Peter Moskos spent the better part of two years as a cop patrolling the mean streets of East Baltimore on the midnight to 8 am night shift, before he left policing to complete a Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University. He now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, where he directs the NYPD Executive Master’s Leadership Program, and where he writes extensively about the importance of good policing to maintaining order and keeping crime in check in American cities.
So we asked Peter, the author of four books, including most recently Back from the Brink (2025), an oral history of how the NYPD in the ‘90s was able to achieve an extraordinary reduction in crime in New York CIty, to join us on BCB to share his insights about what works – and what doesn’t – when it comes to policing cities and curbing crime. In our conversation, he challenges the left progressive embrace of abolitionist ideas and the belief that public safety efforts must focus on root causes, instead arguing forcefully that cities can substantially reduce crime through better policing without first solving poverty, inequality or addiction.
In our conversation, Moskos draws a distinction between policing that is actually targeted at generating real world public safety improvements and policing that merely generates process-measuring enforcement statistics. He describes to us how in the 1990s NYPD adopted “broken windows” crime-fighting ideas and innovative approaches that married systemic efforts to track criminal activity with holding commanders accountable for addressing it to great effect. But he is sharply critical of how over time those approaches degraded into a reliance on high volume stop-and-frisk interactions, where counting stops became an end in itself, which damaged the NYPD’s standing in minority communities without producing many additional gains in crime reduction.
Peter defends proactive policing efforts to maintain order in shared public spaces, though he tells us that the evidence for the claim that addressing minor disorder automatically prevents serious crime is weak. Rather, he contends that maintaining public order matters for its own sake, and that cities should enforce reasonable rules in parks, subways and streets because residents need usable public spaces. He also calls for policing that targets repeat offenders, and offers qualified support for some of the police reforms championed by progressives over the last decade: bail reform in New York was largely successful for low level offenders, he acknowledges, but was extended too far to repeat offenders, and he contends reasonable restrictions on dangerous police pursuits make sense, but overly restricting them allows criminals to evade consequence.
Still, he says, many progressives in blue cities have become reflexively anti-cop and foolishly enamored with radical chic abolitionist ideas. “I actually think opponents of policing are more afraid of good policing than bad policing,” Moskos explains, “because bad policing they can use as a weapon, and good policing shows that they’re fundamentally wrong about the causes of crime.”
OUTSIDE SOURCES:
Peter Moskos, "The Crisis of Police and Public Safety," The Liberal Patriot, Nov. 24, 2023.
Peter Moskos, "Homicide: Life in the Stats," Vital City, Feb. 28, 2024.
Peter Moskos, "Fix the Subway, Not Society," Vital City, Jan. 22, 2025.
Peter Moskos, Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop, Oxford University Press (2025).
Peter Moskos, In Defense of Flogging, Basic Books (2011).
[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues, a podcast featuring smart guests talking about the problems facing blue cities and how to fix them. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. And Sandeep, cast your mind back to the 1970s when we were kids growing up. And like the cop shows were usually pretty positive, like Barney Miller. But the movies like Serpico, more recent films like The Departed are a lot more critical. Like they end up having like dirty cops, right?
[00:00:38] Yeah. I mean, I sort of think of Popeye Doyle and the French Connection as being sort of the quintessential kind of 70s cop portrayal, but maybe, yeah, I don't know, Serpico too. Yeah, sure. All right. I bring it up because a lot of the conversation about policing in blue cities these days sounds a lot more like movies than TV shows. And our special guest today, Peter Moskos has thoughts. I don't know if he has thoughts about that. We'll ask him. But he certainly has thoughts about blue city policing.
[00:01:08] He's a former Baltimore police officer, a Harvard trained sociologist, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who directs its NYPD Executive Masters Leadership Program. And his 2025 book is called Back from the Brink Inside the NYPD and New York City's extraordinary 1990s crime drop. Peter Moskos, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, it's a pleasure. I'm happy to be here. Now can we talk about 70s cop movies?
[00:01:33] Yes. Well, you might have guessed what I want to ask about that, but also about The Wire, because you were before I want to ask about your, you know, background of police work. But just just to start with The Wire, because I'm curious, like what you thought of that as somebody who had the real job? I loved it. It started filming just as I was leaving Baltimore in 2001. And keep in mind, I was only there for less than two years.
[00:02:03] I joke I did 20 and out, but there were months because it was my PhD research in sociology. And I went back to Harvard and it kind of kept me attuned to the streets of Baltimore, kept me spiritually connected. I mean, this was a little, wasn't really, was it before the internet 2001? The internet as we know it today, it was certainly before it. Yeah, before Twitter. And those were filmed on the streets of the Eastern District where I work, so I knew those corners.
[00:02:32] And I want to add that David Simon has been, he's been good to me professionally over the years. You know, he borrowed my latest book, but he's a mensch. Cool. Yeah. I mean, so I will go back and, so I love The Wire. I do think it's not just the best cop show ever made, but it's maybe the best TV show ever made. And I actually went back on the 20th anniversary of when it first started airing and re-watched all five seasons of it.
[00:02:58] And the thing that struck me about re-watching it is the cops in the show, right? They're, how funny they are, right? It's actually this very funny dialogue and banter and kind of, you know, it just captures their sort of, their worldview, their kind of cynicism, you know, in some sense about sort of the state of things, but also just their kind of realism about the world.
[00:03:26] Well, anyway, I found that really interesting, the second go-round to kind of... You know, it's funny you mention that because people ask if I miss policing. And I mean, parts of it, but the short answer is no. Professor is a better job. But I do miss laughing a lot. I mean, and it is a humor. Some of it is unique to, well, a lot of it is unique to policing and gallows humor. But I don't think I've ever laughed at work as much as I did when I was a cop.
[00:03:56] And some of it is the bond of policing that creates that. And some of it is just the absurd situations you find yourself. And some of it is straight up gallows humor. But yeah, it's, the wire captured that well. You know, another movie which was not nearly on the same level overall, but I don't know when it came out. So, End of Watch was an L.A. movie and the plot was horrible.
[00:04:19] But the scenes of the two cops in a car bantering and interacting and the police culture side of it are really fabulous. And, you know, I don't know if the whole movie is worth watching, but for that part of it, it's good. I'm going to have to go check that out.
[00:04:36] Real quick, quick digression, because prior to The Wire, you know, David Simon co-wrote The Corner, right, where in 1997, this great book where he and his co-author spent a year basically on one corner in, I believe, West Baltimore. You know, a drug corner and kind of cataloging the lives and the interactions and the kind of world of The Corner.
[00:05:06] And that was made into a HBO miniseries, which was a precursor kind of to The Wire, but much more gritty and real. It didn't have any of the kind of literary flourishes of The Wire. And I, as people who listen to the podcast know, I had a, I was addicted to heroin in the 90s and particularly my last few years in the, in D.C. in the late 90s was that world, right?
