit safer to me. Certainly public transportation felt safer to me, but I didn't realize that now DC is back up as being a high crime city. - Yeah, that's correct. And I think what's notable about DC is, you know, most cities saw a large increase in certain kinds of crime in 2020, 2021, 2022 by the sort of best statistics we have. This number started to come down in 23, 24. It seems like they're coming down pretty quickly. They're looking specifically at the murder rate, although the other big indicator is automotive thefts. That's, I think, a persistent problem still in many places. And then you have specific problems across a number of other jurisdictions, varies. But I think the notable thing that you see is that when other cities were declining, when they were getting back down to those 2018, 2019 levels, DC was still elevated. And now they're doing a little bit better. It seems like the murder wave is still burning out. But, you know, as I look at it, the city still has a pretty serious A, how much I'd still see this be elevated. B, auto theft is down a little bit from peak peak, but still elevated where it was. And C, across a variety of measures, the city has a pretty serious public disorder problem. There, you know, if you're a tourist coming to DC and you get off at Union Station, still one of the first things that you see is homeless encampments across from Union Station. That's the nation's capital. You see it in public bathrooms. You see it in public drug use. You see a variety of indicators that say to me, the city has this disorder problem on top of this homicide problem. And the auto theft problems, which aren't getting better, but are not getting better, got worse for longer than other cities and still not as better as they are in other cities. - So what's going wrong? What is DC? I do feel like they did turn it around at one point. And like, what happened? How did it start to fall apart? - Yeah. I mean, you know, and the story that you can tell about the moment that you're talking about in the 90s, holds for DC as well, which is, you know, if I wanted to summarize what happened in American policing in the 1990s, American law and crime justice enforcement in the 1990s, I would say in one way, you know, one phrase, we got more cops and we used them better. The story is a little more complicated than that. And I can tell different dimensions. If you'd like, I think that's true across the board. And what we've started to see in major cities across the country is for a host of reasons, staffing is declining. That is, of course, driven in part and exacerbated by the protests against police in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. But it is also sort of, you know, there are structural factors like the wave of hiring that we did in the 90s was exactly 25 years ago. And that's like the police officer's career is 25 years. So we're hitting this retirement in Trump anyway. The point there is the same thing is true in DC. And I think DC is really interesting because that dynamic of a collapse in the capacity of the system holds not just in policing in DC, but across the board. So what do I mean by that? You talk about DCPD, which is down 500 sworn officers is at its lowest level of sworn officers, I think in 50 years, that's a huge problem. - Why, why is it? - That surprises me and it confuses me. Why? Why are they not hiring? I mean, they did hiring surge in the 90s and crime went down. - They are. The problem is that, well, so they're trying to hire and they've jacked up hiring bonuses substantially. The problem is that you are competing against every other major city for a shrinking pool of officers. And the pool officer's shrinking A, because of the retirement phenomenon, B, because of the George Floyd phenomenon, C, because by many measures, it's a great time to be a blue collar worker. Your unemployment is down, wages are going up. The guy, the entity that loses out in that labor market is public sector employment. Like, policing is a great job for somebody without a college to grade. That guy, you're gonna get a stable career, you're gonna make six figures, you're gonna have a pension, you have a union, it's a great job. When you get a better job in the private sector, people start from the private sector at the margin. So it's a really hard problem. And this is the problem that everywhere has. Everywhere has this problem. - They're trying to hire. - They're trying to hire. If you look at the counties surrounding D.C., many of them are down from peaks of sworn officers as well. They're doing the same competition. You know, people are moving to Florida, they're moving to reddish states, or they're getting out of the gig altogether. They don't wanna be in policing anymore. That's a hiring problem. It's also a retention problem. This is really in the weeds, but I think it's important to think about it on this level. 