(news blare) - All that's old is new again. All of this has happened before and all this will happen again. If you don't learn from the past, you are doomed to repeat it. History doesn't repeat
itself, but it rhymes. We are going back to the future! There's no fate but what
we make for ourselves! Miles Dyson. She's gonna blow him away! (bubbles) What is this? A show? What is going on here? Did I put this backdrop up? What was I talking about even? It's a long time ago. I don't remember. Happy 4/
20 everybody! Toke up those fat bongs and
light a lefthanded cigarette because we are talking about... - We're dealing with a
spike in violent crime. We're talking about an increase
in shootings and homicides, robberies, carjacking. - [Reporter] Grim new numbers
on the weekend violence. In St. Louis, Missouri,
11 people were shot. Two of them are dead. - So, cities across the country
are seeing a major spike in violent crime now. A scary scene earlier this
week in New York City. Soto shoot out i
n the middle of the street during broad daylight. - Also violent crime
spiraling outta control in New York City. A nurse visiting Manhattan
died over the weekend after a deranged homeless
man slammed her to the ground in Times Square. - Crime! Scary stuff. Maybe you shouldn't have
gotten high for it actually. I mean, geez, does anybody
see any deranged homeless men lurking around ready to pounce? Luckily I've rigged a crossbow to my door so that anybody who tries to come in and "violent crime me
" will
be violent crimed themselves. You hear me, crime folk? You stay away! - [Warmbo] Oh, Mr. Cody. (Warmbo knocks) - Okay, the crossbow might
be for other things too. Come on in, Warmbo! It's unlocked! Where'd he go? You all heard Warmbo, right? God, I am high, okay. Here's some news. Violent crime is on the
rise across America, and the right wing media really, really wants you to know
this and to be afraid, be very afraid. And if you're not already, you will be. Just check out this segment f
rom Fox News. - Here's the reality, we are shooting each other
and killing each other at a fever pitch. Violent crime is a very big problem. April 2021, 48%. June, 41, March 2019, 49. You know, we're still at
about half of the people, but let's see what happens
when the numbers come through, when the stories are told
and it starts to resonate where you live. - Oh, wow. Maybe I'm just really high, but Fox got way different
from the last time I checked. But maybe Chris "I helped my governor brothe
r
cover up a sex scandal, "and also I got special
and rare COVID treatment "because my brother was the governor," Cuomo has a point there. I mean, with a long, weird
middle name like that, how couldn't you trust him? Maybe we should be extremely afraid that, wait a, hold on. Can we go back to that graph real quick? Okay, wait, how high did I get? Because it really seems
like that graph doesn't at all depict the rate of violent crime, but rather shows the
number of American adults that believe th
at violent
crime is a "big problem." A thing that is not actually reflective of violent crime rates
and could like be biased and influenced by news
segments meant to scare people about crime. But more importantly, hey! Hey! The X axis on that graph is backwards. You realize that don't you, CNN? I feel like it's your job to know that, so it's weird that I have
to point that out to you. And so while it appears
to illustrate a rise in concern over violent crime over time, what it actually shows is
a fall in concern over violent crime over the time period displayed. And again, I'm just so high, but I'm almost certain
that's not how time works because, you know,
breaking news time moves like a spider web made
of strands of rivers, and then inside it
blows up like a balloon, and then those rivers are
also made of spiderwebs that flow into each other. Okay, I wrote that when I was high too. I'm sorry. Forward! Time moves forward! CNN lied is my point. Is there a time spider though? Is that li
ke a thing
I should be concerned? Next episode! Settle down, Cody. I guess if you are worried about how people's opinion
of crime being a big problem is less than it is now, you can at least rest
assured that law enforcement, massive corporations, the media, and politicians will make
sure to do everything in their power to stop the crime that people are less worried about. Maybe they'll rent a Batman, or failing that they'll at least continue to stoke those unfounded fears that people don't have
as much. - When you look at those
train tracks and that trash, you say this, this is not a
third world country, but it is. - Now the dangerous consequences of left-wing crime policies
are on full display tonight as an Apple Store in Santa
Rosa, California was ransacked on Wednesday. - Brazen crimes caught on camera show exactly why American
cities are under siege. Check out what happened at a
Walgreens in San Francisco. This is a man in broad
daylight looting a store and just filling up a garba
ge bag. Then he just casually rides
his bike out of the store and onto the street. Walgreens alone has closed
17 stores in the city just because of this rampant theft. - Train robberies and
lawlessness on the streets! Well, ain't that a bag of nails! Do I need to break out my shooting iron to protect my crossbow that
I use to protect my weed, which I use to protect my
brain from being not high? In the case of the recent
string of train robberies in Los Angeles, Union
Pacific railroad has claimed
, with little evidence, that these robberies are being carried out by organized crime and
has blamed the theft on the newly elected
progressive district attorney George Gascon's "soft on crime" policies. That's right. No one's soft on crime like Gascon! As a result, they're calling
for harsher penalties to serve as a "strong deterrence"
against "train robbers." Yet what Union Pacific
neglected to emphasize is that recent supply chain
challenges have caused train cars to sit idle for significant
periods of time, making them particularly
vulnerable to theft, and that the company recently
laid off an undisclosed number of their security staff right
before these thefts began. And yet politicians like Gavin
Newsom who are incapable of and/or unwilling to withstand
the political pressure from the ensuing media onslaught respond by proposing increased police budgets to protect businesses like Union Pacific, which just so happens to be
reporting record profits. So like I guess I'm not
trying t
o victim blame this giant train company, I guess, but it seems like they
decrease their security and left their (beep) on the tracks and people stole from them. If I left my prized
collection of garden gnomes in the middle of the road,
I can't exactly complain when some other known
pervert steals them all. There are dozens of us out there. And so it's almost like
the public is spending their tax dollars to
subsidize the security costs for a private corporation in
order to protect their profits.