[00:05:34] D.C. and Baltimore had very, very, very similar drug scenes and drug cultures, inner city drug cultures. And I was very much part of it in D.C. in those three years where my life was really coming apart. And so The Corner, the HBO version of it is, it was just very real. It was very, very real. It's funny. I showed a clip from The Corner in my class yesterday. It is a good show.
[00:06:01] It's also interesting because a lot of the actors are the same in The Corner and The Wire. And I don't know this, but I have a feeling David Simon says, look, I know it's not cool to cast all these black people as junkies. But I'm telling you, in the next series I'm going to do, you're going to be police captains and chiefs. Right. Right. Right. He gave them different roles. I also asked him why he's, he filmed it in the Eastern District if it's set in the Western, which he knew better.
[00:06:28] And he said, because the Eastern, they're very similar in many ways. But he said the Eastern District has fewer trees, so there weren't seasonality problems. I said, no, just like the Western, but less green. Okay. Continuity issues. So two years in Baltimore. What can you tell us about that experience that then informs your later work? Well, I mean, I've banked my career on it, quite frankly.
[00:06:55] It was, yeah, 20 months total, and six of that were in the police academy. I basically stayed until I got civil service protection. And then once I felt like, ah, now you can't fire me, so now I can quit. You know, I would have had to stay five years to vest and get a very small pension eventually. But I didn't want to live the rest of my life in Baltimore. One of the old guys who I worked with said, look, if you come back, because first I took an unpaid of leave absence in case things went south at Harvard.
[00:07:24] And he said, if you come back here, it means you're a failure. And I was like, oh, that's a good point. I had an opportunity that the other cops didn't. It taught me, well, I mean, it taught me a lot about policing. If you're going to police somewhere for a short amount of time, it's a pretty good place to learn very quickly. I mean, the city was new to me when I moved there. Just sort of the blue-collar working class was new to me. Both my parents were teachers. I grew up in Evanston, Illinois.
[00:07:52] I did not know pickup truck driving, flag-waving Republican hunters. And so that was sort of, in some ways, more of the cultural shock to me than the African-American Eastern District. Because I went to a public high school, Evanston is well-integrated, or at least was, maybe less so now. And, you know, I'm a city boy at heart.
[00:08:16] But I would say the abject poverty and desperation of so many people in that neighborhood. And again, cops don't see random cross-sections, so you're sort of negatively biased. Because a lot of people just get up and go to work and, you know, don't have problems. You know, but man, I've been to third-world shantytowns. And if I had to pick generally, I'd sort of pick that over the worst America has to offer.
[00:08:43] Because there was just less hope and more drug addiction and more blight and despair. It wasn't just poverty. It goes beyond that. And so that, you know, most people have no clue, quite frankly. And even not just, you know, people who don't live or work there. But, you know, comparing New York and Baltimore. And Baltimore, and though recent years have been kind to it. And crime is finally going down, and that'll help everything.
[00:09:09] But you just can't have nice things with the level of violence it had when I was there. Which one of the, to me, astounding stats that was in Cop in the Hood, my first book about that, was that 13% of men in the Eastern District get murdered before they're 40. And that doesn't count those who get shot and live. You know, and the trauma that goes through families and generations. It's, yeah, things were not good there.
[00:09:36] That said, the city, it's, you know, I don't want to be too harsh on Baltimore because I still love it in a weird way. But it's rough. Were you on patrol? Was that, what were you up? Yeah, I had, you know, the worst shift in the worst district in a kind of run down city. I was working midnight to 8 a.m. in the Eastern District. Yeah, that's an, it is an amazing time.
[00:10:01] I remember one of the people I got to know best in my years haunting the oil joints of Southeast D.C., you know, the terminology back then for shooting galleries. I remember he was an African-American guy. I won't tell you his name. But I remember him telling me early on, he's like, yeah, for dudes like me around here, going to jail is just a rite of passage. That was the phrase he used. It's just a rite of passage for us. We all go to jail. And, you know, and especially back then.
[00:10:30] I mean, that that's changed in a good way. Yeah. That the volume of arrests have gone down and crime has gone down as well. There was also of not just segregation, but isolation where if I arrested some kid, I'm sort of stuck babysitting for hours. And so I, being intellectually curious, would talk to the kid. And, you know, I asked, have you ever been outside of this neighborhood? And the answer was usually, you know, once I went downtown, I have an auntie who lives on the west side.
[00:11:00] But basically the idea was no, that the entire life was within about, you know, 10 blocks of where they live. And it was just not a great 10 blocks to grow up in. Very self-contained world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:15] So obviously you went on then from that experience as a Baltimore cop to now you're a professor and a sociologist and write extensively about policing and related issues. Um, and, and Peter, I've been kind of digging into your, your, your work over this, but let me start, I guess, by asking you about your most recent book, right?
[00:11:44] Which was Back from the Brink. And it's an oral history of the New York City Police Department and a close look at the role that it played in the major drop in crime that the city experienced beginning in the 1990s. And in the book, you challenge the progressive position, right? Which has taken deep root in blue cities like Seattle, that the massive crime drop of that era really had nothing to do with policing. And that rather was all related to, you know, broader socioeconomic factors and trends.
[00:12:14] Um, so talk about why you push back on that and why you think what actually happened in the New York City Police Department in that era, the era of, you know, Bill Bratton, um, uh, you know, he gets appointed by Giuliani as a NYPD police chief in 94. Why that actually was a major factor and driver in this massive crime production that happened back then.
[00:12:43] So, I mean, it's something I've been pushing back against now for decades. The last 10 years have been particularly bad in terms of, um, academic acceptance of police as a fundamental part of liberal society. Uh, I started graduate school in 1995 and I visited New York a lot as an undergrad and as a graduate student. Um, starting when I was a freshman at Princeton in 1989.
[00:13:11] So I saw New York in its most violent year. I still loved it, by the way. I was like, wow, this is the coolest city ever. Yeah. David and I both lived in New York in that era too. Right. And I mean, I, I couldn't, all those movies, the seventies, I couldn't believe there really was a house under the Thunderbolt rollercoaster. I saw it with my own eyes before it got torn down. It was like a giant movie set. Um, and 90, so I start grad school and the big murder decline is just, you know, kicking in in full swing.
[00:13:40] Um, and everything I'm reading in sociology, um, and that is my background. I'm not in a sociology department and I'm not too kind to sociology anymore. Um, but, um, they're all saying it can't happen. It isn't happening. It won't happen. And this really goes back to the Kerner presidential commission in the late sixties that laid out the framework of the criminal justice system. And of course it's a huge multi-authored commission. So it's hard.