'Cause you know, it is, it's an employment problem. The policing sector of research forum, which is a policing, it's what it sounds like, they're think tank, they're good interesting guys, has an estimate that's basically in policing people are out within seven years, or they stay for the duration. People are dropping out within seven years more frequently than they used to. They're not seeing it as much of a career as they used to. - Like teachers. - Yeah, exactly like teachers. You're getting people cycling into private sector instead. - So what about the other like sort of general atmosphere of public disorder? I mean, St. Louis, I always have said that like, when people stop stopping at stop signs, or crosswalks, or stop lights, or using the correct lane, I mean, they might go down the other lane, then you've kinda lost the rule of law, and then you get an increase in crime across the board. Do you think that's happening in DC? - Yes, I think one, and traffic is a good example of the phenomenon that you're talking about, because traffic is often one of the first things to go by the wayside when you lose policing capacity, because you're gonna focus your resources in on a limited set of problems, and you're not gonna spend your time doing a traffic enforcement, which like seems fine until it isn't. So like, I looked at the numbers for arrests in DC, and in 2019, there were 4,000 traffic arrests in 2023, four years later, last year, last year, last year, 2023, there were about 900. So that's, you know, there are 77% fewer traffic arrests. Yeah, that's the traffic violations. - Wow. - Yeah, driving while intoxicated down from 1300 to 600, that's sort of 50% declined. - No one's doing it anymore, I guess. - Nobody's doing it. Then they don't have the capacity to let a man power to do it. But I do wanna say, you know, it's not just the cops, it's also, you look at something like, you can look at staffing or level of activity within staffing, 'cause the number of arrests is done by cops, arrests per cop is down as well. - Why would that be? - But you also look at something like, - Why would that be? - I think that they, it's a little hard to say, I think I can speculatively say that they feel less reason to be proactive, because there's a period of time when the council was signaling that productivity would not be rewarded. I think they've gotten a little more willing to be proactive, but they're still trying to get back, get them back up off the bench, and there's been a change in chief. So there's that level of activity. You also look at the chief prosecutor for DC, is the U.S. attorney. He was attorney for the District of Columbia, it's a federally appointed prosecutor. At one point, he was declining to prosecute half of cases, half of felony cases. He was declined to prosecute three quarters of mystery. - He started telling like a broken record, do you know why that is? But why is that? I mean-- - No, I think that's a great question. You know, the best guess is potentially ideological. He maintains, you know, his office is trained for resources. Maybe this is true. He's still able to find resources to prosecute every guy who is near the Capitol on January 6th, and I'm kind of like-- - Yeah. - Prioritization, you know, I get the concerns, but priorities. - I'm not gonna say, just that St. Louis is just-- - Right. - Yeah, we also had the, we had the sort of politically active prosecutor situation as well. Which, you know, just makes people feel less safe because then if you know that if you commit a crime you're less likely to either get arrested or if you get arrested to actually be prosecuted, then it just really removes the barrier committing crime. - I think it's just specifically the incentives for frequent recidivists or career offenders. Like, you know, the average guy on the street doesn't know the behavior of the prosecutor, but the guy who goes to jail every couple of months, he knows when things change. He's aware of it. And I think that's, you know, that's a shift. So I think, you know, the prosecutor judges, I think last I checked, I haven't updated this recently, the last I checked, they were down something like 15% of judges in the criminal court. They have not filled the slots. And that's because of good luck in the Senate. And like slow, slow, slow walking, they have a problem with truancy, something like 40% of students are truant, which again, is a national problem, but is, you know, when you talk about autotheft, the people who are committing autotheft are mostly juveniles, they're mostly minors. And like, you want to not commit autotheft, they need to be in school, the resident court jacking. And then homeless encampments, the city was doing camp clearances for a while and then it kind of just stopped. And I think that's a resource problem as well. - You know, why they stopped, was it an optics thing or? - Yeah, it's not totally, that's also not totally clear to me. I think, you know, it's camp clearance is often a battle and so it needs sustained political attention to get it through. You know, camp clearances are a good important thing to do. It's important for public health, it's important for public safety. But you often have to fight an uphill battle to actually do it. And so like, if the mayor loses focus or the council loses focus, you know, agency responsible loses focus, all of a sudden, you know, the camp, camp clearance is a priority anymore. - Yeah, one thing I want to talk about real quick before we move on to solutions, because you've convinced me that it's bad. But this idea that you have data that allows it to specifically pinpoint types of crimes to certain blocks