i'm honored to be here tonight sharing the stage with raphael man well. it's great to see so many friends in o the audience and/or trustees and charters. to celebrate the release of the brilliant new book criminal injustice, this book represents the combination of years of the hard work. not long ago the conventional wisdom held the biggest problem with the criminal justice system is that it was far too punitive them the neighborhoods needed the police to stop being so

proactive in their efforts to fight crime. they warned this was a dire mistake with a fragile achievement and the cities around the country would regret the rush towards d policing and incarceration. needless to say he's been proven right. and he's dedicated his professional life to doing everything in his power to restore public safety. especially for the most vulnerable citizens. it's therefore fitting that the introducer tonight is commissioner bill bradenton. over the course of his long and distinguished career, he is saved countless lives. he oversaw the nypd's transformative massive crime decline in the decade and he led a similarly dramatic transformation of the lapd during the early 2000's. at the federal level he served a distinction on the homeland security advisory council which he now cochairs and today is the executive chairman of the consulting firm and author of the profession a memoir of community, race and art of

policing in america. i'm proud to say that he's had a long and fruitful relationship with the manhattan institute. the policing strategy from the partnershiped with the late renowned scholar who co-authored the article that first introduced the content of broken windows policing to the public. telling they worked together on a 1994 piece for city journal explaining the strategy for fighting crime which has proven enormousl' influential. he's also served as an exceedingly generous mentor, collaboratoror and friend. with that i will hand it over to the commissioner. [applause] don't walk, run to buy this book. it is extraordinary.

for the sponsorship of tonight's event,te thank you for the work that you've done over the decades to try to shine a light on how to do things the right way and not to do them the wrong way. we need a a bright light on what's going on because it is being done the wrong way. and that is the strength of the book. the right book at the right time as it takes apart so much of the misinformation, the misrepresentation of so many of the ideas for the city, state and country. the first to tell you that he's not up to the right or the left. he wants both sides to listen and see the strong arguments that he's developed from his years of research and exposure to some of the best minds in the

criminal justice system in america a lot of them introduced in the relationship with the manhattan institute. his parents are here tonight. i can see where rafael comes from. it is rafael the english version. the subject came from his dad who was the detective in the nypd for 20 years during the turbulent '80s, 90s and aftermath of t 9/11. thank you for your service i had the opportunity to meet rafael

several years ago. george was in his last year of life and h had a long bout with cancer. just an extraordinary individual who had a great influence on the issues i was the practitioner of broken windows they understood you couldn't focus just on serious crime you also had to focus on the broken windows people saw every day. in his book basically it explains the importance of them.

on the first visit a young man was working with george and they were collaborating on something that was of great interest to george so much of what he spent his life devoted to to educate the importance of the community policing added importance of broken windows that it's being attacked successfully unfortunately so the idea that he'se about to leave this lifes work was being torn apart and he had the good fortune and death last year to meet rafael and i'd like to think that a lot of the influences in this magnificent book is through that exposure to george. the last was a 3,000 word co-authored by rafael effectively defending the community policing.g. the community policing

effectively is what could make america safe. so fromde that exposure they developed a friendship and admiration. a mentorship not only of me about him andca him off maybe because he's an extraordinary young man with an extraordinary research capability. and most importantly, the ability to take what he's learned, what he's analyzed and presented in a user-friendly fashion. two important to be in the trenches to each other but to find a way to get us out of the trenches on the left and the right into no man's land. with this book he pushes back on

a lot t of the misinformation that's taken hold and i am hoping that if we can advocate myself and many others that have the opportunity to read it we can begin to return this negative tide that's engulfed america over these half dozen years. we are in a perilous place at i the moment. the new yorkers are in a perilous place and we got through it. we got through it with hard work and inspirations and with knowledge. the hard work iss providing us inspiration and knowledge and the groundwork and platforms to stand on to begin to make a difference to once again take the city back from those who would destroy it and the state and country.