[00:14:06] I'm oversimplifying, but it basically said that crime is society's fault and police are agents of provocation and occasional repression and, um, sort of to be contained. And society through, you know, great society programs, we have to fix racism, poverty, unemployment, all those so-called root causes. Um, that theory is just consistently false. Crime goes up and down and root causes don't change or root causes do change and crime doesn't.
[00:14:36] Um, New York, you know, the murder rate quickly dropped 50% and I'm still, sociologists are still saying, no, it's impossible. Well, it's happening. So that's how I got interested in the field in the first place was the crime drop in New York. Um, I thought if everyone's wrong, this is a good field to get into. So I knew there was something, you know, I knew that Bratton was playing a role. I knew that Giuliani for all his faults, uh, but you know, he was doing stuff as mayor.
[00:15:03] Um, I still didn't quite understand, you know, how do these weekly meetings called Comstat stop people from shooting each other on the street? Um, so then flash forward to through my policing research and I've been in New York since 2002. Um, I'm luckily at a school where, you know, the guys whose office was next to me, Vinny Del Castile was the transit police before Bill Bratton was the transit police chief in 1991.
[00:15:32] Uh, and he jokes in my book that he's responsible for the crime drop because as soon as he resigned, crime went down. He's a great guy recently retired. Um, so I had a sort of a pool of people who were there who could tell me what was going on. Um, and that sort of expanded into, uh, into all the interviews I did about half of which are about half of which, some of which make it into the book. There's, you know, 95% on the cutting room floor.
[00:15:59] It's just the way it works in terms of length of a book and 10,000 words per hour speaking kind of thing. But so I went into it first, I was thinking, well, let's, I'll write a book on the crime drop and maybe get into this. And then as I'm interviewing more and more cops and it took, it was a 10 year project. It, I mean, I wasn't working every day on it, but it was a long, long process of interviewing and researching and writing. Um, and then I'm like, why, why am I going to paraphrase these, these men and women?
[00:16:28] Like anything I do to their words is going to make it more boring. They're such interesting, good speakers. I mean, I wish she could, you know, hear the accents that they have because the New York accent is still alive and well in, in, in these, in these people. Um, and so then I, um, I didn't consciously set out to do an oral history because there's some sort of best practices and I didn't really care about them. I wanted to write the book I wanted to write.
[00:16:53] Um, and I will say, I think the part of the format that's novel is in streaming a narrative together. Um, most or academic oral histories are sort of a quote and then an analysis and I don't actually like them. Uh, this is, I introduce each chapter, but this is just the cops and a few other people speaking. Um, and I wanted to make it readable. I want, you know, I, as an author and editor, I want, I want a good book out there.
[00:17:19] Um, but I do think there's a lot of information in here that really has never been out. And I am trying to show that what, whatever percent of the crime drop you think police were responsible for. And we can, you know, we can debate what that percentage, I think it's a lot. Some people say almost nobody rational says none. Uh, but, um, you know, except for few in the kooky far left side. Uh, this is that story. Um, it is, you know, I have access to cops because I was one. So there's a level of trust that they have.
[00:17:49] Um, I find that they're incredibly honest and don't need to be portrayed as some superheroes. As long as you're honest, um, and show it like it is because I mean, cops are flawed and police departments are flawed. No doubt about it. Um, but just sort of show it like it is. And, um, hopefully that's what I did. Um, I had to end the studs, the studs turkle. I was going to say a little, little studs turkle in terms of your approach. Yeah.
[00:18:13] Growing up in Chicago, you know, I heard of, I heard him on channel 11 TV, you know, I didn't really know who he was back then, but you know, he was a Chicago icon. And, and, and then I realized once I started this, you know, I've never actually read him. And, um, he, no, first of all, no one can publish a book that's as long as the ones he did. But my original focus was to do one like his did. And I call it sort of a pointillist approach, which is you present all these little dots and they coalesce.
[00:18:41] Cause I was reading his book on the depression and I'm like, why is he writing about, why is he interviewing people who weren't even alive? Uh, you know, how is this person relevant? And then about a third of the way through the book, you start to see this great picture form. Um, and he was brilliant. And that was my original intention, but two things. One, the length is just, it's a no go from the beginning. Getting even this, it's not a long book, but it's 120,000 words. And even that now is considered on the long side today.
[00:19:08] Um, but I was going to have AI read it instead. Uh, God, AI would do such a horrible job doing oral history. Uh, but, um, I realized there was a story that is forming and there weren't that many people who denied this reality. And so, um, I did end up sort of working my way up the chain and command a bit, but I didn't just want to focus on, on commissioners like Bratton and Kelly and, and there.
[00:19:34] Uh, but, you know, Jack Maple was turned out to be a key character and that was tough. Uh, let's call it an oral history though. Um, for, for, cause I don't know what else to call it. Uh, and, um, you know, he's dead. It's hard to interview somebody who died 20 years ago.
[00:19:52] Um, but luckily through twist of fate, um, I tracked down the guy who wrote his autobiography, um, Chris Mitchell, and he graciously gave me his original micro cassette recordings of all the Jack Maple interviews. And that was really essential because then I had to find a micro cassette recorder. And Maple is sort of the brains right behind the whole comp stat effort, right? This idea of actually studying where crime is happening in this detailed way.
[00:20:22] And then kind of, they would have these meetings, right? Where they pull all the precinct commanders in and say, what do you, you know, what are you doing about these blocks over here? Where there's, am I getting this right? Um, Peter? Yeah. I mean, he was also sort of a muscle behind it. Cause he was a hard ass who got things done. And, you know, a challenge in telling the story is how do you make things like the booking process or getting data to headquarters? How do you make that interesting?
[00:20:48] Because a lot of it was the police department trying to fight itself basically. But the, the fundamental, the shortest version of why crime went down is that the mission statement changed and Bratton came on and said, I'm going to reduce violent crime 15% and year one. And everyone said, that's crazy. And he did so. And then he did so, you know, and then crime went down for the next 10 years at this level. Though he was only there for a year and a half. Let's not forget.
[00:21:13] But he set into place the system that Jack Maple and Lou Anamone put in called CompStat of sort of, it's just an accountability process. But that idea of caring about crime, it's hard to imagine in today's world that what policing was like before 1994. I mean, they did it briefly in transit a couple years earlier, which is a great natural experiment because robberies plummeted in the subway and did not above ground.
[00:21:41] Um, that's a, just a, as a little data point, it's really important to those who say that policing is irrelevant, but you know, God, no, only the fringe believes that, but they have a lot of political persuasion. Just as an aside, I had a friend in college whose mom was in a sociology PhD program in that period. And so we used to, uh, slum it as, you know, snotty college kids by going to Tompkins square park with drug addicts and homeless folks and drink beer out of paper bags and think we were super cool.