of the city or certain, honestly, relatively small groups of people who are committing most of the crimes, why can't we just target those blocks and target those people? - Yeah, you can't, and it works. It's an effective strategy. I think that the answer in general context is that you get a lot of what I might euphemistically term civil society pushback, which is to say the ACLU hates when people do that. They don't like hotspots policing, they don't like focus deterrence. Those are the criminological side terms for what they would refer to as over policing or police surveillance or police targeting and harassment. - But give me a sense or give our listeners a sense on some of these crimes, like how concentrated? I mean, your paper was fascinating. - Yeah, and you can do this in basically any city. The rule of thumb, the number in DC is between 300 and 500 individuals are responsible for about two thirds of gun violence in the city. Pick a city, you can do the same analysis in Chicago. There's like a thousand of them. I think in San Francisco, eight gangs are responsible for the law and authority of gun violence. I'm sure I could find similar numbers to St. Louis if I wouldn't look for it if they've been made publicly available. This is called the law of crime, or this is related to the law of crime concentration, which says that's spatial crime concentration about 10% of blocks or something like half the crime in your city. And the way to think about that phenomenon is just most people and most places don't commit or are not involved in crime. Crime is a case of something, in fact, many things going wrong socially. I mean, I'll talk about violent crime, which is distinct from property crime or disorder crime, but I think very easy to talk about. Violent crime requires a lot of particular shootings, requires a lot of things to go wrong. You need poorly controlled young men, by and large, poorly controlled young men who are in groups who have a high sense of honor or status that is easily offended. There are not a lot of institutions accessing social control over them, either formally, I eat the criminal justice system or the school system or informally, meaning like mom, dad, or grandma. And those guys need to have access to weapons and they need to be in an environment that is conducive to beefing. Like that's a bunch of things that have to go wrong all at once and use the populations for whom those things go wrong, just not that big. And so like basically you can incapacitate those guys. If you target and then capacitate them, you will see large declines in crime. I think the constraint on that one is civil society and the two is that and sort of a deeper criticism, the criminal justice system is set up to deal with cases not offenders. What I mean by that is that I don't say this individual is a habitual, you know, I can maybe get a sense of enhancement, but I don't say this individual needs to be incapacitated for 20 years. He needs to be off the street until he's aged out of crime. Instead of say, this individual has committed an offense that I can prove and he should be punished for this specific offense. Usually I can't prove that he committed the homicide beyond a reasonable doubt, even though everybody knows that he did it because nobody will talk in front of a judge. I don't necessarily have the evidence. And so convicting these guys is often much more challenging than simply knowing who these guys are. - And you say that, I might get this incorrect, 86% of the shooting shooters and victims have had an average of 11 prior arrests. So these are people who have just been touching the judicial system over in a criminal justice system, over and over and over in their lifetime. And that commutative knowledge does nothing for a single incident. - And there are a host of reasons for that. Some of that is that their criminalist involvement will be when they're juvenile offender and then often the clock resets when they turn 18, which produces, it's a complicated, that's a complicated policy judgment. 'Cause on the one hand, we do believe the children are less culpable than adults. And then on the other hand, what do you do with that information? Some of it is that they will get picked up for low-level or mid-level offenses, which it's not necessarily worth the cops' time to pursue the case or the prosecutor's time to pursue the case or the judge says, we don't have the slack policy in our jails, we need to face it in our presence, we need new probation, we're gonna let you back out, you know, electronic monitoring, whatever. Because they're not tracked as individuals and they only belatedly tracked as individuals because we're thinking about cases or we think you get offenses, we're not thinking about offenders, which is like, you know, not even really the ideological phenomenon, it's an infrastructural phenomenon. It has to do with the diffuseness of the criminal justice system and our ability to track offenders across multiple systems and across multiple cases. - Yeah, okay, so that was all pretty depressing. Really, I mean, it's incredible to me, but it makes sense, you know, but let's switch gears now. What can we do about it? How do we get back to where crime was consistently going down like it was in the '90s? Is