as it was back in the 1980s because it is common sense. butrl more importantly for the real world. thank you. [applause] when you get an introduction like that from someone as important as the commissioner just before you delivery talk about the first book in a great room like this one with a club associated with one of the most elite universities in the world, it becomes physically impossible to resist the sense of accomplishment. so, before i get into the talk i want to take a quick moment, a brief moment to acknowledge some of the people that have helped me get to where i am. my family, my mom, dad, wife,

friends, mentors. but also the supporters of the manhattan institute. our trustees and in particular nick know now who has not only just generally supported the project that has been an incredible supporter of the work we institute forw years now andi just want you all to know how deeply appreciative. now if i am being honest my sense of accomplishment makes me a bit uneasy and the reason for that is that its intention with of the reality on these issues the issues that i'm here to discuss that this isn't about me. tonight to this book, the debate are first and foremost about the far too many victims of the sort of injustices that inspired my book's title.

injustices like the 2019 murder detailed in the book's introductionyo of the young unarmed chicago mother allegedly shot by nine prior felony convictions including one from second-degree murder and like the little boy who i was forcedo run for his life backpack in tow as he dodged bullets meant for the young men who made the mistake of walking past at the time and the police say by a homeless career criminal bond not by one or two but three open cases and finally like the incredibly strong woman whoec ws robbed of her husband who many watched eulogized after her husband was murdered by a repeat offender out on probation. i wrote this book largely because i was tired of reading stories about the crimes carried out by offenders that had no

business being out on the street. the stories the data made clear or not outliers and s i wanted o do something about it. in the wake of george floyd's murder, politicians and activists saw the policy proposals that were explicitly aimed at the systematically lowering transaction c cost of crime commission and raising the transaction costs of law enforcement. according to "the new york times" more than 30 states collectively passed more than 140 police reform bills in the year following george floyd's death. an exploration of the trend taking shape sinced at least 20 and to my mind the acceleration of the agenda was going to do damage to public safety particularly in the communities

the reformers say they wanted to help, hence the subtitle with the push for that incarceration and d policing gets wrong and who it hurts the u most. the largest one-year increase in generations and remained unsurprised byct the fact that between 2020 and 2021 more than a dozen cities set all-time records you'd more than a dozen floated with other 1990s peaks. over the last several years, crime shootings, homicides in particular became a much larger problem here in america. but not one whose effects are evenly distributed throughout the society. the criminal violence has long been geographically and demographically hyper concentrated. here in new yorkut about 3.5% of the street segments about 50% of thed city's violent crime and every year for well over a decade a minimum of 95% of all shooting victims in the city are either black o or hispanic. the vast majority of them male. uncomfortable as it may make people in certain circles you

see similar disparities. nationally black males constitute between six and 7% of the population that make up nearly ten timesf the rate of e counterparts and crimess like homicide are tightly clustered inus the relative handful of neighborhoods in and around american cities. for example, in 2019 the national murder rate was 500,000. of the ten most dangerous chicago neighborhoods on the other hand are 95.7% black or latino. 2019 homicide rate was a whopping 61.7 per 100,000. as high as that number is, it understates how dangerous some of the neighborhoods actually are. west garfield park for example had a murder rate of 131 per 100,000. now, my book highlights the data like this for two reasons. first a thorough understanding v of how violence is and has long been concentrated helps us understand exactly who it is

that will suffer the most should the policy program diminish public safety and biological extension who it is that will gain the most should the particular program enhance public safety which takes us to the second reason i highlight this data. the reality of the crime concentration can help contextualize the disparities and enforcement that we hear so much about. it is seized upon to make the case and deep policing as a means of pursuing racial equity. if in fact the most serious crimes are occurring in very small places in the cities and are affecting a particular demographic group more than others, it is entirely reasonable to be disproportionately deployed to these areas and by extension to see disparities arise from that uneven distribution of law enforcement resources. in other words if we accept as legitimate theat victimization