And now it is exactly that. And then the case of the great
Walgreens shoplifting crisis of the 2020s, supposedly going on in
San Francisco right now, Walgreens is blaming their
store closures on rampant theft and local law enforcement
is blaming prop 47, a law which charges petty theft under $950 with a misdemeanor as opposed to a felony. This is despite at least one study showing that the proposition is not responsible for an uptick in crime. Oh yeah. Those store closures we
were just talking a
bout like literally seconds ago, it turns out that there
are probably a bunch of other reasons Walgreens
decided to do that, like the fact that the
city is over saturated with pharmacies and that the corporation had
already laid out a plan in 2019 to close a bunch of
stores across the nation in order to save money because it's kind of hard to believe that rampant theft is the reason you are closing five stores when two of those stores only had seven and three reported retail thefts in 2021. Yet
this is somehow one of the things that prompted San Francisco
Mayor London Breed who was elected on a
platform of police reform and had initially pushed back against the narrative
promoted by Walgreens to pivot towards a policy
of being more aggressive with law enforcement. - You know, this has been a problem that has persisted in this
city for some time now. And the fact is things have
gotten worse over time. - Fun thing about facts is
that she's technically right that things have gotten worse
over time, but only if you count over time as the few years during the pandemic and not the larger crime stats which show that things have
actually gotten better over time and that the high violent and property crime San
Francisco is experiencing right now is still lower
than the crime rates between 2014 and 2019, which
is a long way of saying that, no, you could argue things
aren't getting worse over time. Fun how much like that CNN
graph the people telling us that crime is worse seem to
be tak
ing a lot of liberties with the actual statistics. They just, they just
love taking liberties. But if you live in New
York City, don't worry. The NYPD seems to have gotten
this shoplifting crisis under control. According to the official Twitter account of the New York City Police Department, officers recently arrested 12 individuals and recovered $1,800 of stolen property, which included toiletries
and medicine and diapers. So, way to go, you Cottonelle warriors working hard to keep America
safe
from a baby pooping. Gee, I wonder how much money they spent to retrieve this $1,800
of stolen property. The fact that the media is more
concerned about shoplifting as opposed to a society
where people are so desperate that they need to steal
(beep) medicine and diapers pretty much tells you all you need to know about whose side they are really on. And the fact that the cops who are supposedly charged to
protect and serve would think that this tweet was a great example of them performing their
duty, well, it shows you who
they really are tasked with "protecting and serving." It's not us. And it's not a coincidence that these unsubstantiated narratives that induce media frenzies over pretend rise in crime
are taking place in two cities that have recently elected officials that came into office
challenging the status quo of our criminal let's
call it justice system. These narratives are shaped
by large corporations, private property owners,
and the ruling class, not to mention the power
ful
toilet paper bear lobby. And they are typically
supported, reinforced, and sometimes devised by
law enforcement themselves. All of this to overwhelm
frightful politicians and cause them to relent to
the political pressure exerted by this dominant alarmist storyline. And it's a little bit
disingenuous for large retailers to manufacture a narrative
that supports harsher penalties for petty theft when corporations like the
aforementioned Walgreens simply get hit with fines after
stealing millio
ns of dollars from their employees. And that actually brings
up an important question that I don't think
people ask nearly enough, what exactly is crime? I'm not philosophizing because
I'm super high right now, I mean, literally what defines a crime? We should probably explore that question perhaps in a segment called... What is crime or something? Damn, that's good actually. We should do like a whole thing for it. ♪ Bad boys, bad boys ♪ ♪ What you gonna do ♪ ♪ What you gonna do
when they come f
or you ♪ ♪ Bad boys, bad boys ♪ - Perfect! Better than all movies! Anyway, in a legal sense, very simply, crime is when you break the law. It's when you engage in an action or omission that is
punishable by the state. Except despite that pretty
straightforward definition, there are some things the
public generally thinks of as a "crime" and some
things that we don't. For instance, we tend to
think of things like robbery or shoplifting or hacking
into someone's dream to influence them to dissolve
their father's company when we think of "crime." But we don't often think about cases when an employer refuses
to allow their workers to take meal breaks or fails to reimburse
them for business expenses or doesn't pay them for
overtime as a "crime." But as a matter of fact and law, these are all examples of wage theft, a crime that far outweighs
the scope of other forms of theft and yet is rarely prosecuted, which is why we have a
system where minor crimes like being accused of stealing a backp
ack or shoplifting can come
with massive penalties that ruin people's lives. And yet companies like
Walgreens and Amazon who steal millions from their employees just get hit with fines
that they can easily absorb, which might be a factor
in why US companies vastly outspend the rest of
the world on legal services or spend billions of dollars
a year lobbying Congress to implement policies that
protect their profits, at least until they invent
those, you know, dream crimes, and then they'll just in
cept the president to love corporate theft or whatever. It's the same system
that sentences one person to six years in prison
over a voting error, and yet allows another
person, I won't say who, to see zero consequences for trying to steal a
presidential election and inciting a violent coupe attempt, you know, because our law enforcement and criminal legal system was designed to protect the private property and specific interests
of the rich and powerful and to control the activity
of the workin
g class and poor. But we'll circle back to that because we still gotta deal
with this whole crime biz. And while in my San Francisco
example it does seem like their overall crime rate is down, in fairness and balance
dom or balance sub, there has indeed been
a rise in violent crime over the past two years. And thankfully we know
exactly what the cause is. - When you defund the police people die. - That's right, folks, we
defunded the police across America and the criminals went wild! It was like
that movie "The
Purge," but even worse! It was every day. It was like a forever purge, probably. I don't know. I've only seen "Inception." Except wait a minute, while a number of cities
did reduce their spending on police, or at least claimed to, in the immediate aftermath
of the summer of protests following the public
lynching of George Floyd and so many others at the hands of police, a bunch of those cities
are now reversing course and restoring that very funding
to their police departments a
midst increased political pressure due to the continued rise of
violent crime in their cities. But the thing is the rate
of violent crime is rising across the nation regardless
of local policies. And there is no evidence that efforts to defund
the police are the cause of this increase. According to The Guardian,
research has shown that cities that increased police
budgets were just as likely to see a rise in murders as
cities that reduced them. So, heck, and gee, and (beep) on me, if it wasn't d
efunding the
police, then what was it? Was there like anything that
happened in the last few years that we can point to? You know what? Let's take a quick break so I
can ponder this for a minute. You know, cut to some ads
or like a picture of a dog or whatever. I don't care which. No, wait, I do! Cut to the dog! (news blare) Hey folks, it's Cody,
America's party animal. As you all know, I party
all day and all night. My blood is confetti and my
spit is a sparkling wine. But it's hard being a par
ty animal, which is why I drink lots of coffee. And to ensure my coffee is party
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want that if you're not satisfied, they'll send you a brand new bag for free. That's very party of them. You know what's really party about Trade? All of their coffee comes
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a coffee you'll love. Once again, that's
drinktrade.com/morenews for $30 off. Tell 'em America's party animal sent you. They'll know what that means maybe. (news blare) - Oh, we love a good birthday. Don't we, folks? Why just yesterday was the birthday of my imaginary friend, Brumby. He's an industrial welder with the face of a porcelain baby doll. And wouldn't you know it's
also the eighth birthday of
Brooklinen, home of the
internet's favorite sheets. If it's anything like
my own eighth birthday, there will be plenty of ice
cream cake and laser tag and a nine foot toddler
wearing cow hide gloves. And to celebrate, Brooklinen is gifting us with their biggest sale of the year. Brooklinen is offering their soft sheets, luxurious towels and robes,
snuggly weighted blankets, lavish silk eye masks and pillow cases, and also every single one of
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directly with suppliers to cut out the luxury markups and pass those saving back to you. And with summer on the way, be sure to check out their
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of the year is coming with 20% off of everything. Seeing this ad after the sale? That's okay. You can still save
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use promo code MoreNews for $20 off your purchase of $100. That's B-R-O-O-K-L-I-N-E-N .com. Promo code MoreNews. Praise Brumby. It's his birthday. (news blare) - Oh hey. There you are. I was wondering where you went. Did you enjoy the dog? Okay, so where were we
before you rudely left without telling me where you went? Oh yeah. So, crime is rising across America. Except the thing is even though the media has
often framed the last two years as a rise in crime, that's
no
t entirely accurate. Crime overall has essentially continued
its decades long decline. What has actually been happening
is a rise in violent crime and more specifically a rise