it a big infusion of money? - Yeah, I mean, so that has to be part of the story and I can talk about this both in DC, but I've also didn't work on thinking about this at the national level and what the, you know, what the federal government can do. And, you know, the through line of that, as well as to talk about it as the capacity of you, which is this idea of the problem is not, you know, the folks on the left like to say, the problem is, the problem is like poverty and racism and systemic disadvantage and like, that's not what causes crime to go up and down. And if you don't believe me, I can convince you. And folks on the right often sort of, in my view, over fixate on the harshness of laws and the harshness of rhetoric. We say, what's the statutory maximum? What's the mentor minimum? It's like, that's a factor. It's just not that important in the total equation. I mean, you want to be able to incapacitate people when they need to be incapacitated, that's just like a part of the equation. And really what matters is the capacity of the criminal justice system to do stuff, which is a function of both the money, time, manpower and willingness. I think I have a, you know, the view is something like, the value of resources that the system can dedicate to addressing the problem of crime here. I'm quoting myself, the number of police officers, prosecutors, judges, probation, parole officers and other agencies of the system, but it also, the number of quality, most in man hours that those agents can provide and the capacity of the non-human infrastructure to accommodate the action of those agents, the number of jail cells, courtrooms, prison cells, treatment beds, et cetera. My argument is that in a place like DC, what has happened is that for both will and practical reasons, there has been a declining capacity. What you saw in the '90s was at the state local and particularly federal level, a concerted effort to enhance the capacity of the system, down, you know, inspired by a genuine belief in the capacity system to solve problems. And I think that that yielded results. You know, what DC needs is to solve the hard problem. How can we expand the capacity of the system? And that I think is true in many places. You know, you look at places where I think this shows upon, you know, the micro level on the city to city level, but it's not cities that looked at. There are many cities where they've gotten, so do their homicide and major crime problems back down. They've brought their staffing levels up some, but often what they've done is basically rededicate their staffing and refocus their more limited resources to just the only violent crime or major crime. And as a result, their minor crime levels have shot right up. Like they have, you know, they have shot lifting problems. So they have public sort of problems. So they have like these, you know, these things that are not murder, but are bad and make people not want to live in your city. And I think this is true in DC, but I suspect this is true in the city of St. Louis as well. - Well, you also talk about what I thought was fascinating is the, I don't know why I'm not saying this right, civilianization that people wanted to say like a beat, police officer doesn't necessarily have to do all the paperwork and set it as debt, right? Like you're saying, keep them out fighting crime and have other people doing paperwork set. - Yeah, well, and civilianization is there's some line, I think from police one, which is a policing magazine, which is like civilianization is the future of policing, which is true, unfortunately, to some extent, which is like, there is a, there is one track for getting police officers to become sworn officers, right? They're officers law, they have to go through training, they have to be sworn in, they have to be accredited and licensed. It's a whole thing, rigmarole. And then some of those guys spend their career sitting behind desk doing paperwork. And that can mean like, you know, their high up executives, but it can also mean like they're the guys who review applications to work for the police or they do records management. And like, you don't need a sworn officer to do that. It's not necessary. It's often statutorily or regularly necessary. Sometimes it's necessary because the union picks a fight over it 'cause those are jobs. And you have to sort of say, we're not gonna fire anybody, we wanna come up with guys on the street. Whether or not they wanna do that is a separate question. But in principle, the degree to which a given department is civilianizable will bury. I identify, I forget how many jobs in MPD that I go, look, these could probably be civilianized jobs. But, you know, to the extent that you can free up man hours, you will end up getting more guys on the beat, which is where cops are most impactful on, you know. But what I like to say is there's actually very little that criminology can tell us about crime reduction. Like, it's not that the old of a field, high quality criminology is not that old field. One thing you can tell us is that if you put a cop in a place, there will be less crime in that place. And so the more cops you can put in more places, the less crime you will get. - Right. And you also talk about like professional development