From Cincinnati to NYC: Why Public Safety Feels Fragile

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Commercial Insurance.

Business owners meet Progressive Insurance.

They make it easy to get discounts on commercial auto insurance and find coverages to grow with your business.

Quote in as little as six minutes at progressivecommercial.com.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, coverage provided and serviced by affiliated and third-party insurers.

Discounts and coverage selections not available in all states or situations.

A string of violent incidents in a New York skyscraper, a Michigan Walmart, a casino in Nevada, and downtown Cincinnati have shocked the American public and sparked debates about societal issues, public safety, and policing.

In this episode, we sit down with a criminal justice expert to discuss the forces fueling the incidents and what steps can be taken to make America safer.

I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe.

It's Saturday, August 9th, and this is a weekend edition of Morningwire.

Wake up with Morningwire in more ways than one.

The new Morningwire coffee mug is now available at dailywire.com/slash shop.

Check out the whole Morning Wire collection, the merch you need to get, and the news you need to know.

Head over to Dailywire.com/slash shop today.

Joining us now is Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Criminal Injustice, What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most.

Rafael, thanks for coming on.

Oh, it's my pleasure.

Thanks so much for having me.

Fan of the show.

Well, we love to hear that.

So we've witnessed several violent incidents lately.

The Cincinnati mob attack, stabbings at Walmart, another shooting outside of a Reno Casino.

Is this just the new normal?

Our cities sort of out of control?

Yeah, I don't think we can look at those kinds of isolated incidents and say this is necessarily the new normal, right?

These are still very

statistically rare occurrences.

The risk of being victimized in this way is still very remote.

But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be paying attention to these kinds of events because what they do is they undermine a very important sense of security that is really at the core of what makes cities and society work, right?

We need to know that we can go out into the world with confidence that we're not going to be victimized in this way.

And when we see these kinds of really heinous crimes kind of move outside of the geographical boxes that they tend to be concentrated in, it makes it seem like a less predictable phenomenon, right?

Everyone knows what neighborhoods not to go to in their city if they want to minimize the risk of being, you know, robbed or killed even.

But when violence comes to Walmart or to a midtown office building or to a very popular sort of, you know, touristy area of a city, it really kind of upends that expectation.

You know, talking about a popular area and an event, the Cincinnati Music Festival, we saw this violence that really shocked a lot of people, in part because there were so many people standing around, really just witnessing extreme violence, literal stomping on the head on concrete of a person clearly almost unconscious, a woman getting completely knocked out.

Is this part of a larger societal issue that we're witnessing in that sequence of events?

Thank God it's not, right?

I mean,

criminal behavior is still aberrant, right?

It's definitionally a departure from what society has accepted, which is why we're all so shocked by it, right?

So that's the sort of good news.

But this does reflect a very deep,

serious cultural problem that does need to be dealt with.

Because as you said, not only were there so many people filming that attack, but if you listen to the commentary, I mean, there was joy in the voices of the people who were witnessing that attack.

There were people who actually found it funny.

Most normal people are going to see that kind of brutal violence and be disgusted by it, right?

You kind of have visceral reaction to pull back.

When you start to see that there are members of our own society that don't share that sensibility, that is really the sort of deeply disturbing part.

But that is something that, you know, we've had a problem with as a society forever, right?

There's never been a period of human history or society that's ever existed on planet Earth in which predation isn't a problem on some level.

What we've recognized in Western society is that we need to build out the institutions that exist to help keep us safe, to prevent those things and to make them less likely to occur.

Now, a lot of my work has kind of been focused on highlighting the departure from that recognition, from those lessons of history, because what we've seen over the last several years, especially the last decade, is a pullback away from the institutions that have been central to providing a level of safety that I think we've all grown accustomed to and want to keep, which is, again, why I think these events are so shocking.

Now, you know, part of the shock in that video is the length of time that that goes by, yet there's no police to be seen whatsoever.

Is this a post-George Floyd kind of problem that we're seeing in Cincinnati?

