| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | |
| Have been watching C-SPAN Washington Journal for over 10 years now. | ||
| This is a great format that C-SPAN offers. | ||
| You're doing a great job. | ||
| I enjoy hearing everybody's opinion. | ||
| I'm a huge C-SPAN fan. | ||
| I listen every morning on the way to work. | ||
| I think C-SPAN should be required viewing for all three branches of government. | ||
| First of all, if you say I love C-SPAN and how you'll cover the hearings. | ||
| Thank you, everyone at C-SPAN, for allowing this interaction with everyday citizens. | ||
| It's an amazing show to get real opinions from real people. | ||
| Appreciate you guys' non-biased coverage. | ||
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| You and C-SPAN show the truth. | ||
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| It's the one essential news network. | ||
| With National Guard troops now policing Washington, D.C., and President Trump suggesting he could do the same in other American cities, a discussion on urban crime rates. | ||
| Our guest is Adam Gelb, President and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, an organization whose mission is what, Mr. Gelb? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, our mission is to shed light rather than heat on all these issues of crime and criminal justice. | |
| We are two parts to our organization. | ||
| We're a nonpartisan, non-ideological think tank. | ||
| That means we call balls and strikes and we produce information, data, and research that is credible and found credible across the political spectrum. | ||
| And we're also an invitational membership organization. | ||
| We have about 325 members who have been elected by our board as the top experts, innovators, and leaders in the criminal justice field. | ||
| And the core of what we do, John, is put our members together with our research and information, and we produce strategic policy roadmaps for reducing violence, for reducing crime, for attacking the size of the prison population, women's justice, veterans' justice, and a whole host of issues. | ||
| And I think just to lead it off, and perhaps where you're headed with this conversation, I think one of the reasons why we've become such a credible organization in such a short time, we were only launched in 2019, is that there is such a thirst out there right now for credible information from sources that are trustworthy. | ||
| And unfortunately, that's a byproduct of the lack of trust and declining confidence in information that's coming out of the government. | ||
| So urban crime trends is something much debated right now. | ||
| How is that usually quantified before we get into specific cities in Washington, D.C.? | ||
| How do you look at this data? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, there are two main sources of crime data in the country. | |
| There are police reports and victim surveys. | ||
| And we look at both. | ||
| They're needed to look at both. | ||
| But the vast majority of what determines what people think is happening in the country with crime comes from police departments. | ||
| It comes from officers getting called to scenes, writing reports, those reports being tallied by individual departments, then sent up to the state level, and then from the state level to the FBI, which aggregates all of this and puts out every year what's called a uniform crime report. | ||
| And unfortunately, that's what has been so politicized in recent days. | ||
| What is that report saying about urban crime rates right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, all of this depends a little bit, John, on what crimes you're looking at and what period you're looking over. | |
| So our most recent report from the Council on Criminal Justice, we looked at the first half of 2025 compared to the first half of 2024. | ||
| And when you have that short look back period, you're finding fairly significant drops in homicide, other violent crimes, and most property crimes as well. | ||
| As a matter of fact, the only category of the 13 that we track that we found increased in the first half of 2025 was domestic violence. | ||
| If you expand the lookout back period a little bit further, which we've done consistently to try to understand how things have been moving since before the onset of the COVID pandemic and the social justice protests of 2020, then you find that what we had was a big spike in violence in 2020 and 21, peaking cresting in 22 and coming down. | ||
| We had a drop in most forms of violent crime as people were staying home. | ||
| And so homes were harder to burglarize and stores were shutting down or closed. | ||
| And so you had this mirror image up violent crime, down and property crime. | ||
| And those trends now are sort of bending back together and things are basically back to where they were with both violent crime and property crime compared to 2019, just before the pandemic. | ||
| Is Washington, D.C., a city that sticks out specifically on one kind of crime trend? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It does with respect to one piece, John, and that's the lethality of the violence in Washington. | |