for the, like, so that you've got to raise capacity by having your police officers, but also raise capacity by having them use their time better? - Yes, well, so the way that I like to think about this is in the context of man years, right? So, like, you know, you can say there are however many, 3,500, 3,300 police officers. But you can also think about it as each year, you get 3,300 man years, which is a function of the length of time that people spend in the world and are cycling in and out. So let's say that people are in for six years on average, I think, let's say it's six years on average. If I can convince them to stay for another two years on average, I can seem to say eight years rather than six, then I've just increased my man years by 25%. And so my student office reports that in one time has expanded dramatically in relative terms. So the other useful thing to get out of retention is that retention is a cost saving up to the cost of hiring and training a new officer, which is a six-figure sum. Like it's not cheap to hire and train, particularly in the current environment. And so the more you can retain, rather than trying to compete for, again, this very limited pool of new officers, the more success you're gonna have, the more you, the further your dollar will get. So what I pointed out is like, "Herf, this group, police executive research, grown and went into MPD and did an analysis "of, you know, why are people not sticking around?" And their answer was like, "Look, to some extent, "it's because cops don't feel supported by civilians. "But to a great extent, it's because they feel like "there are no opportunities for advancement. "There's no transparency." They don't feel like they have opportunities to diversify and work in different departments and figure out where they're best. They don't feel like policing is a career. I think this is a big per theme. I think this is true across the board. If we want people to stay in for that full 25 years, and by the way, saying for that full 25 years is good for officer levels, but also cops who've been in the force longer are better on a variety of dimensions. They are more responsible. They arrest less. They reduce crime more. They're just better. If we want people to stay on for that 25 years, then you need to make it a career. So in the context of DCI, I say look, you need to be giving, you have more transparency and hiring. You need to elevate, you need to give people more opportunities within the department. You also wanna educate people outside of the department. Few people realize that two of the best criminal justice programs in the United States are within the greater DC area at the University of Maryland and George Mason University. They're good programs. There was no reason that MPD officers should not be more frequently enrolled than they currently are. But that's, you know, if you pay for somebody to go to school for two or four years, you've got them for two or four years. That's pretty good. - What about within the judicial system, what do you think? - I mean, those people talk about this a lot, so what do they think? - Yeah, and you know, I have sort of a couple of pretty wonky proposals there. One is, as I alluded to earlier, they just don't put judges on the bench. And this is to some extent, you know, a unique problem for DC. So DC judges, DC Criminal Court judges are appointed or recommended to the president by a DC counsel appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate because they're technically federal judges because they're not saying that this works. - Yeah. - This is not necessary. Like they're not article three judges under our Constitution. They're article one judges. Their existence is entirely in the defibrative of Congress. So what I say is, why doesn't the Senate just wave its confirmation? Why don't they just say, we will refer to us, we'll take a three month veto period. If we don't beat each other in three months, they're on. You can expedite the process that way. And then by the way, if you wanna do review five, eight, 13 years later, great, do review later, come back and say, we're gonna re-upper or not. You know, like, we can dump them then. So that's, you know, that's one very wonky proposal. But the idea is like, look, and I think people are critical. DC's come to court is like pretty left leaning. They have an extreme, they have a view of the Fourth Amendment so that I consider out of line with both good public policy and the text of the Fourth Amendment. So let me put it that way. - Okay. - And I'm like, look, on the one hand, I'm sympathetic to the idea that we don't wanna put more crazy people in the bench. I think that Congress can overrule some of those presidents because it has unique authority in the space. - Yeah. - But I also think that when you talk about deterring crime, the three ingredients are swiftness, certainty and severity. You need swiftness and you need certainty in order to do that, you need judges on the bench. - Yeah. All right. And then clearing out homeless camps, which is a problem St. Louis has had. I agree that it makes people feel less safe, it makes people wanna stay in their homes, makes it's hard, it's hard sell to get folks downtown St. Louis, you know, it's not a very pleasant