in gun related homicides. But don't worry! This video is not about gun control on account of that subject
being deemed exhausting and gunny. But the fact is that the last two years
have seen record gun sales. And gosh, I wonder why. Maybe everyone got scared when they learned about all
those new mutants walking around or t
he seemingly inevitable Levy invasion. Oh, wait second gosh. I just remembered that other
thing that has been going on over the past couple of years. Apparently we had a global
pan, pandemique, pandemic. All right, or something like that. It was kind of a big deal
actually, in case you forgot, which I apparently did. And it's still very much happening in case you need to remember. Like, third gosh, do you recall the early
days of the pandemic? You couldn't buy soap or toilet paper or stylish pap
er gowns. And it felt like we were on our way to a "Mad Max" style dystopia. So, a lot of people bought guns for the very first time in their lives. And for some inexplicable reason
more guns tend to correlate with more gun related crimes. That's weird. Look it up on why that is. And like there are plenty of sources that explain how the
pandemic is the likely cause of rising rates of violent
crime over the past two years, but probably the most
compelling one starts with the word no and ends
with
the word (beep). See footnote labeled duh. Freaking of course the
stress, the strain, the fear, the loss, the isolation, the economic insecurity
of the pandemic are the very conditions that lead to violence. Conditions that by the
way are even more severe in our criminal legal system,
but more on that later, because not only did the
pandemic lead to a historic rise in gun sales, but COVID disrupted the work of community based violence
prevention programs both physically and economically. Progra
ms that had shown success
in reducing violent crime. So, you know, that could be a factor. It could also be the fact that
people have been cooped up with their domestic abusers, or it could be that watching a never ending
stream of police murders and shootings has understandably
caused many people to distrust law enforcement and take conflict resolution
into their own hands, or, you know, it could also be the fact that the economic and health consequences of the pandemic have
disproportionately
fallen onto communities that
were already suffering from violent crime due to the strains of concentrated poverty
created and perpetuated by systemic racism and
decades of racist policies, communities that we once commonly
referred to as the ghetto. And the fact is that white
society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it. White institutions maintain it. And white society condones it. And perhaps compounding that stress onto already vulnerable
communities is like... Th
ere's a word. What's the word? (news blare) What? No, the word is bad. Jesus, title monkey, drink
a coffee or something. Also really bad that like
a lot of people died, like a million people. And it's been (beep) terrifying for many. And when people are scared,
they tend to make bad decisions. That's why you should
never look at car loans while in a haunted house. But the truth is that
the causes associated with both the rise in crime
and the reduction in crime, a hotly disputed issue
and an imp
recise science, we can make some educated guesses, but anyone pointing a firm
finger probably is trying to sell you something
like a haunted car loan. For instance, we don't fully
know why crime has fallen so much since the 1990s. Theories include a decline
in alcohol consumption, reduced levels of lead and gasoline, legalized abortion
preventing would be criminals from being born, the
economic boom of the 90s, and the theory that there
are just fewer young people than there used to be and most
crimes are
committed by young people. And maybe it's none or
all of those things. And then there is of course the argument that more police on the streets and harsher penalties are responsible for the decline in crime. But one issue with that assertion is that incarceration rates
were rising for years before crime started going down, and crime was rising during periods of increasing police budgets. And the current consensus
from criminologists is that these policies have had, at best, a small ef
fect on the
decline in crime over time. That isn't to say that
some studies don't show that more police reduce crime. According to one pretty extensive study, every new cop on the street
prevents between 0.06 and 0.1 homicides, meaning that you'd need
like 10 to 17 new cops to prevent one murder per year. Their presence also technically
reduces certain types of crime like carjacking because people don't
tend to do those crimes literally in front of a cop. That study found that arrests for crimes
like burglary don't go up, but arrests for other types
of crime go up significantly when you add these extra officers, meaning that they aren't stopping crimes so much as preventing
certain types of crime from being committed
by just standing there. And by standing there, they
end up increasing arrests for things like liquor
violation and drug possession, also known as nonviolent crimes that shouldn't ruin a
person's life for committing. This would also cost millions annually just to prevent th
at one murder, and so generally doesn't
seem all that effective. While it's anecdotal, just look at the fact
that New York City added over 700 more cops to patrol
their transit systems this year mere months before a mass
shooting attack occurred on the subway, to which of (beep)
course The New York Times immediately framed as, "Shooting in subway station
heightens simmering fears "about public safety,"
before quietly changing it. And of (beep) course again, while the NYPD counter terrorism unit
was busy terrorizing homeless people, the shooter was caught
by some guy named Zach. But my point is that no
police presence matters if someone simply doesn't
care about getting caught. So, ultimately this data doesn't really show a huge
improvement when you add cops. In fact, the study itself goes on to note, "Critically though, the
average effects described above "mask important variation "in the quality of policing across cities. "In cities with relatively
large Black populations, "the return
s to investments
in police manpower are smaller "and perhaps non-existent
for Black civilians. "Likewise, larger police forces lead "to a greater number of arrests "for quality of life offenses, "in particular for Black civilians, "without the reduction index crime arrests "that we observe elsewhere." In other words, these
policies of more policing or harsher sentences
also come with an array of catastrophic consequences for society and have been enacted at the expense of other less tragic polic
ies that could have been much more effective at making our communities safer, because, and I don't want
anyone to call me a (beep) bitch for saying this, but there are
some things that we do know about the conditions that
influence the level of crime in our society. But much like other
foreshadows and clues riddled throughout this mysterious episode, we will get back to that or will we? Yes, we will. For now, it's worth noting that while there has been a
rise in violent crime, it is still well b
elow its
peak in the early 1990s, despite the fact that polls show 56% of the population believes it's higher. And crime overall is much lower
today than it was back then. Now I don't want to minimize
the impact that crime and particularly violent
crime can have on individuals, their families, and communities. It can be devastating. But the fact is that our
political and policy response to crime can be even worse. Something more scary than
crime itself is the impact of the fear of crime. Because
when media narratives
about crime take hold, American history has shown us that it activates a certain
kind of fight or flight mode in the political body. Politicians oscillate between
leaning into these narratives and aggressively exploiting
them for political gain or reluctantly relenting to
them due to public pressure and for well political gain. But either way, the result
has mostly been the same. We, the titillating people
of these United States, are presented with an extremely
limited ran
ge of options when it comes to the policies created to address concerns over public safety. Typically the options are to
keep things the way they are or hire more police, give them more power, and allow our system to
inflict harsher penalties for criminal offenders. And if you don't want
either of those options, well, then we'll just abandon
you all together how about? You don't want our help? Fine. We'll see how well you do then, huh. Good luck in your John Carpenter hellscape of tsunami surfin
g. And speaking of arguably
regretful things from the 90s, let's take a quick trip back in time, but first deepest apologies
for the Carpenter slander. Okay, time travel go now! The year is 1993. America has its first Black president. All the cool kids have pagers and JNCOs and are pretending that they understand how to play the game Myst. Go (beep) a (beep), you submarine maze. And the movie "Groundhog Day," a story about a guy who was doomed to repeat the same tragic fate until he finally lear
ns his
lesson has become a hit. And a man from Delaware
stands on the Senate floor and flaps his gums. - We must take back the streets. It doesn't matter
whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter,
my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents. It doesn't matter whether
or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn't matter whether or
not they had no background that enabled them to
have to become a social, become socialized into
the fabric of society
. It doesn't matter whether
or not they're the victims of society. The end result is they're
about to knock my mother on the head with a lead
pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons. So, I don't wanna ask
what made them do this. They must be taken off the street. - This is of course our
current president, Joe... Bobby. Pushing for the passage of the infamous and controversial crime bill, a piece of legislation that
he largely wrote himself, with a little help from
the police of c
ourse, that ultimately passed into law in 1994. While the bill did include
some arguably good things like the violence against women act and an assault weapons ban, the law also did some, let's
say opposite of good things, whatever that word is. Joe himself unabashedly bragged about it in the aftermath of the law's passing as proof that the left