Is there a limited number of police available?

Or was this just a particularly bad moment for them?

What's going on there?

I think it's probably a combination of both.

Cincinnati, especially in the post-Floyd era, has really suffered on the policing front, like most urban departments around the country, right?

It is struggling with recruitment and retention.

And at the same time, it was struggling with recruitment and retention at a time in which the calls for service were increasing because crime levels were going up.

And so there were a few years in the relatively recent past where Cincinnati was actually setting and breaking homicide records for its city.

Now, you know, when you have large gatherings like that in a jurisdiction that is policed by a department that is strained for resources, response times are going to be slower, right?

The amount of resources that you can afford to deploy to an area of the city that is generally safe when you have really serious gang violence happening in different parts of the city.

It's a very difficult problem that police executives have to solve.

And there really is no good answer, right?

I mean, putting resources in one place means taking them away and depriving them from another place.

And this is why that institution really needs to be a big part of our conversation about how we want to move forward as a society, especially as an urban society.

You know, over the last five, six, 10 years, there really has been kind of a shift in terms of the willingness of the broader public to

kind of entertain ideas like defunding the police or de-emphasizing policing as a sort of primary response to things like public disorder.

You have very popular politicians pushing for policies like taking police out of traffic enforcement or divesting violence response or mental health response.

And all of that reflects a kind of lack of recognition for the importance that police play in terms of the role of providing for the public safety.

And what that's done is a couple of things.

One, it has communicated that that institution is no longer valued in the way that it was and that has dissuaded people from joining that that line of work from from taking that career path um and from staying on that career path for the people who were already on it but it has also created a sort of environment in which criminals feel emboldened.

They understand that their risk of apprehension is lower.

They understand that even if they're apprehended, their risk of serious punishment is lower.

And that kind of erosion of general deterrence, I do think really does begin to manifest itself in these kind of brazen acts where you're seeing brutal violence in public, in the plain view of witnesses, in an area where you know police are not that far away.

And that's the thing that I think really eats at our sense of security when, you know, pro-social, well-adjusted people see those kinds of videos.

Like you said, a lot of this is public.

perception, the expectation that the police will be there to protect them.

And it makes sense that the people pay very close attention to what the police chiefs say, what mayors say.

There's been a lot of analysis on the reaction of the police chief in Cincinnati and the reaction of the mayor there.

They both resorted to a lot of blame shifting, blaming people on social media for making their jobs harder, they said, blaming the Trump administration for bringing up race at all.

They ultimately shifted the blame away from local officials.

Are their statements helping or hurting the situation as you see it?

I certainly don't think they're helping.

that's for sure.

I mean, when you have these kinds of petty fights happening on the side, what's happening is you are getting away from what the central mission really is, and that is providing for the public safety.

Who cares who's to blame?

What has to be done is you have to have an after-action sort of review and make decisions about how you could have allocated resources better, what

lack of communication may have contributed to this, and what the city really needs so that it can start asking for it.

And I do think that that's a big part of this, right?

I don't think that there's any question that the Cincinnati Police Force is understaffed.

I don't think that there's any question that it's under-resourced.

I don't think that there's any question that its officers lack morale and the kind of public mandate that they need to go out and be proactive and be aggressive and do the things that we know will help reduce crime.

But those are all conversations that need to be had soberly and really in quick order, because what we see is the effect of this kind of diffuse situation where no one really feels like they're quite responsible.

At the end of the day, these kinds of events need to be prevented and responded to by the police.

If the police don't have the resources necessary to do that, they need to be asking for them incessantly.

And the public needs to be made aware of where the gaps are and who's responsible for filling them or failing to.

Now, there's an ugly racial component to this attack, at very least in terms of the optics.

And I think there's a lot of doubt in many americans now that a lot of these officials will actually follow through with full justice if there's a minority involved in the violence again it's a perception whether or not that's true that's how a lot of people see it is this again another post george floyd problem that local officials and police departments are facing is this a real problem do they go easier on minorities particularly the black population yeah i i look i think this sort of perception problem has predated george floyd for a long time right i do think that people have perceived a double standard with respect to interracial violence.