| So let me put a placeholder there and say a few things about what's happening with crime in Washington. | ||
| I think the first is that we have a lot of people talking past each other right now. | ||
| And that's because, I think, a lot of reasons, some of them certainly political. | ||
| But if you're just focused on the numbers, we have some people who are focused on the level and some people who are focused on the direction. | ||
| That is some people saying, well, it's going down, so it's okay. | ||
| We shouldn't take extraordinary measures. | ||
| The district is doing the things that are needed to drive those numbers down. | ||
| Other people who say, fine, the numbers may be down, but they're still high. | ||
| And just because the numbers are down doesn't mean that they're good. | ||
| And so when you look at Washington from that perspective and compare it to other cities as we do in our reports and as the FBI does as well, you find that Washington's homicide rate, its violent crime rate is, well, definitely elevated compared to the national average and certainly among the highest among large cities, which makes it somewhat more comparable. | ||
| But it is nowhere near the highest in the country. | ||
| There are a number of cities, unfortunately, Detroit and St. Louis and New Orleans and Memphis among them, that have homicide rates that are substantially higher, double and triple the rate that we see in Washington, D.C. | ||
| And there are some other large cities where the homicide rate is a fraction of what it is in Washington, and that would include New York City. | ||
| President Trump has also talked about other aspects of crime trends in D.C., juvenile crime in particular. | ||
| What can we say about juvenile crime and cities? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, there's one main thing I think to know about juvenile crime in this country, which is that it has plummeted dramatically since the 1990s. | |
| Many of your viewers are probably not going to believe this given what they're seeing and feeling today, but juvenile arrests peaked in 1996. | ||
| And by 2020, we're down 85%. | ||
| Let me say that again. | ||
| Juvenile arrests in 2020 were 85% lower than they were in 1996. | ||
| And that includes an 80% drop in arrests for juvenile violent crime. | ||
| Now, just because things were way worse then doesn't mean they're okay now. | ||
| And just because things are relatively low now doesn't mean they might not be increasing, and they certainly seem to be. | ||
| At the Council on Criminal Justice, we took a deep dive into juvenile crime trends between 2016 and 2022, and we found that that overall downward slide continued, both in violent and property crime. | ||
| But juvenile homicide is increasing. | ||
| In fact, between those years, 16 and 22, there was a 65% jump in homicides involving juveniles. | ||
| And that's just very disturbing. | ||
| And so it depends, like all of these, like all these numbers, you can pull out ones to tell the story that you want to tell if you're so inclined. | ||
| We're talking about crime statistics in American cities. | ||
| Adam Gelb is our guest with the Council on Criminal Justice, joining us this morning, taking your phone calls. | ||
| It's 202-748-8001 for Republicans to call in. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| As you're calling in, we noted that President Trump not only making this deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., but suggesting he could do it in other cities as well. | ||
| This was President Trump from a week ago today. | ||
| This issue directly impacts the functioning of the federal government and is a threat to America. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's a threat to our country. | ||
| We have other cities also that are bad, very bad. | ||
| You look at Chicago, how bad it is. | ||
| You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. | ||
| We have other cities that are very bad. | ||
| New York has a problem. | ||
| And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. | ||
| We don't even mention that anymore. | ||
| They're so far gone. | ||
| We're not going to let it happen. | ||
| We're not going to lose our cities over this. | ||
| And this will go further. | ||
| We're starting very strongly with D.C., and we're going to clean it up real quick, very quickly, as they say. | ||
| I was President Trump from Monday. | ||
| Mr. Gelb, when you watched that, what was your reaction to the cities that he mentioned and thoughts on how much a deployment by National Guard troops for a certain limited amount of time, what that will mean for reducing overall crime trends? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, there's a lot in there, John. | |
| I think the first thing is to note that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should necessarily do it. | ||
| The question for public policy generally and the question here in these circumstances is not just what can work, what might work, and how do I deploy the tools that I have at my hand. | ||