wasn't soft on crime, saying this at the time. - Well, let me define the liberal wing of the democratic party. The liberal wing of the
democratic party
is now for 60 new death penalties. That's what's in this bill. The liberal wing of the democratic party has 70 enhanced penalties,
which my friend from California, Senator Feinstein outlined
every one of them. I gave her a list today. She asked what were in there to be sure. Every one of them. The liberal wing of
the democratic party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of
the democratic party is for 125,000 new state prison cells. The liberal wing of the democratic party ain't the old wing I k
new. - Awesome stuff, Joe. Hey, fun, philosophical exercise. If you take the liberal party and replace all of their
values with a pro-cop and pro-prison agenda, do you suppose that's
still a liberal party? Is it a party of Theseus thing or are you just perhaps making up words? I could certainly take
a dump in my fish tank and call it the new toilet, but that doesn't exactly make
it a common fact, does it? The absolutely terrible bill also ended higher education
grants for inmates and provided in
centives to states to adopt harsher mandatory
minimum sentences, which accelerated the already growing mass incarceration crisis that began under the
policies of Nixon and Reagan. And while crime bill
apologists will point out that the law only pertained
to federal policies and therefore had limited
impact on incarceration rates, the fact is that this law and the alarmism around it became a model for
"tough on crime" policies that were adopted by state governments throughout the country. For exa
mple, there's the
California three strikes law, which imposed a life sentence
for almost any crime, no matter how minor, if the defendant had two prior convictions for crimes defined as serious or violent by the California penal code. And so by that definition, if I in the 90s broke into
Hulk Hogan's house twice to steal his bandanas, that would be two instances
of first degree burglary and count as two strikes. Then if 10 years later, I was caught shoplifting a
copy of "No Holds Barred," I coul
d go to jail for life. I'm not saying it's good or right to deprive the Hulkster of
his valuable skull coverings or movie residuals, but just pointing out that
this doesn't exactly feel like a life in jail offense. Maybe cute references to baseball, a game where people who
strike out continue playing that game are actually not cute when talking about a human life. So why? Why did we do this? Well, ever since the 1960s, America had seen a steady rise in crime, a fact that was of course exploited
by bad faith political actors
who pushed draconian policies that did little to solve the
problem, often exacerbating it. And sensationalized media
narratives about crime designed to scare the (beep) out of
white people for ratings continued throughout the 1990s, even when crime was starting to decline, which is why the first Black first lady of the United States was
compelled to say this. - We need to take these people on. They are often connected
to big drug cartels. They are not just gangs of
kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators. No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why
they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel. - Mind you, this super
predator narrative was not just something concocted by the
twisted mind of HR to the C. The term was coined by a young Princeton professor
named John J Dilulio, who used a single study of boys
in Philadelphia to conclude that there would be an additional
30,000 young murderers, rapi
sts, and muggers by the year 2000. And of course the media
instantly adopted this narrative and milked it like a sodden fear tit, a spooky boob, a shutter
udder, a ma-mmary. But surprise, these predictions
did not come to fruition. In fact, the violent crime
rate continued to fall. A generation of remorseless
young monsters did not surge together and create a Voltron of crime. But what did increase was the
juvenile justice population as a result of the policies implemented in response to this ma
nufactured hysteria, which is a nice way of saying, we decided to put a
bunch of kids in cages, something America loves to do apparently. It's like our third most
popular national sport now. And cases like this are why "fear of crime"
politics is so dangerous because like I said,
when people are scared, they're more likely to do dumb things. And in the early 1990s, the democratic party was really scared. It had lost five outta the
last six presidential elections and for decades had been labeled
a party that was soft on crime. And since its America
we're talking about here, of course that label was created with a hearty dollop of racism. - [Announcer] Bush and Dukakis on crime. Bush supports the death penalty
for first degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes
the death penalty, he allowed first degree
murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton who murdered a boy in a robbery stabbing him 19 times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend
passes from
prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a
young couple stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime. - Yeah, really scoop on that racism. Just slap it on there like
a fist full of cream cheese, you honky freaks. This is a pretty infamous ad run during the 1988 presidential election between Republican
candidate George HW Bush and democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. During the summer before the election, Poppy Bush had latched onto
the Willie Horton issu
e and made it a mainstay
of his campaign speeches, releasing an ad attacking the
Massachusetts furlough program showing a series of prisoners walking through a revolving door. Soon after the Willie
Horton spot began running on television. And though this ad was ostensibly run by an independent group and was quickly pulled from circulation, television newscasts were more than happy to keep it on every screen in America. But whether or not the
group that ran the ad, the National Security
Political
Action Committee, was in fact independent or indeed working in concert
with the Bush campaign as many suspected, their goal was the same. As Bush's campaign
strategist Lee Atwater noted, "By the time we're finished, "they're going to wonder "whether Willie Horton is
Dukakis's running mate." And while that's just a dick
nest of horror in itself, what doesn't get talked
about much is the fact that the use of furloughs for prisoners was not only
widespread across the nation at the time but also a
largely successful program. It wasn't bad, boosted prisoner morale, and rarely resulted in problems. But one of the tried and true rules of American political
history is to never let facts or the truth get in the way
of the political advantages that can be gained by leveraging racism, and an additional advantage that the GOP had going for them was that this was also a peak
era of color blindness. Wait, Willie Horton was
a Black man, you say? Why (splutters) I hadn't even noticed! Everyone looks
like the
same gray square to me. And it certainly didn't
help that when confronted with the accusation of being soft on crime at a presidential debate
by one of the moderators invoking the theoretical
rape and murder of his wife, Dukakis responded with as much emotion as a calculator dressed
up in a beige suit. - Governor, if Kitty Dukakis
were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable
death penalty for the killer? - No, I don't Bernard, and I think you know that
I've opposed the death
penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence
that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to
deal with violent crime. We've done so in my own state. - A few things, weird and
wildly inappropriate question, my God, but also come on, man,
you're a politician be like, "How dare you ask that question,
you disgusting media you. "Fake news! "May you (beep) sand!" I'm not saying Dukakis should
have said exactly that. The (beep) sand thing might be a bit odd, bu
t at least show some version
of a human adjacent emotion for the sake of gosh. And yet on the substance, this goober was absolutely
right about the death penalty, that there is no evidence
that it deters violent crime, and as an addendum, the death penalty also
costs a ton of money, habitually executes a whole
bunch of innocent people, and also happens to be
just cruel and wrong. I don't have a graphic
for that last claim. It just like is cruel and wrong. Like, if you believe that
killing people
is generally bad with the exception of
maybe self-preservation or puppet homicide, well, then I'm not sure why you'd think that having our government
systematically kill people they've already caught
and jailed isn't also bad. But whether Dukakis lost the election because he was king dweeb or because America just wasn't ready for his luxurious eyebrows is hard to say. Maybe it's both. But one thing we do know
is that the lesson taken from this election was that
the Democrats lost yet again for
being "soft on crime," which is why you had
the tough on crime pivot within the democratic
party reach critical mass in the 1990s. But the 1988 election
was really just the straw that broke the bushy
eyebrowed camel's back. Do camels have eyebrows? I'm not looking it up. They do now! But right wing reactionaries had been meticulously melding the modern
notions of race and crime for decades. As historian Joshua Zeitz has noted, "In the 1970s and 1980s, "Republican candidates
successfully used vio
lent crime "as an issue to attract white voters. "Fused with concerns
over the economy, busing, "and neighborhood integration, "law and order politics
dislodged millions of working "and middle class white
voters from their former home "in the democratic party." But of course, this is just the tip, hot, of the iceberg, cold, when it comes to the tremendous
pants poop America took over this fear of crime. And anyone alive in the 90s
probably knows what's about to lurch out of the shadows like Nick
Fury at the end of "Iron Man." But just like those Marvel films, we're gonna tease you a bit
and go to some ads first. So, just sit there and
take in these bulbous ads. Thank you. (news blare) - Slurp, slurp. That's the sound of health. Things are just better when you
consume them through straws. So, why not also do that
with your daily nutrition. Wouldn't it be cool to have
all your vitamins sucked up through a small plastic tube? Well, you can have that
with AG1 by Athletic Greens, the catego
ry leading superfood product that delivers all your
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delivered through a straw! How great is that? We love straws, don't we? AG1 is design