[00:22:11] So I remember I was in grad school and Giuliani gets in, he's going to clear out that park. And also my wife grew up next to Riverside park on 104th. And in those days that was like a major crack corridor. I mean, the whole block was littered with crack vials and because people were making the route from that park up to Amsterdam, which was one of the highest murder rate blocks in the whole corners in the whole city. Um, so I was kind of on the anti Giuliani side of things.
[00:22:39] And then I remember going to Tompkins square park a couple of years later, this is sort of late nineties and there's kids playing and it's a sunny day. And I'm like, I must've been wrong about that. You know, even in my still nineties, you know, Yeah. I was like, holy shit. Like, actually this is, this is, uh, you know, this, this is, this is a lot better for the families that live here. I mean, of course, probably 10 or 15 years later, uh, those same folks couldn't have afforded it.
[00:23:08] So there are some downsides to, uh, uh, improving things, but I want to ask about part of what Standeep started with, which was this attitude that you're kind of cutting against in blue cities where, um, you know, we talk about root causes, homelessness, addiction. Poverty, poverty, inequality in our public school system and society. And as a liberal, I mean, I agree that all of those things are huge, um, problems. And like, how can we live in such a wealthy city where we're failing our kids?
[00:23:38] We're, we're failing poor kids a lot of the time in our public school system. Um, but the second point that liberals or progressives seems to make in blue cities is that if we enforce rules like you're talking about in the subway, um, that, you know, that's morally bankrupt because we haven't addressed causes. Oh, and by the way, if we, if we enforce those rules in the subway, the problem is just going to move, I don't know, to the next subway car or something else, right? It's going to move to the next block is usually the serious argument.
[00:24:08] So how do you grapple with that? Because that's really the heart of the, the, the argument, it seems to me. I think there are ways to grapple with the bigger issues. I listened to your episode. I don't, I don't think it's recent. Um, with Keith Humphries, I listened to that a couple years ago. We've done a couple of those answers. Um, and, uh, you know, that's not my field so much, uh, though I agree with most of what he says on those, those issues. Um, the, the subway, when you're focusing on the subway, focus on the subway.
[00:24:37] No, we're not going to fix the world. Um, we have to care about people commuting to work. Um, some of it, I mean, they did clean up the subway in 1991 and some of that was, a lot of that was enforcing the rules. There were social services to go with it. Um, the idea that, you know, you don't have to go to a shelter though. We'll give you a ride there. Um, but you can't stay here and just, you know, putting that friction into the, into the system.
[00:25:04] Um, and it did, uh, you know, immediately, uh, reduce felony crimes. It's interesting by the way, cause they cleaned up graffiti before that. And a lot of people don't know that timeline and that might be good for its own sake to actually be able to see out the windows again. But, um, uh, that did not reduce crime. So it's, that's the broken windows analogy to not getting cleaning graffiti to not reduce crime on the subway, but dealing with rule violators and quality of life issues. Absolutely. Absolutely did.
[00:25:33] Um, is that mean to those people? We could debate that. Uh, I think it's mean to see people literally dying in the streets. When I walked down 57th street from the subway to 11th Avenue to work, um, the idea that somehow it's progressive to leave people alone. And, you know, you've, you've discussed these, all these arguments before. Um, I sort of, I punt it as it's not my field, but we, we don't have to accept that as a society. And, and the idea that somehow that's compassionate to let people deteriorate in front of us.
[00:26:03] Um, it, it, it bothers me. Uh, and, but, you know, I get more professionally, I get involved when it comes into the public space and affects public safety. Look, poverty in New York city increased in the 1990s. Inequality increased in New York city in the 1990s. Um, Rudy Giuliani was, you know, maybe not as crazy as he is now, but you know, he was a little bit crazy. Um, and he was, you know, I, I'm, I think he was racist, uh, but I didn't live in the city yet. So it probably made me a little easier to tolerate him.
[00:26:33] Uh, cause I could just see that the city was substantially improving during his time. Um, let's not forget the New York times endorsed him for reelection, enthusiastically endorsed him for reelection and said that his democratic opponent was, um, you know, asking us not to believe our lying eyes. Basically, uh, the, it was hard work, but the solutions weren't hard. Um, in the sense, I mean, in policing, when Bratton and Maple were running the NYPD, Jack Maple asked how many people were shot last year in New York city.
[00:27:02] And the, the NYPD did not have an answer. This is, and, um, he said, well, what, you know, we have the forms. Why don't we count them? And so they did. But so to this day, and you know, shooting data only goes back to 1993. We don't know how many people were shot in 1990, the most violent year. And it could have been close to 7,000. And we just never know. Um, so if you start at that level of, Hey, why don't we do something about crime? Uh, why don't we figure out where it's happening? Who's doing it?
[00:27:30] Um, you know, magic can happen and magic did happen. Now it's a bit harder because we've, you know, that now that's normal in the policing world. Right now they actually do like compile stats and look at where crime is happening and stuff. But, but, um, so I guess to follow up on David though, to, and kind of a steel man, the, the progressive pushback argument on this. Um, I think they would say, well, okay, this quality of life policing stuff, right?
[00:27:58] Bratton comes in and he says, I'm going to apply broken windows ideas to how we do stuff. And, okay, maybe that works for a while, but then doesn't it evolve into stop and frisk and, you know, approaches that prevailed under Bloomberg that were both constitutionally dubious and basically racist. Um, you know, doesn't it turn into biased policing in New York?
[00:28:24] Isn't Peter, Peter, weren't, Peter, weren't you also saying, uh, broken widows? It doesn't work if we're talking about graffiti. Well, there are two things about broken windows. Uh, one is the theory of the small, if you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves. And I don't think that's true, but the other is, and George Kelling said this when, when Wilson died. Um, it just, it gave police the excuse to do what the public wanted them to do anyway. Um, those broken windows matter on their own.
[00:28:53] I don't want someone crapping on my front stoop, not because it'll lead to some hypothetical robbery in the future. I just don't want to clean up the crap. Um, that, so it, it, order maintenance, um, has a purpose in a, in a communal liberal society. We have shared public space and there need to be some sense of accepted rules that need to be followed. I mean, that's what laws are supposed to mean.
[00:29:18] You know, we have a system for this and we can either say that some people just don't have to follow any rule or that people do. Um, I don't see that as some, it shouldn't be some inherently liberal conservative divide. Now, uh, both George Kelling and Bill Bratton could, well, Kelling passed away, but Bratton can talk to you for hours about how broken windows is not zero tolerance and how stop question. And it morphed into stop question and frisk. Um, that's a question of leadership.
[00:29:47] Um, and, uh, broken windows is sort of based very much based on Jane Jacobs and the, of how does a neighborhood function and what can police do to encourage what the citizen, how a working healthy society functions. Um, it is big on discretion. It is not about just making arrests for arrest sake, but that is the sort of the pressure in the police world. And it certainly did happen under Bloomberg and Kelly, uh, in the two thousands.