| It is actually what will be most effective, what will be most cost-effective as well. | ||
| Most effective, meaning what will help bring crime down both in the short term and the long term, and what's cost-effective, meaning both what will cost taxpayers the least and what will cause the least infringement on constitutional rights and liberties. | ||
| And where do you come down? | ||
| You talk about policy recommendations that you've made. | ||
| Is a National Guard deployment a recommendation that you have made to reduce crime trends? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it is not, not specifically. | |
| But I think there's one most important thing for people to understand about reducing crime and deterring crime in particular. | ||
| And that is that there are three aspects to deterrence. | ||
| It is certainty, swiftness, and the severity of punishment. | ||
| And we have this obsession in our country, unfortunately, with the severity of punishment. | ||
| Whenever we think we're going to try to reduce crime, we try to make punishments stiffer. | ||
| And actually, it turns out that sort of longer prison sentences are the most expensive and least effective way to reduce crime. | ||
| What really does it is the certainty and swiftness, the confidence that people can have that if they commit a crime, they're going to be caught, and that if they are caught, justice will be delivered swiftly. | ||
| So, from just a straight-up analysis point, augmenting the size of the police force in Washington, and there are a lot of arguments about how the National Guard is being deployed, whether it's in federal buildings or whether buildings or whether it's in actual crime neighborhoods, increasing the chances that people who are committing crimes get caught can probably help crime in the short term. | ||
| President, your clip was just showing saying he might want to extend this beyond 30 days, understanding that 30 days you can have some impact, but that would need to be longer. | ||
| There's not going to be very much tolerance in Washington for a much longer deployment, let alone in other cities where the federal government doesn't have the same authorities it does in Washington. | ||
| But really, the most important point is that long-term sustainable reductions in crime, and particularly violent crime, are going to take a partnership between the federal government and local jurisdictions that involves a comprehensive whole-of-government approach, not simply one that says we're going to go out and surveil people and block them up. | ||
| I should note for our viewers on your screen: we've been showing some live shots of Union Station, the camera on the roof of our building. | ||
| We can turn and point towards Union Station. | ||
| It's been a focal point of a lot of the pictures that you've been seeing at the National Guard deployment in D.C. that have shown up in newspapers there on Friday. | ||
| Several Humvees there. | ||
| There's obviously military vehicles there today, National Guard members in uniform. | ||
| So, those are live pictures this Monday morning, the 18th of August, here in Washington, D.C. Taking your phone calls with Adam Gelb as we talk about urban crime rates. | ||
| This is Kyle, Buffalo, New York, Republican. | ||
| Thanks for calling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, John Ceasefan, the host. | |
| The host talked earlier about the 90s crime rate. | ||
| And I know a lot of people don't realize, but it dramatically has changed probably because of drugs crack of marijuana is pretty much legal in most states. | ||
| So I think, you know, the economic opportunity isn't there like it used to be. | ||
| So, and then he also talked about COVID, how the numbers went down and they're back up. | ||
| My question is, though, we see a lot of recent years of the youth offender status being removed. | ||
| Do you think that has a lot to do with the young youth crime rates going back up with the whole cash bail and can't be charged as an adult until 18 for most crime? | ||
| I think all crimes, really. | ||
| And I think that's pretty much it, really. | ||
| I just have seen, as an educator for 24 years, I've seen it go up and down. | ||
| The violence was not there like I saw it when I first entered in the early 2000s. | ||
| And again, I always say that the drugs game is much different than it was back then. | ||
| I would think most of the crimes back in those days were drug-related. | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| Kyle, thanks for the questions. | ||
| I always appreciate the calls from Buffalo, New York. | ||
| Mr. Gelp. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A few things to going on in that question. | |
| I would say first that to augment what I said earlier about trends in juvenile crime, I want to note that in addition to the rise in juvenile homicide in recent years, while the overall trend of violence is down, we're seeing a bit of a split in terms of the age trends. | ||
| That is still trending down for juveniles age 15 to 17 and pretty substantially, but trending up by about 9% in terms of involvement in violent crime for kids as young as 10 to 14. | ||