ed by experts who keep up with all the nutritional news, so you don't have to. Their product is vegan,
keto, and paleo friendly and only has one gram of sugar. It's good for anyone who needs a quick fix for eating healthy and through
a stupid straw that we love. You actually don't need
a straw to drink it. Again, I don't use them
even though they are great. Straws are great. And to make it easy, Athletic
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with your first purchase if you visit
athleticgreens.com/morenews today. Again, simply visit
athleticgreens.com/morenews to take control of your
health and give AG1 a try. (news blare) - You've probably heard
the names Lewis and Clark. Also true is that you probably
went to an American school, so I don't know, maybe you don't know everything
about their expedition. Luckily we can now absorb information through the magic of podcasts. It's like the future or something. Wow-wee. O
h, the lights and space. Okay. That's why I'm here to tell you about "American History
Tellers" by Wondery, and their brand new season
covering the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. You know the two. They did stuff in the 1800s, including but not limited
to setting out on a mission to find an all water route
to the Pacific Ocean. I'm sure they did that for a reason, and now I can find out
what that reason is. "American History Tellers"
will take you on a journey through mountain
ranges and
harrowing rapids and jerk bears to uncover an expedition that was about far more
than exploration and science but also leadership and luck and about who truly owns
the American Northwest. Is it me? Do I own the west? I'll have to listen to find out. "How do I do that," I ask myself. Well, I can listen to "American History
Tellers Lewis and Clark" on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or you can listen ad free
by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. It's a podcast. You love those, right
? You love 'em. You love podcasts. Listen to 'em with your ears. (news blare) Oh yeah, that was a lot of weed. Hi. I have skin. So, we are back from those veiny ads. And we're talking about a series of manufactured crime scares that have existed since
the days of crimped hair. We've jumped around a bit
through the 80s and 90s, but we sort of skipped a detail. See, just like the Willie Horton ads or the impending threat of
super predators in the 90s, the early 80s came with its
own manufactured h
ysteria, a dangerous and destructive delirium that would devastate the
lives of millions of people for years to come. And I'm not just talking
about shoulder pads. - A pregnant woman smokes crack cocaine. Her intense high lasts only a few seconds, but it can leave her unborn child with a lifetime of trouble. Medical experts say that in Miami, 10 crack babies are born every day. Statistics are nearly the same or worse in many major cities. It is a looming financial
crisis at big city hospitals, a
bill that is expected to
top $300 million by 1991, a bill that you and I will have to pay. - During the 1980s and 90s,
the media, politicians, and health experts were
freaking the (beep) out about so-called crack babies. According to the prevailing narrative that children who were
exposed to crack cocaine while in their mother's
womb would be condemned to lives of severe mental
and physical disabilities, and even worse, all of us
would have to pay for them. The absolute horror! And so consideri
ng this was obviously a public health crisis, politicians responded by
dramatically expanding access to healthcare and implemented programs to help people struggling
with drug addiction, right? - [Reporter] In the most
aggressive prosecution yet, two women in central
Florida have been charged, not just with child abuse, but with delivery of a
controlled substance to a minor, their infant children. If convicted, the women
face 30 years in jail and drug testing by the state for the rest of their c
hildbearing years. - See to me, while drugs are involved, this isn't a drug case. To me, it's a child abuse case. - Oh, how interestingly terrible. Pretty (beep) wild that a
nonviolent public health concern like drug use so quickly
became insidiously conflated with a violent crime like child abuse. Seems like something we shouldn't ever do. But put a pin in that
notion for the moment because the thing is it turns
out that the moral panic about crack babies was kicked off by a study of just 23 in
fants
that the lead researcher now says was blown out of proportion. In fact, subsequent studies since then have consistently concluded that prenatal exposure to crack cocaine, which happens when a
woman smokes crack cocaine while pregnant has little or no effect on the long term development of a child. I mean, you probably like
still shouldn't do it, but the fact that the
crack baby myth was built on (beep) has not stopped this fable from persisting to this day. It certainly didn't stop
lawmake
rs at the time from implementing harsh penalties for crack cocaine possession, which was of course richly ironic because meanwhile our
government was, at best, looking the other way when it came to the trafficking of crack
cocaine into our cities and, at worst, actively
participating in the drug trade. And this is of course the part where we talk about the war on drugs. The aforementioned Nick Fury
of America's crime panic because you can't talk about
crime without the old WOD. And just for goof
abouts
and snicker pusses, let's allow the guy who
started the whole thing to have the honor of
introducing the topic. - I am glad that in this administration we have increased the amount of money for handling the problem of
dangerous drugs sevenfold. It will be $600 million this year. More money will be needed in the future. I wanna say however that
despite our budget problems, to the extent money can help in beating the problem of dangerous drugs, it will be available. This is one area where
we
cannot have budget cuts because we must wage what
I have called total war against public enemy number
one in the United States, the problem of dangerous drugs. - Now there is a whole lot to
say about the war on drugs. There are many, many books that have been written about this topic that you should read if that's your kink, which I mean, okay, everyone's
got their thing, I guess. But let me provide you
with a brief synopsis. The war on drugs has
been, what's the word? Oh yeah, titillating. W
ait, (beep) no. The word is bad. A failure from the start and super racist and well, just really, really bad. Declared by Nixon and then expanded by both Reagan and Clinton, the brutal tactics and
policies that were deployed in this campaign have
been a major contributor to the massive rise in
our prison population over the decades, and ultimately
landed us USA number one in both the total prison population and incarceration rate per capita. Over the decades, the war on drugs has
justified harsh
er penalties for nonviolent crimes,
increased police surveillance, made getting high scary, and has exacerbated the
militarization of the police. It also rationalized the
increased use of a practice known as civil asset forfeiture, which allows police to seize property as long as they believe that the assets in question
were somehow connected to criminal activity. They don't even need to prove it. In fact, on an annual basis, police sometimes take more stuff from American citizens than burglars
do. And this particular policy was championed by none other than our
current president Joe... Brian. That guy again. Boy, he really seems to
keep showing up, doesn't he? Dude just loves attention for awful things that led us to our
current political moment while being incapable of admitting his and his party's role in it, and thus making him
incapable and unwilling to do what needs to be done to fix it. And of course the thrust
of all the politics and policy surrounding
the war on drugs was a de
liberate scheme to
leverage the racist fears of the white population
for political gain. And this is not hyperbole because remember that guy Lee Atwater that I mentioned earlier,
the Poppy Bush strategist who championed the racist
Willie Horton scheme. Well, it just so happens
that he'd been a part of this sort of thing before. During an infamous interview in 1981 while he was working in
the Reagan White House, Atwater fessed up to the nature of the racist Southern
strategy deployed by Nixon, us
ing words that I'm not
particularly inclined to say out loud, so I will let him do it. - [Lee] You start out in 1954 by saying "(beep) (beep) (beep)" By 1986 you can't say (beep)
that hurts you, backfires, so you say stuff like forced bussing, states rights, and all that stuff. And you're getting so abstract. Now you're talking about cutting taxes and all of these things. What you're talking about
are totally economic things, and the byproduct of them
is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And su
bconsciously maybe
that is part of it. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that if it
is getting that abstract and that coded, that we we're doing away with
the racial problem one way or the other. Do you follow me? Because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut taxes. "We want to cut this,"
is much more abstracted than even the bussing thing, and a hell lot more
abstracted than (beep) (beep) - Yeah! That one word we kept bleeping out, it's the one you assume it is. And remember, after
that interview, he went on to become
Bush's campaign strategist. Bush saw that man and thought, "Now there's someone I could really use." If this isn't enough, Nixon advisor John
Ehrlichman's confession made the specific connection
between the war on drugs and the political exploitation of racism, even more explicit than
old Michael Richards did in that clip. And so it's not a
surprise that the policies that came out of the war on drugs exacerbated racial inequality and rolled back many of the
gains that had been won during
the civil rights era. As an example, consider
the sentencing difference between crack and powder cocaine. The 1986 anti-drug abuse act
created a 100 to one disparity between being arrested with crack versus being arrested with cocaine, specifically only five
grams of crack constitutes a five year air mandatory minimum sentence while it takes a whopping
500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger that same result. Just to really hammer that home, here's what a little ove
r five
grams of crack looks like. And here's what 500 grams
of cocaine looks like. The latter is like an entire
Aaron Sorkin screenplay worth of blow, while that measly rock of crack couldn't even write a single