[00:30:14] Um, but that didn't happen again, the timeline's important because I'm not going to defend that. I think it was bad policing and it set policing back for a long time. Um, but arrests in the nineties in with broken windows increased less than arrest in the 1980s did with community policing. Um, yeah, there was more, there were more arrests, uh, but not substantially more. And it was sort of a temporary thing once, and then they got things under control.
[00:30:44] Um, but it wasn't like the eighties was some, you know, glorious period of, of Kumbaya and community policing under, under Dinkins and, and, and, and Kachpa forum. The change happened when stats became important for their own reason. And when Comstat started, they were very focused on what matters are victims and criminals. We want to catch the criminals and stop crimes to help the victims. Um, the victims being disproportionately poor and minority New Yorkers.
[00:31:14] Once it became about counting stops as a productivity stat is when it all sort of went downhill. And the, the means became the end. The tail started wagging the dog and the department was just institutionally afraid of changing, um, because they were afraid that crime would go up on their watch. And they just kept squeezing that stop question and frisk. Um, and there was no more juice to get out of it. Right. I mean, we recently had Elizabeth Glazer on, right?
[00:31:41] She's the head of vital city, a New York city policy shop. That's difficult. Uh, focus. And she's in my book. Yeah. On public safety. And I know you've written for, for vital city, a number of pieces for them. Yeah. It's a great journal. Yeah. And, um, and, you know, she had a great piece in the Atlantic about, as you say, and as she said, you know, um, broken windows does start as this kind of Jane Jacobsy sort of, sort of approach to just understanding the, the, the, you know, the existing environment.
[00:32:10] And making sure it's, you know, conducive for people to act in appropriate ways. Whereas if you create environments that, that invite disorder, that's what you're going to get. And, you know, Liz talked to us about lighting the speech. She wrote in the Atlantic about that. And we also had your, your, I think your colleague, David Kennedy on for, for an episode.
[00:32:31] And he said something, something similar to us that broken windows started as a really subtle, interesting, smart way of doing policing, but then was discredited when NYPD turned it into stop and frisk. And you've suddenly got not suddenly, but over time, you've got 700,000 people a year getting, you know, rousted by the cops. Most of them black and brown. Yeah. Yeah. It was, I mean, it was a failure in, in leadership.
[00:32:59] And as I said, it really did set policing back. Because crime didn't go down that much in New York in that era. It wasn't even working on the sort of, you know, even as a form of, of oppressive policing, it wasn't actually effective because cops were stopping my students because they were just wanted easy people to stop. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was just, yeah, it was a dark decade for policing in, in, in New York city.
[00:33:33] Yeah. Well, let me, let me, let me then follow up. Cause there's a piece you wrote for vital city in 2024 that I really thought was interesting. And it was titled homicide life in the stats. And in that piece, you argue that we really shouldn't fixate on aggregate, you know, kind of national crime trends, but rather need to focus more on what's happening with crime locally in each city or jurisdiction kind of taken on its own.
[00:33:59] And when you do that, you write, you see a lot of variation from place to place about how the macro trends related to crime are playing out. And just to quote you here, it said, imagine if inflation were like murder, one could never see prices increase 34% in New York while at the same time decreasing 30% in New Jersey. But between 2018 and 2023, that's exactly how murder changed in New York city and New York.
[00:34:25] So speak to that, what this, the, this kind of the local, the localism of how we should be. Yeah. I mean, crime is local, often hyper local. A murder in New York city does not affect a criminal in San Diego or vice versa. Now, one of the, there are a lot of naysayers and the book is maybe secretly dedicated to them.
[00:34:52] When crime started going down in New York with broken windows, people, a lot of people were against that from the start, by the way. And I actually think opponents of policing are more afraid of good policing than bad policing because bad policing they can use as a weapon. And good policing shows that they're fundamentally wrong about the causes of crime. Now, those, what works, there's nothing magical in the, now there are federal policies that I think have a national effect. There was the 1994 crime bill.
[00:35:22] I don't know how much it affected crime. Probably a little. I don't want to say too much, but that, you know, hired a hundred thousand cops nationwide. So there are some things that of course, COVID was a happened nationally, though it played out differently in different cities. The idea that, well, crime went down everywhere. People will say, well, first of all, no, it didn't. And you have to explain why it didn't go down in these some places. So, you know, we could focus on that.
[00:35:49] In 2020, crime went up everywhere, except where it didn't. And these are all local factors. Now, you can have similar things happen. And look, there's a U.S. conference of mayors and there's a, you know, association of police chiefs and they get together. And when something works, news spread quickly. Nothing happens in a vacuum. And look, when crime started going on down in New York, it was on the cover of Time magazine. Of course, the rest of the country looked and said, what are they doing? Oh, they're actually doing investigations and focusing on crime and criminals.
[00:36:18] Why don't we try that? Okay, so that was pretty easy. But I don't like the idea of a national trend in crime. Now, statistically, you can make the argument. I mean, there are numbers. You can have a statistical trend. But it happens locally in every jurisdiction where you have people doing the work. It doesn't happen by itself.
[00:36:45] And anyone who lives in a neighborhood sort of understands that, that there are actual individual actors with agency doing things in the world. This shouldn't be such a controversial theory. You know, there are millions, tens of millions of people at risk or whatever the term might be now. But, you know, poor people in bad conditions who aren't criminals. When we're talking about New York City, you know, there are a million people literally living in poverty and there are a few hundred murderers.
[00:37:14] So to sort of keep making that, to try and tie everything together. I mean, I guess it, you know, comes from some sociological Marxist-rooted idea about society and how to fix it. But, you know, we did reduce homelessness and public homelessness in New York City. And we did it by focusing on public homelessness. Everything doesn't have to be about housing society and so on and so forth. Focus on what you can manage.
[00:37:42] When they, you know, when they got rid of graffiti on the subways, it was another problem that they said couldn't be done. Well, they did it a bit at the time. You know, they got rid of squeegee men in New York. And that, by the way, happened under Dinkins. And Giuliani took credit for it. And Bratton took credit for it. They had nothing to do with it. That was solved. But, you know, it determined a mayoral election, probably, because it was such a close election. So I just, yeah, keep it local. That's what matters.
[00:38:10] I was just thinking, yeah, I didn't really like the squeegee men. I was, people who, people don't know, they would come and put dirty water on your car windshield and then smudge it around. And to prevent that from happening, you had to basically pay them money or drive away quickly when the light turned green. It was not a great way of can handling. But people defended them. Remember, they were just poor people. Absolutely. That's what people said. Absolutely. Yeah. And they got rid of them in two months.
[00:38:38] So, basically, police reform means better policing to you. It's funny that it could mean anything other than that, but that's kind of what you're talking about. And I'm not trying to put you on the spot and know too much about Seattle, but Seattle's looking for a new police chief. There's no real money in it. And it's a tough job here because, you know, we've had different city councils, some of which have been more pro-police and others less pro-police.