| And so, you know, when you think about what defines the difference between being a child and adult, there are lots of ways to do it. | ||
| I think of it pretty frequently as the ability to defer gratification. | ||
| When does your brain form enough that you are not acting so impulsively? | ||
| And when we see kids as young as 10 to 14 committing crimes, it's very disturbing. | ||
| It hits people. | ||
| And I hope we're going to be able to talk a little bit about the difference between some of these numbers and how people are actually perceiving what's going on with crime. | ||
| But when you have acts that are committed by very young children who people just have a very different image about what kids that young are up to, it hits them very differently. | ||
| And it really speaks to, I think, the caller's ultimate question is: well, what the heck do you do about this? | ||
| And I think it is precisely because kids of that young age and even up into the older teens are not thinking necessarily rationally. | ||
| They're not weighing pros and cons and the future implications of their activities that the responses have to be, they have to be very swift and certain, and they have to be really speaking to what are driving these kids' behavior. | ||
| On juvenile offenders, D.C. Federal Prosecutor Jeannie Piro also spoke at that same press conference on Monday from the White House about juvenile crime. | ||
| This is a little bit of what she said. | ||
| And I'm not going to stand here and go over and over the cases, but what I can tell you is this: I see too much violent crime being committed by young punks who think that they can get together in gangs and crews and beat the hell out of you or anyone else. | ||
| They don't care where they are. | ||
| They can be in DuPont Circle, but they know that we can't touch them. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because the laws are weak. | ||
| I can't touch you if you're 14, 15, 16, 17 years old, and you have a gun. | ||
| I convict someone of shooting another person with an illegal gun on a public bus in the chest, intent to kill. | ||
| I convict him. | ||
| And you know what the judge gives him? | ||
| Probation. | ||
| Says you should go to college. | ||
| We need to go after the DC council and their absurd laws. | ||
| We need to get rid of this concept of, you know, a no-cash pail. | ||
| We need to recognize that the people who matter are the law-abiding citizens. | ||
| And it starts today. | ||
| But it's not going to end today because the president is going to do everything we need to do to make sure that these emboldened criminals understand we see you, we're watching you, and we're going to change the law to catch you. | ||
| Adam Gelb on the laws, specifically how they apply to juvenile offenders. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't want to speak to exactly what has happened in D.C., but there's no doubt that over a long period of time that there's been a bipartisan consensus in this country that Our laws as they were in the 80s and 90s, in particular, had gotten just unnecessarily restrictive, and that there were more effective and less expensive ways to deal with many juveniles. | |
| And that's borne out in the statistics that we talked about earlier. | ||
| We have this 80-plus percent drop in juvenile violent crime. | ||
| We have a proportionate drop in the number of kids being held in residential facilities. | ||
| And so, you know, at the end of the day, there's a lot of variance in jurisdictions and what their laws are. | ||
| But in most places, the courts do have the ability to hold juveniles who have committed serious violent crimes and to put them in secure facilities for at least up to two years. | ||
| The difference between whether the law says 17 or 18 can be significant. | ||
| Don't want to trivialize that, but there are much bigger things that are happening in our neighborhoods and our communities that are going to be solved by whether that age of adulthood for purposes of criminal trial is going to make a big difference here. | ||
| Just about 20 minutes left with Adam Gelb at the Council on Criminal Justice on a day we're talking about urban crime trends and also a day that the National Guard troops are back. | ||
| You can see them at Union Station today, a live picture from just across the street here from our C-SPAN studio. | ||
| The military vehicles, the National Guard members back at Union Station in Washington, D.C. Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., sending this ex-post this weekend saying American soldiers and airmen policing American citizens on American soil is un-American. | ||
| Taking your phone calls, Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| This is Sylvia out of the Keystone State Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| When I was a child, we had a whole lot of things to do. | ||
| Church program, after-school program. | ||
| We had a lot of games, swing sex, swimming pools. | ||
| We had a lot of things to do. | ||
| But now, everything, lots of gone now. | ||