rates are highest we must accept they are going to interact disproportionately with the spending time in those neighborhoods. and to focus on the disparate rate of interactions is to ignore important context that undermines the assertion that law enforcement disparities are driven exclusively by racial animus. another example of this can be found in the studies that show the severity of the crime committed as well as for the agent criminal history of the offenders in question. the disparities shrink substantially by the national academy of sciences in the meta analysis which i will quote verbatim. racial bias and discrimination are not the primary cause. when they aree used to take account of thehe characteristic,

prior criminal records and personal characteristics, black defendants are on average sentenced somewhat but not substantially more severely. contextualizing the data thatfo inform the criminal justice debate is a major theme of the book because placing the data in the proper context often leads to the rhetorical impact of some of the harshest critiques of the criminal justice. two prominent examples include the charges that america has a mass incarceration and police violence problem. let's start with mass incarceration. we often hear it lamented that the united states houses 5% of the population about 25% of its prisoners or that the u.s. has been incarceration rate that is higher than that of other developed democracies but much of that can be attributed to the fact the united states is home to many more pockets of the concentrated criminal violence.

even in the countries that are so oftenor unfavorably compared with. in 2018, germany, england and wales experienced approximately pu3200 homicides with a combined population of 142.2 million people. by contrast the american cities in chicago, detroit, st. louis and baltimore with a combined population of 470,000 saw 336 homicides. if you americann neighborhoods some more than 10% experienced in three countries despite less than half a% of the countries combined. i would also note germany sentences a higher percentage of the murderersha to life in prisn than does the u.s. and in the uk it's five yearsen in prison. such offenses are regularly met with probation in cities like new york.

so no, our comparatively high incarceration rate is not primarily a function of the m me punitive approach to crime. what about police violence? it turns out that it's thankfully gotten more common over the lastve decades and isnt very common at all in 1971 the nypd shot over 200 to 20 people. that number is now down in the lower 20s. theld problem is you wouldn't kw this fromit listening to the critiques of law enforcement that are often amplified in the legacy mediaf outlets. what you see a lot of is a casual consumer of the coverage but the highly salient anecdotes of the misconduct as well as data on the force with the favorable right possible. sometimes the injustice of the action is plain to the untrained eye. the murder of george floyd and i think is a clear example of that

but the reality is the police use force for 1% of all arrests. if they fire the guns and a 0.03% of all arrests. that entire dataes set captures one fatal police shooting. meas important as it is to me tt you all understand the reality that i present in the book and that ire mention here tonight is even more important to me that you understand what i am not arguing. i am not arguing that the criminal justice system is

perfect. i am not arguing that there isn't a subset of america's prison and jail population as doesn't served the genealogical end. i'm not arguing the police don't make mistakes or abuse their power and i'm not arguing that when cops do mess up our batting a thousand. however the fact that the institutions traditionally relied upon to make play major roles in the safety aren't perfect docents justify the sort of radical realization proposed today in the name of equity. calls for the deep policing must be forcefully resisted for the criminal offenders but i of the deep andnd sincere empathy for e communities that those offenders harm. as such resistance begins with understanding precisely what it is that the advocates of the

misguided program gets wrong and who will hurt most if they get their way. only then can we bring true t justice under the weight of te violent crime problem. >> with that i hope we have some time for audience questions. raise your hand's theory microphone going around? the gentle man in the black shirt here the microphone is coming to you. >> the statistics what three or four things would you do differently than what is being done right now to remedy this? >> i'm not sure i would do much

differently. one of the problems i see when i look at the data on the outcomes are the data for example like the city of chicago where the average suspect has 12 prior arrests but 12% have more than 20 prior arrests. these are the things i hear in new york city but what that tells you was the policeb departments are doing a pretty good job of focusing its resources. the criminal justice system around policing is failing to do its part to backck them up in those efforts and so i do think that what the nypd learned from the '90s and is being continued today for the resources for the neighborhoods that need them the most where crime is most concentrated so to speak but what i think we failed to understand and appreciate particularly in the city is the efforts of the nypd can only do so much good if the rest of the system will allow them to and if prosecutors refused to prosecute