[00:39:03] But if you're coming into a department like Seattle or any other major city, what kinds of things should they be thinking about doing to bring about police reform? Do you have like a top 10 list or a top five list of the types of reforms that you'd want to see? I don't actually like the term reform because it's often used by people who just want less policing. Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm using it provocatively. Yeah, I know. I prefer change for the better.
[00:39:30] Change, you know, I'm not against change, but it's got to be good. Look, you can always err on the side of transparency. You can, you know, you always need a system of accountability. These are general things. The truth is most of these cities that are most critical policing are doing a better job with policing than places we don't focus on.
[00:39:53] Thinking of small town America of, you know, places where cops shoot 10 times as many people per capita as they do in Seattle. To some extent, rather than constantly saying, you know, this is horrible. We need a change agent. Let's also first recognize what are we doing right? Not perfectly, but right. And, you know, build on that because it's not always, especially with use of force issues. Perhaps you don't, we don't, you know, we don't need change on that. We might need change in something else.
[00:40:23] I would be very hesitant to come on at the job as a police chief in Seattle. I mean, you need political support. A lot of these things are just a question of political will. As a police department, you're going to do things. They're not always going to go well. There's going to be some bad video. Now, if we're talking actual criminal police behavior, then you have to crack, you know, and you have to throw the book at them. And I mean, you know, you have to make an example of someone if they're corrupt or if they're brutal.
[00:40:51] But, you know, somebody used force. Well, maybe you have to explain why it's right. I don't, I know Seattle's come a little bit back from crazy, but I don't know if they're at that level yet where they're willing to accept and defend policing in the broad scheme of things. I also worry there's not many cops in Seattle.
[00:41:13] If you had the number of cops per capita as Baltimore or Detroit or D.C. or New York City, you'd have three times as many police officers. That's quite a resource. I don't, I cannot figure how, I don't know how it's done quite frankly. Like I have not done research out west where there are so few police officers. And Seattle had a particular problem with flight in 2020 of cops moving to greener pastures elsewhere.
[00:41:42] So that's true as well. But in terms of change, I would say it's a being open, yeah, being transparent as a police about what the mission is, what the message is, focusing on crime. And to some extent, accepting that some people are always going to hate you and that's okay. But there's a vast middle that deep down knows we need policing and one's policing. And say, you know, there is only so much we can do.
[00:42:10] And some of these things shouldn't be police matters. But first we need a vision. And that comes from politicians and the mayor first. And I'm thinking of particularly of sort of broken, the proverbial broken windows and quality of life issues. You know, these are deep-rooted problems. And we can mitigate them to some extent. But if we don't have other agencies to fix them, it always falls in the lap of police. Yeah, you wrote in a – you wrote a – I thought a great piece in the Liberal Patriot back in 2023. We'll link it in the show notes.
[00:42:42] Where you talk about the state of policing at that point and about the calls from the left coming out of kind of abolitionist tendencies. And you push back against that. And one of the things you write in that piece is you say, quote, instead of reform based on don't do this and don't do that, reform should focus on do's. On things, you know, police should be doing, right? And you talk in there. You have a list of things, right?
[00:43:12] Push back on the anti-policing crowd. Accountability and transparency are important. But then you say some controversial things, right, from a progressive perspective. You say cops are supposed to chase robbers, right? So this whole push against stopping police chases and stuff like that, you take issue with that. That's interesting.
[00:43:37] I wrote a piece many years ago for the West Side Rag, a small little paper you may remember from New York City, which I said cops should not ever do chases in cities because they are dangerous and people die. Car chases end with crashes most of the time. The only question is what that person is going to crash into. Will it be another car? Will it be a person? Will it be a lamppost? Now, that's not a great ending. And I still stand by that.
[00:44:05] But then I saw the problem is you still need the threat of a chase or else suddenly stopping for a cop becomes a completely optional thing and you can opt out. Well, you can't have that either. So you need a little bit of deterrence. But you don't you do you want to discourage chases in cities. They're just too dangerous. And especially if for what? For a traffic violation. But on the other hand, a murderer in a car running a red light is not going to you know, doesn't want to stop for cops. And that can't be an option either.
[00:44:35] So it's always there's always a sort of a mini max situation there. But you want you want to err on the side of fewer chases. But you you got to you got to have a few. It's interesting because here in the Washington state legislature, you know, Democrats dominate and they passed, I think, in 2021, significant restrictions on police chases. And the state police pretty quickly started complaining and saying people are just ignoring our our our attempts to pull them over.
[00:45:02] But the criminals have figured out that if they just drive off, we're not allowed to chase them anymore, because unless they're really in the midst of some very serious crime, they just had to stop all chasing. And and it became a public backlash. And the Democrats actually partially had to roll back some of the restrictions that they passed. And, you know, some of it is you can have a policy that's restrictive or limiting. You don't have to advertise it necessarily. I mean, I think this also relates to prosecuting shoplifters.
[00:45:31] Look, shoplifters weren't being prosecuted really ever. I mean, petty shoplifting going back decades. I mean, with a few exceptions. But for a prosecutor to say, I'm not going to prosecute shoplifting, zip it. Shut your mouth. Don't say that. We know in reality, most cases. Yeah, aren't don't reach adjudication for minor things like that. But you don't want to send a message that we're never going to do this because, yeah, what do you know? People listen and they go, OK.
[00:45:56] OK, so there's a weird similarity, I think, between policy on car chases and prosecuting petty shoplifting, which is, yeah, it doesn't happen a lot. But you got to leave some discretion. One of your lessons in that TLP piece, you say don't pass laws and then act shocked at the intended consequences. Right. If you pass a whole bunch of laws. I mean, I think a lot of reformers sort of, especially during that era a few years ago,
[00:46:22] were sort of assuming there would be police pushback or police would violate the rules or the law and keep doing it. So you needed to have this. I'm like, no, they're they're they're pretty good at following orders. And if you tell them not to do something, you know, not always by and large, they'll do it. But, yeah, then don't act surprised because this is the intended part of the reform. I mean, New York City had so many bad laws passed when, you know, legalizing loitering solicit loitering for the purpose of solicitation. And now we have more streetwalking prostitutes again.
[00:46:51] We legalize public injection and now we have people injecting in public. Drug use hasn't changed, but I don't. But I think it should be a crime so that you can police people as a verb and say you can't do that here. I'm not you know, a cop isn't going to cure your heroin addiction. The cop isn't going to and no one's going to end prostitution in the world. But we can still set boundaries and say and to do that, you need some or else. And that's the law. That's the threat of of arrest. I mean, that that is what policing is.
[00:47:19] And I keep saying that like the key is the verb doesn't always have to be done by police even. But we do we need we need rules in a civil society. Let me ask about one of the proposals that we see being I want to say still debated in some ways here in Seattle, which is letting civilian mental health professionals help deal with crisis calls. In some ways that's gotten some resistance by our local police union.