| That's what Washington and other states try to keep kids busy with things. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Let me spend money on that. | ||
| Adam Geld on the idle hands argument. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, idle hands or the devil's workshop is something that is a very common phrase in the criminal justice community. | |
| I think everybody understands that kids need to have things to do and positive, positive activities, and adults and role models to engage with. | ||
| Back during the crime bill, when I was working on the Senate Judiciary Committee, we had this debate between prisons and policing and prevention, and folks sort of derided the notion that there should be after-school programs as midnight basketball and midnight basketball became kind of a joke. | ||
| But that was the early 90s. | ||
| And I think along the way, almost everybody has recognized the crime control value of having pro-social activities for kids after school when actually arrests are highest for kids and into the evenings. | ||
| And that includes summer jobs. | ||
| One of the interventions that has the strongest research base behind it is trying to make sure that during the summer months that kids are gainfully employed and don't have the learning loss that's associated with sitting around and having nothing to do all summer. | ||
| Let me come back to a topic that it sounded like you wanted to talk about the numbers on crimes and juvenile crimes specifically and how people perceive them or also how people consume them via social media, how they see them. | ||
| It sounded like you wanted to talk more on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think it's really important. | |
| Thanks for returning to that, John, to talk about the difference between perceptions and tolerance and fears here. | ||
| We started at the top talking about how if the numbers are going down, that doesn't mean that they're good. | ||
| But we have a lot of people who are saying just because something is coming down, then we shouldn't, not that we shouldn't care about it, but that it's not a serious problem. | ||
| And I think the point that most people recognize, but you don't hear that often, is that people's perceptions are not really determined by what they are seeing in graphs and charts, if they actually ever see those things. | ||
| You know, what people see is what they have in their social media feeds, what leads on their local news, what they're seeing on the streets and from their friends. | ||
| And that's what largely is going to drive what they're thinking about, along with what I would call the quality of crimes rather than the quantity, right? | ||
| All this debate about statistics is about how many murders or robberies there are. | ||
| But I think a significant part of what is going on here is the quality piece, which is, are these incidents that we're hearing about, are they random? | ||
| Are they brazen? | ||
| Are they particularly brutal? | ||
| Are they close by to me? | ||
| Are they at some place that I can easily remember? | ||
| And it's those qualitative aspects of some of the incidents that we're seeing, including the attack on the Doge staffer in Washington that at least was the immediate precipitator of what we're seeing in Washington. | ||
| That just strike people in a different way and that people find very disturbing. | ||
| And so the question is, I think not so much are people misperceiving the problem because the numbers are moving down. | ||
| It's just that people think about and calculate their fear and concern based on a whole other host of factors than what their objective risk of victimization is. | ||
| By the way, if you're interested in the charts and the numbers that Mr. Gale was just referring to, you can go to counciloncj.org and see the charts that show overall crime trends for things like homicide, aggregated assault, aggravated assault, gun assault, sexual assault, domestic violence, robbery, carjacking. | ||
| You can see the trends over the years. | ||
| Those charts also, if you go farther down the list, break down the numbers by city, by year. | ||
| So if the charts are something you're into, there's plenty of information all available. | ||
| Again, counciloncj.org. | ||
| This is Christine in Holland, Michigan, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| I was just calling because of that clip that you showed about that lady that's over everything in BC trying to do something about crime. | ||
| And President Trump was standing right beside her. | ||
| And he is acting like a Gubernado delinquent. | ||
| And he was there on January 6, 2021. | ||
| And he let all those people out that had been convicted for these very same crimes. | ||
| He's trying to stop now. | ||
| So I would say that he is the problem, and seeing less of his bad behavior in the news would help tremendously because he is the problem. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Christine in Michigan. | ||
| Adam Gilbert, it brings up an interesting point. | ||
| Did January 6th skew crime numbers in DC for that year? | ||