and judges refuse to incarcerate and refuse to hold anybody, they affect of the arrest on the community safety is going to be increasingly muted and i think that is where we are today. >> what pieces of legislation the last two years have created this mess? >> absolutely. there's a fewl things that happened on the criminal justice reform front at the state level. we had at the reform that i'm sure you've all heard about and i'm sure you've been told it's not having an impact on crime, don't you worry. it w is plain and obvious. what they like to do is kind of aggregate the population into one big pile and they say these individuals who have may be one prior arrest or are first-time

offenders are not going out and hurting anyone. one of the things we've seen here in new york is a massive jump in the share of offenders particularly violent offenders that have open cases. both with respect to w total arrest. inte thed share of offenders constituted by people that have these cases i think that is a major hole in the reformed defense. the other piece of legislation that is passed on the reform is the discovery that drastically increased the compliance burden associated with the criminal prosecution in new york state. this was done without any funding to allow prosecutors to absorb that burden that was done by design. it is an approach to criminal justice. we don't like this, so let's give it way more work that we

know ito can handle which is forcing increasing amount of time doing the groundwork to raise the transaction forcing aprosecutors not to bring chars at all or to delay them entirely. those misguided efforts have been backed up by the age requirements that made it impossible to charge even the most chronic offenders and adult criminal court which had disastrous results and we've seen the recidivism rate to jump within that population and now of course it makes it more difficult to send people back to prison for violating their parole or probation terms. these are i think very characteristic on the massive scale. they will prove to be a y disaster risk and they have proven to be disastrous in other jurisdictions as well.

>> talks a good game. where w does this come from and how do you see it, how do they come aboutin and resolve. part of it comes from a fading memory of how bad things were in the 80s and 90s as well as a faded memory of how we got to the point in the mid-2000's. it makes us all comfortable and reduces the sense of urgency with respect to issues of public safety so it's also made people less comfortable with operating the system that has been characterized as overly punitive and there also is evidence to

suggest we overcorrected in the 1990s. the problem is that that has been met with the attempt to throw the baby out with the bathwater and what should have been done. again i don't think that anybody would ever argue j the criminal justice system is perfect. the misrepresentation by backtracking in ways that had been absolutely disastrous. you said in your speech that the

u.s. has a disproportionate percentage of the population incarcerated but that is not due to more punitive venue went on to cite the fact remains there is a significantly larger portion of the population incarcerated within the countries and so why is that? simply because we have a lot moreos crime. most is as safe as any place in the world. what is different here is we have a number of pockets of concentrated crime that occurs at levels that would be very difficult. like it exists in west garfield parkar we understand there is an abstraction that we have no idea in the community.

we don't know if you're going to have to dodge a bullet. the united states has a lotot of that. this is something a lot of people understand in the context of the gun control debate we often hear it highlighted we have so many here in theun u.s. and that's why we have a higher violent crime rate than other western european democracies. we predict that in to talk about this incarceration and i think we would do well to remember the terrible distinction. the fact we have more resources to dof this than a lot of other countries like brazil has more violent crime they in the united states. i don't think that's because they preferred not to incarcerate the murderers and robbers and rapists it's just

that they don't have theal sortf wealth the united states has at its disposal. >> my friend here on the left. >> fantastic job and congratulations. many cities are struggling with early retirement of the police forces and struggling to recruit police offices. it now endorses the funding for the police department. my question is an increase in funding is enough to address the retention and hiring or do you have any other recommendations? >> iis don't think the recruitmt and crisis we've seen particularly over the last years