place to walk around, certainly not after dark. - Yeah. - And that, you know, I live in a pretty small town now and they've had a problem clearing a homeless camp. It's just, it's been bad sort of feelings and PR around the whole thing. So you gotta get past, you sounds like you're just like, get past it. Don't apologize. - Yes. Yes. And I think the thing that people do not understand, there's a tendency to regard homes and camps as a symptom, that, you know, there are deeper structural problems that are leading to this concentration of dysfunction and we need to address those, you know, we need to address. We need to end homelessness before we can end homeless encampments. We need to end racism, poverty, whatever. Homeless encampments are a cause of social problems. They cause crime, they cause drug use, they cause disorder, they cause illness. They are not merely concentrations of these things, they're independent generators of them. And this is a simple application of the insight that more is sometimes different. One or two guys camping are different from five or 10 guys camping in terms of what they can do at scale of the economies that emerge for them. When you have 10 or 20 guys, maybe it starts to make sense to sell drugs there. Maybe it starts to make sense to run a prostitution ring out of there. Maybe you get guys who have beef with each other in this conflict. In much the same way that network effects, you'll benefits in large cities, that will affect the old costs in the context of homeless encampment. And so, until we start regarding encampments as independent generators of problems, as things that merit being addressed in their own right, independent of the terminus of homelessness, where we're gonna be stuck dealing with these enormous causes of problems, you talk about, you know, you talk at a state like St. Louis, you talk at a state like DC, now more so than ever, people don't have to live in cities. It's not actually required. A quarter of the American workforce is now remote. It seems like we're not going back from that, or they were at least part-time remote. I think it's a quarter of hours at work to remote. It is much easier now at the margin to shift away from living in a big city if you want to. And so, more so than ever, if cities want to be competitive, which is to say if they want to attract tax dollars that will drive the politicians' plans, schemes, whatever, they need to provide a baseline to safety and order that in many cases they have abdicated. If you don't do that, if the city is dirty, smelly, gross, full of people screaming at you and using drugs, people will not live there. They will go somewhere else. - People are somewhere living more than Oregon for that reason. And it seems to me, I could be completely off-base here. Seems to me, Occupy sort of got this thing going because I don't remember homeless encampments even around DC before Occupy, and then it's like, oh wow, this is the thing we can do. And it's a totally valid way of either protesting a situation or just living. And am I wrong, did they exist before that? Or is it a trend, is it a fad? - I think you've particularly seen unsheltered homelessness has gotten much worse over the past five years or so. I mean, it's gone up and down. So you sort of talk about there are two different kinds of homelessness, right? The large majority of, when you count the homeless population in the States, the large majority of homeless people are, you talk as temporarily unsheltered. These are people, they live on the margins of homeless versus not. You have a place to live, you fall short on your rent, you get evicted, you couch surf, maybe you're in a shelter for a while, you get back in, you do this over and you go through a cycle. Those people are like, like basically there's people need some help getting their lives together. Sometimes that is a carrot, sometimes that's a stick, but like, that's the large majority of homeless people had also not what you and I think about when we think about homelessness. We think of it chronically homeless, who are people who are homeless for extended periods of time, often unsheltered, often co-current serious mental illness, drug addiction or both or some other disability or all three. That population is who you see on the streets. You know what I'd say is, I think that the unsheltered homeless population has gone up since 2020, COVID reasons, social control reasons, but also because bluntly, there is in many major cities, a non-profit industrial complex that hands out supports to these people that will give them tents and will give them quote unquote safe drug use supplies and will give them food and will give them clothing, will make living on the street as pleasant and comfortable as possible. You talk to, you know, I've interviewed people in Portland, I mean, you know, almost people in Portland and they'll say like, you know, I don't want to go to shelter. Shelter, I can't use drugs. I have to be in at a certain time. I have to be sober. Like, I don't want to do that. I want to be out on the street because that's where I can handle my habit. And I'm like, well, yeah, that's, if people are making that pleasant for you, I see why you want to stay there. You're behaving rationally. Unfortunately, the