| Did you see, was that reflected in the numbers that you look at every day? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't think so. | |
| Certainly there was some effect, but it's a good question overall about the role of our leaders and set an example of what kind of behavior is acceptable and tolerable in our society. | ||
| And then if I could just careen to the sort of the opposite and far nerdier end of that question, there have been some questions raised about the validity of the DC crime numbers. | ||
| And I think it's important for viewers to understand a few points about this as it seems that the notion is building that all these numbers are just made up. | ||
| So there are a few things about this. | ||
| First, that the most reliable numbers, sort of widely considered the most reliable numbers in the criminal justice world, are homicide numbers. | ||
| Bottom line is it's very hard to hide a body. | ||
| And almost everybody seems to believe that the homicide count in any jurisdiction is going to be highly accurate, the most accurate. | ||
| The second thing is that a lot of these other crimes don't necessarily follow homicide in lockstep, but robberies and car thefts and other types of violence do tend to follow somewhat in the same pattern. | ||
| So when you see those trends in Washington aligning very closely with similar trends in other cities, it becomes a lot more plausible that this is what is happening in D.C. | ||
| And then finally, and I think really importantly in this conversation, I haven't seen much of this yet, there is data from other sources about homicide and firearm industry from the health side of the equation. | ||
| And if you poke around a little bit, you can find that hospital emergency rooms in Washington are reporting a 25% drop in firearm injuries in the first part of this year from January to May. | ||
| And so that number and that drop aligns very closely with the police numbers as well, suggesting here again that what we're seeing in the numbers that are being widely discussed by the mayor, the police department, and others reflect what is happening on the ground there in Washington. | ||
| Staying on homicide for a minute, this chart from the Council on Criminal Justice website shows Shows various crimes and various cities, the city's different numbers along this chart. | ||
| So we went to just homicide here. | ||
| Washington, D.C. is sort of online with a lot of the same cities on the bottom, but there's one city that sticks out above them all, and it is the city of Chicago. | ||
| It's that blue line that keeps bumping up through the top. | ||
| Can you discuss homicide rates in Chicago and why they're so much higher than other cities? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Chicago is a very big city. | |
| I can unfortunately can't see the screen you're looking at right now, John, but it's likely that you're looking at the counts rather than the rates because Chicago, yeah, in terms of the rate, I believe is a good bit lower than some of the cities we mentioned earlier in the show, including Detroit and St. Louis and Memphis, which interestingly are blue cities in red states, where Chicago, blue city, and a blue state. | ||
| So when you look at the rate, which I think is a better way to look at it, you see a different picture for Chicago. | ||
| And there have just been massive efforts by city leadership, state leadership, a number of fantastic nonprofits, and a huge coming together of the philanthropic community in Chicago to apply some very innovative approaches with respect to working with young men who are involved in violence. | ||
| And they seem to be starting to have some effect as we see the significant large drops in homicide in Chicago too since the pandemic peaks. | ||
| This is Benny in Albany, Georgia, Independence. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to ask your guests: the top 10 states in the United States for crime, how many of those states are Republicans? | ||
| And I also have a second question. | ||
| Since Congress has passed all these laws and the ENRA has released all these guns on the streets, why is it that wouldn't that increase the crime rate in America? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Caller asked a very interesting, a very interesting question. | ||
| I think a tough one for the field, which is that there was a huge spike in gun purchases in 2020 and 21 high of the pandemic. | ||
| I believe somewhere on the order of 5 million more guns purchased in those years than on the average in previous years. | ||
| And at the time, a lot of the explanation for why we're seeing the increase in violence in 20 and 21 was we're washing guns. | ||
| We have all these guns out there. | ||
| Now, coming off the other side of the pandemic in 23, 24, and into 25, our numbers show crime coming down. | ||
| We still have all these additional guns out there. | ||
| And so I think it's a real challenge for folks to try to explain what is happening and not with respect to firearm ownership and how it's affecting these trends. | ||
| Wilmington, Connecticut, this is Greg, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| Good morning, guests. | ||