[00:47:49] I'm not 100 percent sure why, but I wonder if you have any insight into whether or not it's a good idea. I mean, should should, you know, let police focus on policing. And if somebody is having a mental health crisis, police aren't really well equipped to deal with that. I was speaking to a cop of a class of cops Tuesday night and.
[00:48:12] They would love nothing more than to not have to deal with homeless related issues and they don't see it fundamentally as a police issue. And it should be mental an issue of mental health and addiction and housing. Interesting. That's not the world we have, though. But I'm I'm I'm curious what the union position there in Seattle is, because cops would love to wipe their hands of this. I think they just have they know they don't have faith that anyone else is going to deal with this.
[00:48:39] First of all, cops deal with it better than people think just through experience because they're out there. We're already paying them if we have enough money to pay another group. But the problems with it is, one, there's no magic deescalation pixie dust that social workers magically have. There may be a bit incrementally more effective because they might care more of certain empathy and know that that's their primary job. But cops do OK on those calls.
[00:49:08] They're not going to handle the dangerous calls. So they're taking the low hanging fruit, the easy ones, the ones that cops could handle because the person isn't a threat. As soon as the potential of violence comes in, they're they're out. And then you need co-response with a cop. Well, do we really need four people off? You know, sometimes the problem are too many people respond to this or one person can develop rapport. And then suddenly someone else shows up and you lose that that you lose you lose the advantage you have.
[00:49:36] I would say it's this it's all rearranging decks on the Titanic. Titanic. The problem is not enough beds for long term treatment of mental health issues and addiction. The problem are people, of course, who don't have any interest in curing addiction and see it as a bodily autonomy thing that needs to be destigmatized. And that's not good for anybody. Once someone is in crisis, it's too late. That those problems need to be dealt with. So people aren't in crisis on the street.
[00:50:06] I don't think who responds to the 9-1-1 call just matters that much, quite frankly. And then it's just an issue of money and so on. And it doesn't really fix the problem either way. I'm not against it, but I don't know. I think there's too much focus on what the person responding, you know, the clothes they're wearing, quite frankly. One of the other interventions we hear talked about a lot in blue cities, you know, like Seattle.
[00:50:32] This is a live conversation right now here is the idea of violence interruption. Right. Or what can we do to better prevent or gun violence or, you know, the antecedents that lead to gun violence? We had a very high-profile shooting here at a big public festival, the Bight of Seattle, that's caused all of this fallout a couple months ago.
[00:51:00] And one of the things you write in that liberal patriot piece is you say, violence interrupters and all the alternatives to policing are great, except that they never seem to work. I'm literally quoting what you wrote there. And so speak to that. Speak to that because then there's this other concept of focused deterrence, right? David Kennedy at John Jay, the major proponent of focused deterrence, which is sort of melding cops with community and social service outreach.
[00:51:27] But that's different from the violence interruption approaches. And so speak to why you're so skeptical. Yeah, I don't want to say it never works. I'm sure it's there on an individual case. Sometimes it does. I think there's a useful role in terms of, like, preventing retaliation of going to a hospital and someone is shot and talking to family and friends who show up to visit the victim.
[00:51:50] We've had these programs for decades, and there's one study that's always cited that pretended that police didn't exist in this neighborhood. It gave all the credit to the violence reduction team. If this were really effective, we'd have a lot more because there are lots of academics desperately trying to show that this stuff works. And the proof isn't there. The worst case scenarios are the government's funding a criminal organization. That's happened as well.
[00:52:19] Places get raided by the FBI. And it's, you know, it's a drug gang that's rent is being paid for by the city. That's happened in Baltimore more than once. And the premise here of violence interruption, right, is that you get people that were formerly in the life, right, former gang members. Incredible messengers. Yeah, yeah. And then they go out as ambassadors to younger people in the community and sort of the kids that, you know, are highest risk of getting into gang beefs or what have you, right? That's the.
[00:52:46] Yeah, it would be nice if they weren't arrested so often, the actual ambassadors. I don't know, a fat guy in a T-shirt. You're telling me a 16-year-old kid's going to look up to him? Like, yeah, he's done time. Well, so have I. The issue is, you know, keep trying. I don't know. Maybe it's just good as a make work program. Like, I think generally it doesn't hurt. It might help a little, though it does hurt sometimes when you're funding the wrong people. There's no accountability. That's the main issue.
[00:53:15] This is an idea I'm stealing. I want to give him credit. Chauncey Parker, who runs the Gun Violence Strategies Partnership in New York, which is somewhat similar to David Kennedy. So I can get into that in a little more detail if you want. It's a very interesting program. He was deputy mayor for a while. He's done a lot for the city. He's a good public servant. He said, why don't we give them 10 names and say,
[00:53:42] your job is to keep these people from being arrested in the next year. And we're going to judge you on this because we know who the troublemakers are. That is a very doable thing, though I've never heard it seriously proposed. You can't just keep throwing government money at any organization, I mean, in any context where there's zero accountability and a lot of, and receipts aren't being kept too well either. I mean, it just invites corruption.
[00:54:10] And at a more philosophical level, I also worry if the question is, how are they willing to cooperate with law enforcement? And they all say, well, we're separate. I don't know if we really want to fund a separate, completely separate structure that goes against the entire criminal justice system. I mean, we do have a system. Now, I understand why, you know, you don't want them to be snitching and ratting everybody out. But there has to be some communication between the police commander.
[00:54:40] Sometimes you have to talk about a specific individual. And there can be cooperation between these groups and policing in a limited sense. It depends on the group. Sometimes it's just 100 percent oppositional. And that is not, that's not productive. But it does, look, as long as these programs exist, what policing go, what cops go about reducing crime, you know, give them credit for it. They can take it.
[00:55:06] But, yeah, it's, there's been a lot of research. You know, these are hard things to research because it is real world situations. But like how, if there's a neighborhood with a lot of violence, odds are it will go down next year. Whether it is a statistical regression of the mean or it's because police are focusing on hot spots. And there happens to be some other group there. So, I don't know. They're not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. And there may be some benefit.
[00:55:35] But I want to say, yeah, give them names and say keep these people out of trouble. That would be great. And they might be able to do that. I mean, that's something in a way that police can't do. Focus on these individuals.
[00:55:46] Which goes to another thing that not just you, but pretty much everybody we've talked to about crime on this podcast have said to us, which is that it's a very small number of people that are responsible for a very disproportionate level of the serious criminal activity in any given city or community.
[00:56:07] And, you know, go after those folks or target those folks, whether it's with, you know, social service interventions or punitive or coercive interventions. But, you know, am I getting that right? Is that? Yeah. You know, this is a problem with a lot of progressive reform laws is I think they're written with the idea that everyone's making rational choices.