episode of the west wing. Personal photos, by the way. It's the same essential substance, same basic dangers and addiction levels only crack was associated
with Black people and powder cocaine was
associated with white people. And the nature of the
enforcement of drug crimes was wildly u
nequal, despite
the fact that white people and Black people used drugs
at basically the same rate. In fact, the rates of drug
use are more or less equal across racial and class divides because, you know, throughout
history human beings like to get high, and some of the cooler animals too, if I'm being fair and
balanced, TMC our 420 bra, and yet in the 1970s, Black
people were approximately twice as likely as white people to be arrested for drug related offenses. By 1988, that went up
to five tim
es as likely. It's almost like, it's like, it's like the system itself is racist. And I wish there was a
better term for this dynamic, but there's not. Maybe we should teach about
this in schools or something, so then I would know what the word is. Or like how as author Michelle
Alexander noted in her book, "The New Jim Crow," "A survey was conducted in 1995 "asking the following question, "'Would you close your eyes for a second, "'envision a drug user, and
describe that person to me?' "The sta
rtling results were published "in the Journal of Alcohol
and Drug Education. "95% of respondents
pictured a Black drug user "while only 5% imagined
other racial groups." This is all despite the
studies around this showing that the vast majority of drug users are college
aged white people, meaning that when you close your eyes to envision a drug user, you should be picturing
something like this. She goes on to note that the
same group of respondents also perceived the typical
drug trafficker as B
lack. Also not true. In fact, white people are
more likely to sell drugs, but Black people are more
likely to be arrested for selling drugs. And one of the main reasons
for this is that our history of systemic racism has
relegated Black people into inner cities, areas
of concentrated poverty that have been heavily policed, using similar counterinsurgency tactics that the US military uses
as an occupying force in other nations. And so perhaps the brutal
policies and practices and blood thirsty pe
nalties enacted in response to fears over
crime, real and manufactured, have been implemented to
maintain the political and economic advantages
of white supremacy. Perhaps not! But perhaps. (news blare) The bottom line is that a
deliberate political strategy racialized the very notion of crime itself and successfully equated
the word crime with danger and violence regardless
of the type of crime and whether or not it was
dangerous or violent in nature. This campaign succeeded in
further cementin
g the image of a young Black man as a
dangerous, violent criminal in the imaginations of white Americans. This is how a child walking home from the store wearing a hoodie and carrying Skittles and
ice tea could be portrayed as a scary Black man, or how a little kid playing in the park with a toy gun could be
killed within two seconds of police arriving on the scene, or how five adolescents could be convicted of a crime they didn't commit then have a corny real estate
guy take out full page ads i
n four New York newspapers to call for reinstating
the death penalty for them and then get away with
refusing to apologize even after they were proven innocent. Epilogue, and then that
corny real estate guy became the United States president specifically on a platform of building a big wall to keep drug dealing,
raping Mexicans away. Sequel, and might again. What I'm getting at
here is that America is kind of an apartheid state. Like, I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it really seems like our
c
rime policies are designed to divide us by race and to
continue present policies is to make permanent the
division of our country into two societies; one largely Black and poor
located in the central cities, the other predominantly
white and affluent located in the suburbs and in outlying areas. And I think we've known this for a while. In fact, literally the last sentence
I said isn't my own words but a direct quote from something called
the Kerner Commission as was this. White society is deepl
y
implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it. White institutions maintain it. And white society condones it. Also actually a direct quote from this Kerner Commission report which was created in (beep) 1967. I actually changed out
the word negro for Black because it would've
been super weird not to, pulled a little Nikole
Hannah Jones on you all. April fools! That's all month, right? And the reason I did this was, well, boy, what an
indictment of this country that an analysis from th
e late
60s would be just as true, if not more true today, that I can pull quotes from
this 50 plus year old document that sounds exactly like
the kind of issues we're still dealing with today. Before super predators and crack babies and the war on drugs, in 1967 President Lyndon Johnson formed the Kerner Commission to determine the causes of
the violent racial uprisings that were taking place in
America's cities at the time, but nobody, certainly
not the administration, expected the commission t
o conclude that, "Bad policing practices,
a flawed justice system, "unscrupulous consumer credit practices, "poor or inadequate housing, "high unemployment, voter suppression, "and other culturally embedded forms "of racial discrimination all converged "to propel violent upheaval "on the streets of African
American neighborhoods "in American cities, north
and south, east and west." In order to address this crisis, the commission recommended
a vast expansion of our social safety net and
more adeq
uate social services, a massive jobs program, and vigorous action to
end racial discrimination in hiring and discrimination
for the formerly incarcerated, increased funding for
disadvantaged students, and sharply increased efforts
to end segregation in schools, as well as an increase in low
and moderate income housing outside of ghetto areas,
along with a commitment to overcoming the prevailing
patterns of racial segregation. It also included a strong condemnation of the increased
militarization
of the police. So, in response to the
findings of the commission, we enthusiastically implemented all the policies it recommended, right? Right? No, of course not! Happy April fools month! Unfortunately and predictably, the backlash to the report was immediate. Polls showed that 53% of white
Americans condemned the claim that racism had caused the riots, while 58% of Black Americans
agreed with the findings. And as the report ominously
noted in its conclusion, "One of the first witnesses
to be
invited to appear "before this commission
was Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, "a distinguished and perceptive scholar. "Referring to the reports
of earlier riot commissions, "he said, 'I read that report
of the 1919 riot in Chicago. "'And it is as if I
were reading the report "'of the investigating committee
on the Harlem riot of '35, "'the report of the
investigating committee "'on the Harlem riot of '43, "'the report of the McCone
Commission on the Watts riot. "'I must again in candor say "'to you membe
rs of this commission, "'it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland "'with the same moving picture
re-shown over and over again, "'the same analysis, the
same recommendations, "'and the same inaction.'" But even worse than simply
ignoring the findings and recommendations in the report, as a nation, we freaking sprinted
in the opposite direction. Instead of accepting the notion that systemic racism had created
the conditions for violence and inequality in the segregated and economically deprived inner c
ities that white supremacy had
intentionally created and maintained, we promoted racist ideas that continued the American tradition of pathologizing the individual
behaviors of Black people in order to perpetuate inequality and maintain white supremacy. Instead of expanding our social safety net and making a concerted
effort to address inequality and racial discrimination, we gutted the social
safety net and pretended that the era of racial
discrimination was a thing of the past. We also went in
the opposite direction when it came to the commission's
recommendation on policing. Here's how Jelani Cobb, author of the book "The Essential
Kerner Commission Report," described the analysis
and recommendations made by the commissions on
the matter of police. - Law enforcement are called for a whole array of social concerns that actually have nothing to do with the enforcement of the law. And what this does is create just simply more points of contact between the average civilian and the avera
ge law enforcement officer with the potential of
something going wrong each time and something potentially
going disastrously wrong each time. And so what they said was that there needed to be other
social service organizations or outlets that could address concerns that didn't require someone
with a gun to show up. And in a very succinct way, they were encapsulating
the idea that has been, come to be known as defund the police now. - That's right. We knew. We (beep) knew what to do
and yet we d
idn't do it. And again, we instead did the opposite. It's kind of a thing we
absolutely love to do in this country. And this all brings us
back to the present moment and serves as a harrowing
harbinger of things to come because I don't need magical
time traveling powers to know what's on the horizon. I mean, I'll take time
traveling powers if you got 'em. But if the tough on crime
posturing of Republicans during the confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson
is any indication, the GOP is goi
ng to make
crime a top 2022 issue. And what about the Democrats? Well, if their behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 elections is any indication, conservative Democrats
will blame progressives for pushing the defund the police agenda as a scapegoat for democratic losses. Hey Democrats, maybe you should have tried
fixing American democracy while you had the chance before you started blaming progressives for your utter cowardice, is what I yell out into the terrifying and yet probable future. And
thanks to the tremendous
amount of weed drifting through my veins, like
time rivers on a river web, I'm almost certain they can hear me. You don't like the slogan
defund the police, fine. I don't care about whether
or not you like the slogan. What I care about are the
policies that you support. And I care about the role that