| So from my perspective, and I think many people in the circles that I follow and the news that I pay attention to, this is all about taking the eye off the Epstein situation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It would be nice if Joan Hero would go after Epstein's co-conspirators with the same vigor that she seems to want to go after a 14-year-old child. | |
| I just wanted to get your guests' opinion on this. | ||
| Mr. Gellman, any thoughts? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't know if there's anything surprising. | |
| I mean, President Trump is a whirlwind of activity and is doing all kinds of things morning, noon, and night. | ||
| I guess you could say that about anything, whether or not what he's doing in Washington has anything to do with Epstein or the timing of it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think there are a lot of people who, excuse me, who believed that this was coming, that he's been talking about it even in his first term, and that it was just inevitable at some point. | ||
| So, yeah, real hard to say. | ||
| A topic that Genie Piero brought up and that has come up over the course of the past week, especially when it comes to juvenile crime, but also crime rates in general, no cash bail or cashless bail. | ||
| Can you explain what that is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, sure. | |
| When you're arrested in this country, you are innocent until proven guilty. | ||
| But laws for a long time have allowed the court to hold you if you are perceived to be a risk to public safety or what's called a risk of flight. | ||
| That is, you will not show up for court. | ||
| And what it turned out is over the years, people began to realize that what we had was a system that locked people up based on their wealth. | ||
| That is, bail is set if you are held pretrial. | ||
| And if you can make bail, you get out. | ||
| If you can't afford to pay, you get held. | ||
| And that that was a situation that both violated our constitutional principle of innocence until proven guilty and our sense that there shouldn't be two systems of justice, one for wealthy people and one for people of less financial means. | ||
| And so there was, over the past 10 years or so, a wave of reform at the city level and in many states to say, let's move away from a wealth-based system to a risk-based system and get bail and how much money you have out of the equation and say the court should do an objective assessment of the level of risk that you pose to public safety and the level of risk that you pose for not showing up to court and exercise that presumption of innocence. | ||
| and say all but the most dangerous and folks should be held pre-trial. | ||
| And what's happened, the research shows, is that it's basically worked, that there have not been increases in the overall crime rates in the jurisdictions that have done this. | ||
| Now, there are certainly individual instances, and whether it's the police department or the prosecutor's office or reporters, absolutely you can find cases and in some cases, horrible cases of people who you're just thinking to yourself, how was this person let out pre-trial, given their prior record and the crime that they were accused of? | ||
| That should have never happened. | ||
| There's plenty of that happening and too much, I think. | ||
| But overall, what we're seeing is a system that has gotten, I think, more fair and generally more effective. | ||
| Because when people are jailed, even for just a few days, let alone for several weeks or months while they're awaiting trial, it can obviously disrupt their jobs. | ||
| It can disrupt their childcare and cause a whole bunch of problems that would have been far worse for society in general than if the person had been released. | ||
| And the real thrust of what's trying to happen here is to interrupt these cycles and not exacerbate them by deepening people's challenges in getting and keeping their lives on track. | ||
| Time for maybe one more call here. | ||
| This is Jeff, Bayville, New York Independent. | ||
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
| You're on with Adam Gelb. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Mr. Gelb, I have a question about the correlates of information, of evidence for prevention of crime based on poverty and education. | ||
| It's widely known that poverty is associated with poor academic performance, and it's also widely known that poverty is associated with crime. | ||
| And my question to you is, has there been studies to specifically look at elevating academic performance in impoverished areas and reduction of crime? | ||
| And the programs that are most effective at doing so? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Gelb. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I think one of the longest held findings in our field is for high quality preschool education. | |
| You set a kid off on the right foot before he or she reaches age five. | ||
| Then there are all kinds of benefits down the line for education, educational attainment, employment, and reduction in crime. |