And you see it in the kind of media reactions, right?

I mean, you know, take an instance like Jordan Neely, the mentally ill man who was, you know, involved in a struggle with Daniel Penny on the New York City subway and ultimately lost his life.

And the response to that was a swift prosecution that I think a lot of people felt went way too far, well beyond what the facts would have supported.

And a lot of really reckless commentary that racialized the incident without really knowing anything about the intentions or mindset of someone like Daniel Penny.

And yet when you have a situation like this, or

for example, the killing of Austin Metcalf down in Frisco, Texas, which also made news relatively recently, you start to see that people who were very quick and media institutions who were very quick to racialize incidents suddenly become much more reticent to do that.

And when you look at the data, and this is really kind of the toxicity that this sort of racialization invites, right?

Because once you start racializing these incidents, you invite people to start looking at the data.

And what the data show is not particularly pleasant, right?

I mean, white Americans are significantly more likely to be violently victimized by a black American than the other way around.

Are we supposed to ignore that?

And if once you get to that point where the conversation takes that turn, it becomes very toxic very quickly.

You start seeing these kinds of ugly tribal instincts kick back in, and it's not really helpful for anyone.

And this is one of the reasons why it really upsets me that we have decided as a country that kind of the most effective way to push criminal justice policy conversations down the road was to sort of focus on the racial element of these instances, whether you're talking about instances of alleged excessive police force or interracial violence between among members of the private public.

It's not helpful.

It's not a positive frame through which or lens through which to see these kinds of incidents.

I really wish we'd stop.

I'd like to turn to the bigger bigger issue of mental health.

We had this New York City mass shooting where the killer had a history of mental problems.

How do organizations like the ACLU play into this?

They seek to protect the rights of potentially violent people often.

Again, are they making things worse?

Is there a rationale there that is defensible?

Yeah, look, I do think that we are sort of living with the after effects of the deinstitutionalization movement that really kind of took hold in the 1960s and 70s, where

real problems were acknowledged and focused on in our mental health institutions.

And instead of reforming at the margins and making those institutions better and more effective, we did what we tend to always do as a society, which is overreact and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And we saw the same kind of sentiment taking place in 2020 with the Defund the Police movement, right?

Rather than address individual bad actors or adopt reforms at the margins, you had people pushing to just get rid of the institution as a whole.

And that movement has kind of been taken up in the name of compassion, right?

The idea is that these institutions are constraining, that

they're unpleasant.

A lot of them in the 1970s were not very well kept.

And so the idea became that the compassionate thing to do was to

really focus on treatment within the community, giving people as much freedom as possible, irrespective of whether those people were actually capable of handling that freedom.

And that's where the compassionate argument argument starts to fall apart because it's not compassionate.

When you walk down into a subway station here in New York City and you see somebody with open sores on their legs talking to somebody who's not there, they're clearly sick.

They clearly need help.

They don't know that they're sick and need help and so won't voluntarily get it.

but they're free, right?

And so this really, I think, is an issue that does need to be resolved.

And what we need to do is just relearn the lesson that there are some people who just cannot cannot live in society because they are sick and they need to be incapacitated and put into inpatient mental health treatment where they're going to get the medication that they need.

They're going to be taken care of and they're less capable of posing a danger to others and themselves.

Because let's remember one other thing is that in many cases, these individuals who are left to roam the streets without their faculties are often the victims of serious crime themselves, not just also the perpetrators.

Indeed.

Now, we're on the topic of New York City.

Zoron Mamdani is the leading mayoral candidate there.

A lot of this defund the police conversation has been swirling around him for his past support of that movement.

And now we have this situation in the city that really highlights how violence can erupt at any point, particularly if the police force is not available like we saw in Cincinnati.

What do you make of his stances when it comes to policing?