[00:56:33] Well, if I were on the street and I were offered a decent place, like I would never choose to remain on the street. Well, maybe that's not why you're on the street. There are outliers. And you don't, you know, I think it's almost a joke among the policy world, you know, generally laws named after individual victims are bad laws. You don't want to make laws on the based on the exception. But laws have to account for the outliers and exceptions. And just because most people wouldn't do this, some will.
[00:57:00] And so this isn't just sort of a moral and public safety failing. It's a political failing because this is why Republicans get elected, because you pass laws that simply allow. And judges are partly to blame certain judges. But, you know, that where you get repeat violent offenders constantly released and then they kill somebody. And that's why it makes the news. And you look, oh, look, they 12 prior arrests, five in the past year. And, you know, this is at some point, you know, maybe three strikes and you're out is not a good policy.
[00:57:30] But how about 12 strikes and you're out? Like at some point, you just have to say enough of this. So this is just sort of restating the obvious, but I guess we haven't exactly asked you about it directly. You know, one of the biggest progressive concerns over the last decade plus is about mass incarceration in the United States, especially of black people. I'm curious, actually, what you think about that. Like, do we need to be putting more people in jail, more people in prison to make cities safer? If you were asked the question that way, what's the answer?
[00:57:58] No, we need to put some people in jail and prison to make. To make it safer, you know, bail reform in New York City. It was very broad. It changed a lot. Interestingly, by and large, it was a success in that it did. It has reduced recidivism among low level offenders. But there's a specific subset of violent recidivist offenders where it has increased recidivism. Now, this is a problem that could be fixed.
[00:58:28] We could change the law. So we address that subset of repeat violent offenders. No movement to do so from the left. And that is, again, a moral and political failing. Part of the problem, though, is, you know, you're creating a right wing backlash because you are allowing these outlier cases. But they're real victims. I mean, it's, you know, they're few, but they matter. And then people just say, well, you know, the right will say, well, bail reform, this has happened because of bail reform.
[00:58:56] Well, yeah, but it also it wasn't all bad. And we seem unwilling to do incremental improvements and tinker with things and say, OK, this part of it worked. This didn't. It's sort of one and done. Break it and move on to the next cause. And it's a bad way to do public policy. Well, and we should mention here that one of your earlier books right back, I believe it was 2011, you published a book titled In Defense of Flogging, which caused a bit of a stir when it came out.
[00:59:24] Right. And you make the argument in that book that rather than mass incarceration, we should seriously consider, you know, brief, painful, but nonlethal physical punishments as an alternative to incarcerating people for long periods. Right. Bring back the lash. And so speak to that. Yeah. I was worried when that book came out that people wouldn't, you know, Mother Jones called it a book of the year, by the way. The left's got it and never I was hoping it would cross over into the right wing world and it never did.
[00:59:54] It's a long essay on where I'm just trying to be honest about prison, that it is a horrible place. I've since then, I mean, in recent years, I've become a little more pro incarceration because we've moved so far in the other direction. The idea, you know, sometimes a night in jail is the perfect punishment for a crime, but we need some punishment. And so the idea of using flogging as an alternative was simply if the goal is to punish, let's just punish. We can do it.
[01:00:23] We don't have to destroy your life. You can keep your job as long as it's not a sit down job. And let's be honest about the role of prison because we still have this idea of, well, is prison for punishment as opposed to make you a better person? Well, some people leave prison better than they go in, but most people don't. And so then the purpose of prison is punishment. But by and large, progressives do not like the idea of punishment. They're against punishment. It's all about help. You mug someone. What can we do to help you so it won't happen again?
[01:00:53] Well, what if the person just gets off on mugging because you get an adrenaline rush? Sneaky thrills. Jack Katz at UCLA wrote about this years ago. There's no services to offer a person who enjoys a life of crime. You just need to deter them. And, you know, I'm not against services for other people. Like, these aren't mutually exclusive. But this idea that everyone deep down wants to be good is absurd. We know it's not true. And so we do need some form of punishment.
[01:01:22] We just don't want it to be super expensive, counterproductive, you know, and racially biased. No offers. No offer of services if you're Al Franken, though, who might have preferred a little flogging to what I know that. A little light flogging. We're coming up on time, Peter. But you mentioned this Chauncey Parker proposals. So speak to that a little bit as we.
[01:01:51] It's gotten a little bit of publicity, but I don't think enough. It's called GVSP, Gun Violence Something Partnership. And it's been going on for five years now. And it's a daily meeting every day at 10 a.m. sharp. And it gathers dozens, 35, 40 different organizations in the same room. And they go over people who have been arrested for a gun, plus one other factor. Meaning using a crime or repeat offender.
[01:02:21] And every day they look at three, four, five, six individual people. And what they're trying to do is get these organizations to work together. Because sometimes if a cop wants to know who the assistant district attorney is, it might take a half day just to find out the name and reach them on the phone. Every organization is in this room. From housing to corrections to all the acronymed law enforcement agencies to the prosecutors. And they very efficiently go around the room and say, what do you have on them?
[01:02:50] And once you're on this list, by the way, it's bad news. And this kind of relates to Kennedy cease fire. It might be good if the people knew they were on that list to have it be a bit more of a deterrence. But this is no, we are trying to get you now. And we want to know if there's a problem, if you need information. And there's been no formal study on this. But you know what?
[01:03:11] If every week you lock up a couple recidivist gun violent offenders who wouldn't have been locked up otherwise, over the course of five years, you can make a major dent in shootings. And partly it might explain why shootings and murders in New York are declining right now more than other crimes. Because they do know the individual people. But the general thing is it's, again, collaboration. That organizations and bureaucracies tend to silo their information.
[01:03:41] And every successful violence reduction strategy, you might just say strategy in general, involves getting people in the government community to collaborate and get together and share information and tactics. And I've never seen a successful program that doesn't involve that at some level. And this is going back decades. And I will say perhaps Comstat was the original one of that. But that was just within the, well, other organizations joined once it was a success.
[01:04:10] But breaking down those barriers, it's sort of unsexy. But it's a really important part of city government. Basically, cops can't stop crime on their own. You need a kind of unified effort between the political front and the social service front and the police. Oh, I stopped some crime on my own as a cop. But yeah, to make a major dent, yes, you do need to. Because sometimes you might arrest a major player for a minor crime. And you say, you know, this guy is trouble.
[01:04:38] We, you know, we do want to throw the book at him. We don't want him on pretrial release. That kind of information. Well, we're at time. So, Peter Moscos, I want to thank you so much for coming on to Blue City Blues and talking with us about policing and how to do it better. Yeah, thanks for having me. You got a, you got a good podcast there. Keep it up. Thanks, Peter. That's it for another edition of Blue City Blues. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. Thanks everybody so much for listening.
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