policy environment is inducing rational behavior that is socially harmful. So. - That's right. And then people are behaving rationally when they leave Portland, which many, many people are doing. So do you have any like optimism around this? Do you think, do you think people are listening to Charles Lehman on this? Or like, do you think we're going to make a turn? Because sometimes it's like a pendulum, right? And people are getting fed up with the camps and the crime and maybe we'll get back to be picking up police. I mean, defund the police. - Oh, yeah. - I see it probably wasn't helpful. But like, do you think we're going to get back to that? - Yes, I would say I have a, here's a reason for pessimism and reason for optimism. The reason for optimism is, look, the reality is that voters hate this stuff. They hate crime and they hate disorder and they vote in local elections based on it. Like much more so than some of the more intractable problems. They will fire people. They will get rid of elected officials over crime and disorder. And I think you are seeing this in many major cities where executives have made major about faces since 2020. This is true in San Francisco, it's true in Portland, it's true in DC, it's true in Atlanta, it's true in Philadelphia. All of these cities now have executives feel like we are cutting down in crime. We were focusing on public safety. This is a priority. So I think from a pendulum swing perspective, look, defund was not popular in 2020. None of the polling said it was popular. Everyone hated it. And it was a huge liability for Democrats in 2020. And now we've really gone in the other direction rhetorically at least. And now I think the issue is not so much the rhetoric and it's much more about the capacity. This goes back to the sort of long-term structural problems that decline in police staffing, which is a generation's long problem that really only can be addressed by a dramatic infusion of new federal money. The lack of investment in basic policing research. The story I like to, the example I like to give here is the National Institute of Justice. The research on the Department of Justice receives approximately, actually I think slightly less funding than the National Institute of Eye Health. And I don't tell you this, but-- - Not health. - Will it kill-- - Eye health. - Eye health, eye health. No, the National Institute of Health of $40 billion, NIJ is like 300 million. National Institute of Eye Health, a component, where like eye diseases kill like 20 people a year and homicide kills 25,000. So you do the math. - And what about data just on that point? - Yes. - Because, you know, we've been tossing around this idea what to do about St. Louis crime and one big difficulty in trying to figure it out is the lack of quality data. - Yep, it's a huge problem. There are a handful of departments that do this well. But what I like to say is, so there's a fellow, if you've seen any of the recent coverage of homicide trends in 2024, homicide's declining, that does not come from the FBI. The FBI is just now, we're getting to putting out 2023 homicide crime numbers. And I can get into the weeds on that if you want. That's coming from a friend of mine, his name is Jeff Asher, Jeff is a crime analyst in New Orleans. And we're in a situation in America where the best, he's about to put out actually a whole new data project on a product I'm very excited for. It's called the Real-Time Crime Index. The best crime data in America is coming from Jeff. - Nice. - It's not coming from the FBI, it's not coming from the state, it's coming from Jeff, which is one of us. - Who's just going city by city and putting it all together. - Yes, he is a team now. He's gotten some grant funding to do this, but yeah, that's basically what's happening. - That's incredible, who is Crime Crime Index? - Yeah, the Real-Time Crime Index. Like we spend, actually, if you look at research, as this is the point of research, education and statistics, the budget has declined in nominal terms, definitely in real terms, factoring and placement, nominal terms since 2012 federal spending on this. It's insane. - Wow, that's incredible. - And there's structural constraints that I can get into, but yeah, I mean, we just don't try. And if we try it a little bit, that would be better. - Yeah, well, this is something we think about a lot, 'cause we do think about a lot, like Missouri cities and how to make them more business and family friendly and crime, if you don't talk about crime, then the rest of it doesn't really matter, right? So I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about it. And if people want to find more of your work, where can they find it? - Yeah, I'm always at the Manhattan Institute, which is Manhattan.institute, yes, that's our address. I regularly for City Journal, which is our in-house, our quarterly publication online that's city-journal.org. You can find me, I'm on Twitter, I'm @CharlesFleiman, and I'm also on Substack, which is, it's called the causal fallacy. So you can find it. - Love it. All right, well, thank you so much. I do really appreciate it. Safety always be a concern. - Well, thank you so much for having me on, always have a good discuss. 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