police play in our society. If you wanna increase
funding for the police, for the purpose of addressing the nationwide rape kit backlog, fine. Super. If you wanna increase
funding for the police so that they all stay at home and aren't out there
harassing and killing people, also fine, but less super because if your issue is really that you thought the slogan was bad and not that you disagreed
with the actual policies, it would be incredibly easy
to adjust your messaging around the issue. Even this former cop was able to do this when she was asked about the
defund the police movement by the lord commissar mean girl. - I just wanna know from you, do you support def
unding
and removing police from American communities? And if not, why do you think
there's such a hard time being differentiated right
now between defunding and reforming police departments? - So, Meghan, I think that a big part of this conversation
really is about reimagining how we do public safety in America, which I support, which is this. We have confused the idea that to achieve safety you
put more cops on the street instead of understanding to achieve safe and healthy communities
you put
more resources into the public education
system of those communities, into affordable housing,
into home ownership, into access to capital
for small businesses, access to healthcare regardless of how much money people have. That's how you achieve safe
and healthy communities. - In all honesty, no notes. Well, in some honesty,
probably some notes, but a pretty good answer. If only this former cop was in a position to influence the current
president of the United States, Joe... Buttigieg. I need l
ike a mnemonic
device for that or something. - We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police. - [Woman] That's right! - It's to fund the police. (people applaud) Fund them. Fund them. - Okay, in fairness, maybe
he said fun the police. Like, F-U-N. Like, dress them all up like Jack Sparrow. But I'm pretty sure that Joe... Bottles in dick enticed nurses. Biden just said he wanted to
give the police more money. And see, I learned to remember
your name this time, Joe, as we all should b
ecause
you have consistently been on the wrong side of
criminal justice issues for your entire career. Also weird that former cop
was behind you clapping for some reason. Maybe there was a really
big mosquito in there. And sure Biden has acknowledged that some of his past
stances were mistakes and has done the bare minimum by implementing a pause
on federal executions and has proposed increases in spending for violence prevention programs. So, this guy may be marginally
better on these issues th
an the fascist alternative, but unfortunately he is not
the answer to our thoughts and prayers. When you hear people
like JRB tout solutions like community policing,
run for the hills. Why would we want police
to be more integrated into our communities? Police (beep) suck, man. They're just former high school
bullies with badges, guns, and qualified immunity. Also they dress stupid. (beep) armed milk men. It is whack. I don't want them showing up at Warmbo's kids little league games. Besides the
y inevitably
use this expanded access to the community to, you know, spy on you. And I totally understand how all of this can leave
you feeling helpless, given our history on the issue. But as "Brainscan"'s Edward
Furlong has taught us, there is no fate but what
we make for ourselves. And more recent history with regards to the criminal justice
system has also shown us that things can't actually change because since the publishing
of Michelle Alexander's book, "The New Jim Crow," in 2010, a rare
example of a good version of a bipartisan consensus
has begun to emerge, that harsh penalties for
nonviolent drug crimes are maybe not such a good thing. There is a growing recognition that the trillion dollar
war on drugs has been an utter failure. As a result, 18 states
have legalized marijuana and 38 states and Washington, DC have
legalized medical marijuana. And some reforms have been made in reducing the harsh penalties
for nonviolent drug crimes. There's still a long way to go, but some p
rogress has been made. So, make sure to celebrate
4/20 properly today, folks, by filling a dirt bike gas
tank with high potency indica and sucking on the tailpipe, except legally speaking,
don't actually do that. But as Danielle Sered warns in
her book, "Until We Reckon," if your goal is to end the
mass incarceration crisis, simply addressing the sentencing for nonviolent crime is not
going to solve the problem. Quote, "Just as we cannot
incarcerate our way "out of violence, "we cannot reform ou
r way
out of mass incarceration "without taking on the
question of violence." And as a quick side note, our goal should be an
end to mass incarceration because while this country has only 5% of the world population, we have nearly 25% of the
world's incarcerated population. That is supremely (beep) up. America's a bad country. We did a bad job with that. Yet addressing our approach
to violent crime is a much more difficult political challenge. But as that former cop suggested earlier, maybe we o
ught to start
reimagining public safety, and it starts right there
with that term, public safety. Because if public safety
is truly your goal, it makes it easier to start recognizing which policies actually
create more public safety. For instance, maybe using the police and the court system to
inundate citizens with fines and fees for low level violations in order to fund the city government, as was done in Ferguson, is not about promoting public safety. In fact, preying on the vulnerable in thi
s way actually makes us less safe. And if you start truly looking at things through this lens of public safety, it can be very illuminating. Consider that tweet by the
NYPD we discussed earlier, boasting about their
arrest of 12 individuals. Do those arrests make anyone any safer or do they just protect the
interest of large corporations? Maybe enacting policies
aimed to create a society where people aren't so desperate that they need to steal diapers and medicine is what would
actually make us
safer because some of the things
that we do know contribute to levels of crime are income
inequality, joblessness, and poverty, specifically
concentrated poverty. And as an additional bonus,
those corporations run by cartoon (beep) paper
bears wouldn't have to worry about sticky fingers in
their toiletries aisle. And if your true goal was
creating the conditions for safe and healthy communities, you would probably start out with many of the recommendations
made in the Kerner Report more than hal
f a century ago. And add onto that universal healthcare, free at the point of service. Ooh, baby, wouldn't that be neato to like live in a world that
wanted to enact policies to lift people out of poverty. Half a century old policies in some cases. But in all honesty, those corporations would rather maintain the economic leverage
they have over employees to keep their pay low and continue to outsource their security to the publicly funded police. It's a system that works
extremely well for them.
Besides if we actually did adequately fund and promote the basic
needs of the human beings in our society, taxes might go up for
these large corporations. (news blare) Can and should and won't. And while our current
system works over time to protect the specific
interest of capital, it does very little to
address the needs of people who have been more
significantly harmed by crime, in particular, the
survivors of violent crime. And shouldn't that be one of
the major goals of our system? Seems o
bvious. After all, the thing that actually makes crime bad is the harm that it causes people. That's why it's a crime. It would be logical to
always think of crime first in terms of helping the victims, right? And yet we focus most of our efforts on punishing the perpetrators of crime while doing very little to
repair the harm inflicted on the survivors of crime. We tend to offer them
little more than locking up or executing the person
who caused them harm. And sometimes that's not really what s
urvivors of crime
actually need or want. In fact, there's been research showing that not only do the victims or families of victims largely
get left twisting in the wind after a criminal trial, but most of them actually
find less closure if the death penalty is used. This is thanks to the
constant appeals process often prolonging their grief. The idea that punishing the
criminal brings closure is a completely unproven idea. And yet we love to use it as the reasoning behind a lot of harsh sentenc
es. We prop up the victims to justify our criminal justice system, despite never actually
endeavoring to help them. Not to mention that the
brutality of a prison system not aimed at reform plus the
threat of execution means that no one is ever going to
want to confess to a crime in a way that might bring
better closure to the victims. We'd rather be wrathful
than seek resolution. Cut off all the noses,
despite all the faces. I'm pretty sure we just did
an entire Batman about this. And for the pe
ople who do
eventually get out of prison, as most of them do, they're met with significant
barriers to rejoining society in constructive ways. Barriers that we as a society
have intentionally placed in their way. These factors may be why we
have such high recidivism rates as in formally incarcerated
people turning back to crime. And so not only are we not
meeting the needs of survivors, but we are failing to hold
those who cause harm accountable and making it more likely
that they will continue
to cause harm and endure more violence when they have supposedly
paid their debt to society. It seems like a really, really bad system. In fact, whenever a restorative
justice system is practiced, as in a system where the
offender is held accountable by allowing the victim of the crime to confront them along with
members of the community, a system built on the
idea of rehabilitation, well, nearly every study shows that an offender is far
less likely to reoffend in the future. And it's kind of ir
onic
that the same politicians that deride the nanny state
are the very same ones that promote the notion of punishment as the central tenant of our
criminal justice philosophy. And while at first glance, the notion of accountability
may seem like the easy way out in response to a terrible crime that has caused unspeakable
harm to individuals, if you sit and think
about it for a minute, there is nothing easy about sincerely taking true accountability for something like that, and there's nothing
easy