the profession of policing added is a profession demonized in the way that i don't think any of the provisions of seen. and it makes people really question themselves. why on earth what i take a job that requires me to wear a bulletproof vest if only metaphorically by the public that i'm risking my life to serve these are questions i ask myself in 2010 precisely because of the reality that even back then, the police officers couldn't count on ther supportf the committee's and cities of the news media when they were engaged in something that was controversial and video. people that we want them policing with high levels of education and who have high levels ofst psychological

stability. alongside the career and policing it isn't surprising given the rhetoric that they choose those other options. what i reallye don't want to se happening is for the delta between the average cop and that is what we are going to see. [applause] unfortunately we are moving in that direction as far as choosing police officers. we see a lot of cities lowering the requirement but that's not thean issue i wanted to bring u. sixty-five people were shot in chicago over the last weekend. the majority of them in what we

would normally call drive-bys. they were not known to the people who shot them. what is the impact of drugs and gangs. most is a form of retaliatory involving drugs and gangs and possibly someone who ratted on someone else and this is an issue that politicians and the media refused to address and it ties very much into your discussion that is primarily young minority males shooting other young minority males that only gets attention when a few quote on quote innocent people are caught up in the gunplay.

>> i think you make some really good points there. the direct answer they are playing a huge part in the city of chicago. it is a smaller part than you would think. the unclassified a report that actually looked at the percentage of shootings that were the result of drug related and i think it was 5% ofns all e shootings however the gang related is a a large plurality. it is an interesting one because often times when we talk about the drug debate, we often hear terrible stories of people spending decades in prisonmp on end for simple drugll production but doesn't happen. only about 14%. but it also ignores the fact the drug enforcement isn't really

about the drug use. the drug enforcement is to be a tool through which to attack more serious violent crime. it's one of the reasons crack was traded to so much more harshly than powder cocaine in the 1980s. we hear a lot about the racist constriction of the act in 1986 that established 100 disparity between crack and powder cocaine but people don't tell you the act of 1986 was cosponsored by 16mb of the 19 members of the congressional black caucus at the time, cosponsored and passed by a vote of 97-3. black americans played a huge role in the advent here in new york city that established the minimums. it's a wonderful book by a scholar i would recommend to all of you by michael j fortner. it's important forlk us to understand thatug when we talk

about the drug decriminalization, we are also talking about taking a tool out of the belt of law enforcement officers trying to impact any way they can and there is a massive overlap between people who engage in the drug offenses and engage in serious violent offenses. one statistic in 2017 the baltimore police department identified over 100 homicide suspects. seven in ten had att least one prior arrest for drugs so the idea that drug offender can be understood to mean nonviolent offender i think it is deeply wrong, deeply misguided and so when we hear about drugs it's important to make the point that you made that they actually do drive some of the most serious forms of violence and certainly did a lot more in the past. but that is a tool that police officers need to maintain at least in the near term.

>> a second question here. one second. the microphone is coming to you. >> throughout the speech how much is less of a policing issue with well oiled machine's and they understandth the tactics ad the philosophy behind the criminology et cetera and more of this is just failure of the judicial process into the prosecutorial process and how can we fix the system through actual legislative reform and enforce them to do their job and affect rate and prosecute crime rather than simply letting the communities fall into chaos and criminality?

>> i think the general answer to your question is the political process. i don't think we can force prosecutors to prosecute if they don't want to. we can stop voting those and that have been open about what they are going to do if they win the election. the fact he wanted to d incarcerate on a massive scale. what he was going to say in the memo that everyone was so shocked to read. the radical in philadelphia was 17% of eligible voters came out in that primary. it requires a political solution. are there good ideas awaiting the wing one of those is to stop

all the bad ideas. but i think we are starting to see that there was a real perhaps good reason for policies like three strikes and you're out and like truth and sentencing. is three the right number, probably not. maybe it's five but i know that i'm absolutely tired, exhausted of reading stories about people that have the prior arrests and convictions who are out on the streets free to kill, rape, rob, terrorize. these are the communities they deserve what they are getting. [applause] thank you for coming. it's truly an honor. [applause]