Is Mamdani moderating or still pushing radical policies?

Well, I certainly think he is at least

trying to

develop the patina of having moderated.

Whether it's sincere or not, I think is a question for the voters, and they're going to have to make that determination in November.

But I find his relatively recent record on these issues extremely troubling.

This is a man who has repeatedly said not just to defund the police, but to dismantle the NYPD, has expressed support for emptying and dismantling our jails and prisons, has supported legislative pushes to significantly reduce criminal penalties and reduce the likelihood that serious criminals go into prison.

And not just in terms of the regular street crime, but even in kind of the most egregious spaces.

I mean, child welfare, I think, is a really good example.

I mean, Zohra Mamdani was a co-sponsor on legislation that would have made it illegal to do very routine drug tests on newborn babies.

out of fear that because new black newborn babies might be more likely to test positive, they would be more likely to be removed from their mothers.

And so it would be a crime in that legislation to do routine drug analyses of newborn babies,

meaning that it would be easier for those babies to go home with potentially drug-addicted parents who expose them to harsh substances in utero.

So

this is a person with a very seriously troubling record.

I was not aware that he pushed that.

It's just actually shocking.

So what is the solution for Cincinnati and New York?

You've touched on some of those, but if you're going to summarize what's the best approach to actually address these real problems, including even this uncomfortable reality that some populations, some areas need more policing, how do we address this?

What you have to do are a few things.

One, you have to start with addressing the recruitment and retention crisis in American policing right now, because at the end of the day, if there's no one there to answer the call, it really doesn't matter what policies that you have in place.

So it has to start there.

We need to figure out a way to make policing attractive.

And I think that's going to take several avenues.

One is we need to increase pay.

Two is we need to take special care to really attract high-quality recruits.

Or you see a lot of departments right now lowering their standards to meet recruitment goals.

That's not the way to go about it.

What you need to do is I think what the military does, which is create a separate track for people who have, you know, high levels of educational attainment and high levels of performance on exams and in the academy, and guarantee them a career track that they can be proud of.

So that, I think, is job number one.

We got to get more people into uniform and onto the street.

Job number two is you have to give those officers the mandate to be proactive, to pay attention to things like public disorder offenses, and to be aggressive in the way that they police American cities.

But those efforts need to have a backstop, and they need to have a backstop in the broader criminal justice system.

What we see in too many cities is that you have DAs.

who are committing preemptively to not prosecuting whole categories of offenses, who are committing to not pursuing incarceration or pretrial detention detention in a number of circumstances.

That has to stop.

Voters need to wake up and address that problem.

And then you also need a judiciary that is empowered by a legislature to impose real, serious criminal penalties, that understand that the most important job that a criminal justice system can do is to incapacitate an offender who has demonstrated through repeated criminal conduct that they have no intention of playing by society's rules.

What we see with so many of these heinous offenses is all too often the perpetrators have very long criminal histories, very long histories of mental health disorders that have manifested themselves in terms of problems obeying the law and following by society's rules.

Those individuals should not be on the street, whether they need to be in jail or in an inpatient medical facility.

We need to create those circumstances because it doesn't matter how many arrests police make if the courthouse door is a revolving one, right?

I mean, the expected benefit of any given police action is going to be diminished by the degree to which the broader criminal justice system fails to act as a backstop.

So true.

And it strikes me that if you have a weak point in any of these elements, the whole system basically collapses.

You really have to fortify it from all directions.

Let's hope we see some real progress on this, including in Cincinnati and New York.

Rafael, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

That was Manhattan Institute fellow Rafael Mangual, author of Criminal Injustice, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

These are questions that take cultures thousands of years to answer.

During Answer the Call, I take questions from people just like you about their problems, opportunities, challenges, or when they simply need advice.

How do I balance all of this grief, responsibility?

How do you repair this kind of damage?

My daughter, Michaela, guides the conversations as we hopefully help people navigate their lives.

Everyone has their own destiny.

Everyone.