about endeavoring to repair that harm. Also things that aren't easy, switching to a system
built on rehabilitation. It won't happen overnight. And some of the solutions
can only be solved by massive federal
government intervention. But a lot of the policies
surrounding the role of the police take place
at the local level. And so we can and must do our
part for both everyone's sake and for the sake of the writer
of this episode's mother who is losing sleep over the heartbreaking
case of Meli
ssa Lucio. - Now this is an old case
that is gaining a lot of new attention. It happened 15 years ago in south Texas. Lucio was convicted of capital murder after the death of her
daughter, Mariah Alvarez. Now according to the DA's office, the two year old had signs
of abuse on her body, but family members claim
Mariah's death was an accident, saying she fell down the stairs. The Texas woman is now on death row, scheduled for execution on April 27th. - Melissa is scheduled to be
executed seven da
ys from now on April 27th for the crime of allegedly murdering
her two year old daughter, a crime that sure seems to
have not actually occurred, and in all likelihood
was a terrible accident where her daughter fell
down a flight of stairs. Having maintained her
innocence for 14 years after a corrupt district attorney obtained a false confession after
seven hours of interrogation, Melissa Lucio does not
deserve to die in our shoddy and blood thirsty system. So, please go to the link on screen to
help stop this one injustice. Also, wow, I hope you didn't actually
get high to watch this video like I told you to because
pretty bleak but important stuff. Like, yes, I want you to care about this, but I also don't want you
to completely lose all hope. We can have joyful things
in a terrible world. For example, weed. Also this picture of my dog. What else is good? Corn on the cob is amazing. Bugs are neat. You get the point. Or if you don't because you're too high, the point is that we need a
system fundamentally built on compassion where people
are both held accountable but rehabilitated, where victims see justice
but are also cared for, and especially where our
goal toward crime is never to frame it as an evil entity or sinister epidemic
that needs to be attacked and snuffed out like the media and cops and government loves to do, but rather as a sign of systemic failure, a symptom of a larger problem. Like, if you get terrible pain farts, the answer isn't to try
and punish your own
ass unless you're into that. But rather try to figure out
what's causing those farts and change things on a fundamental level. Like, perhaps not eating
so much corn on the cob when you're allergic to it, even though it's buttery and delicious and I want some right now. This got away from me, but
I think you understand. And so maybe if we sought to
prevent crime from happening in the first place by providing
for people's basic needs, actually respond to the
needs of survivors of crime, and pursu
ed a strategy of
accountability and rehabilitation, we might have no need
for an ineffective system that instead pushes people
to the brink of starvation, surveils and harasses them,
habitually assaults them, seizes their property, inflicts traumatizing punishments on them, that perpetuates cycles
of poverty and violence and (beep) kills them. Maybe it's not just crime
we should be afraid of but rather the current system in place to allegedly address crime. And just maybe once we all sober up, w
e can thrive for something
better than what we have now. - [Warmbo] Oh, Mr. Cody. (Warmbo screams) - Dang. Got him right in the face. Don't worry! He's incapable of dying. It's like a fun game for us. - [Warmbo] Warmbo is happy
to be penetrated by Mr. Cody. - And now it's less fun. (news blare) All right, I'm gonna pull out the arrow. Do not call it me pulling out. Wow-wee, what a fun
filled episode that was. Be sure to like and
subscribe and leave a comment about what a fun filled episode this
was. And we've got a patreon.com/somemorenews. We've got merch at a merch store. There's links everywhere for you. We've got a podcast
called "Even More News." And this show that you
just watched as a podcast. So, get out there and be yourself.
Comments
What a Modern Nuclear War Would Actually Be Like - https://youtu.be/H4GQ7gm-jdI
Remember folks, if you see someone shoplifting food, diapers, and baby formula, no you didn't.
It's so goddamn weird how the public at large has this perception that shoplifting is such a violent crime committed by malicious thugs who deserve to be locked away forever, but the public response for wage theft is "Just find a better job, lol". It's almost like the public mentality is that everything wrong is the poor's fault.
You could almost say that it is Critical that they teach about Racist systems in school. Theoretically.
When people rob corporations, that's a crime. When corporations rob people, that's just business.
they also didn’t “close stores due to rising crime”, they “had bought up the competition and were now consolidating”
“But what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?” ― Vetinari in "Snuff", by Terry Pratchett
My dad's girlfriend got hurt and disabled at work through the negligence of her employer, and while she was trying to get her work to cover her medical bills and answer for her unlawful firing, one of the judges told her "This is not a Justice System. This is a Legal System." and I think about this a lot lately.
I love when American politicians talk about other countries being "authoritarian", when the US police budget is bigger than almost all military budgets and no country in the world imprisons more people than the US.
I work with kids who have Fetal Alcohol Spectral Disorder, and a few of them have/had parents who also did hard drugs. The scariest thing is the detox. Take the most awful withdrawal and imagine a new born going through it. It’s terrifying. But the foster parents/parents/guardians and I can tell you almost all of these pregnancies also involved alcohol use, because addiction is a hell of a thing. And the alcohol did way more damage than the crack. But alcohol is perfectly legal.
Remember kids: if you see someone shoplifting food, no you didn’t
Maybe we need to stop calling non-cops "civilians", since at least technically, cops are civilians, unless they are military police.
“Close your eyes and imagine a drug addict.” I dont need to. Many of my high school friends died from drug abuse. My uncle died from alcohol abuse. I suffer from addiction problems. This can be changed with better public health.
"If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class." - A GODDAMN VIDEO GAME CHARACTER IN THE 1990s BEING MORE CORRECT ON AN ISSUE THAN REAL PEOPLE
If I could make one global law, it would be that news agencies have to painstakingly explain every graph they use, under penalty of being stabbed with ten percent of a pie chart.
Just some more information in the Melissa Lucio situation: Melissa and her kids moved into a home that was definitely not up to code and was a second floor building. The stairs leading up to it were heavily dilapidated. Melissa’s daughter had a condition where her feet were inverted making mobility a big problem for her. Because of this Melissa and her husband were planning on moving to a first floor home nearby. In their last days of living in the old house, Melissa’s daughter had fallen down the stairs and hurt herself very badly. Melissa at the time he only seen a bloody mouth on the child so she assumed nothing too serious. Turns out Melissa’s daughter had suffered from severe brain damage and the symptoms did not show right away. This condition if not treated immediately can kill a child, unfortunately that’s what happened. However, Melissa didn’t notice any big problem with her daughter so the family had finished moving to their new first floor home. A couple days in, Melissa noticed her daughter was irritable and had lost her appetite. I don’t remember the exact details from here but Melissa’s daughter died in her crib from the brain damage and the ambulance was called. The authorities noted that the baby’s body was covered in bruises and their were signs of abuse. Melissa had struggled with a drug addiction so they assumed she was the killer. Melissa had told the authorities that her daughter had indeed fallen down the stair and that’s how the bruises got there but the authorities did not believe here since their new house was on the first floor. Thus, Melissa was interrogated for hours on end. There’s a video up showing the interrogation. The cop refuses Melissa water, food, or even a bathroom break and because of Melissa’s past experience with abusive men in her life, her thought process was “they won’t let me go unless they get something”. So she falsely confused to abusing her baby. During her trial, no one defended Lucio on her behalf. Her mom, her sister, her neighbors all said Lucio was not the type to abuse her children, that she was actually too soft on them. Even Melissa’s other children who were all witnesses to the baby’s fall and the baby’s death, could not testify for their mother. Melissa had a terrible attorney who purposely left out information that could changed the outcome of Melissa’s trial. There is so much more to this case but this is the little I know and it enough to know that Melissa Lucio is innocent. The idea that a mother who has mourned the death of her child will be executed in a week in gut wrenching. Please watch this video by Professor Flowers detailing the case: https://youtu.be/ENQkTEEf4jk and also the documentary “Melissa vs. the State of Texas.” In the video by Professor Flowers, more ways to help are linked in the description and I encourage you to share them with anyone you know.
It's interesting that talking about gun control after the nth mass shooting is "politicizing tragedy" but calling for more militarized police after spikes in crime is just "the obvious solution"
Dude. That part after you read the Kerner Commission findings and joke said "We enthusiastically implemented all the policies it recommended..." and chuckled it away, I teared up instead. That one hurt. White America always knew the problems in explicit detail, but outright refuses at every corner to address them unless pushed by blood and money. sigh welp, back to work and trying to forget that I'll be a target/other for the rest of my life in this country!
A reminder that Oregon decriminalized drug possession and as a result, arrests PLUMMETED. Magical how that works. And the money being saved is being put into other, more important areas.
we live in a society where we are more worried about people stealing bread than the fact that people need to steal bread.