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Dec. 31, 2025 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:02:30
Is the NYPD Doomed?

Jared Taylor and Officer John Patterson discuss the daunting challenges facing the police under Zohran Mamdani. Thumbnail credit: © Kyle Mazza/CNP via ZUMA Press Wire

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Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed listeners, welcome to Radio Renaissance.
This is a special episode with a special guest, Officer John Patterson.
He has been my guest before.
He is my expert on all things related to police work.
He has been SWAT, a detective, drugs, vice, high up in the command of a police department.
He's done just about everything that a police officer ever does, and probably a few more things besides.
So welcome, Officer John.
Very glad to have you back on my program.
Thank you, Mr. Taylor.
I was glad to be here, and it's a privilege.
Can you tell, first of all, I know that you do a regular show yourself in which you analyze police action.
How can people tune in and hear from you directly?
Well, thanks very much.
I work together with my friend Jack the Barbershop Guy.
We were both friends of the late Colin Flaherty, and we do a show on Rumble at rumble.com.
And the name of the show is Denial, Deceit, and Delusion in honor of Colin.
But the way to find us on Rumble is you must type in Jack the Barbershop Guy, all one word.
And we're approaching, I think, about 400 episodes of just, we cover the vastly disproportionate crime statistics.
And I do a lot of body cam analysis and things like that.
And get a little bit of humor here and there.
And then, and Jack did the, if anyone was a listener of Colin Flaherty's show, he does all of the music and songs that were on the show.
Yes, a very talented guy who spoke at an American Renaissance conference once.
So now I'm wondering how to entitle this program when it goes up, but it might be something like, is the New York PD headed for a death spiral?
Because I believe that is your view as to what is in store for law enforcement in the great late city of New York, especially now that it's got this new Muslim mayor who's going to be sworn in very early next year.
I think maybe January 1st, he's supposed to be sworn in.
So is that a fair assessment of your view?
Is this a death spiral that the city law enforcement has gone into?
I think that description is about as accurate as it can get.
I mean, we can agree that as New York goes, as far as the law enforcement profession goes, or as the financial system goes, so goes the rest of the country.
And in some cases, so goes the world.
But, you know, NYPD is hands down the largest agency in the country, and they are hemorrhaging officers at a pace that as a former administrator who handled personnel matters and budgeted an entire patrol division, I just don't see how this is survivable, especially coming from the perspective of someone who was a police officer and knew all the things that make police officers jumpy, for lack of a better term.
But I just, I think we're getting ready.
We're on the precipice of a total collapse, in my opinion.
Well, give us some numbers then.
How large is the force?
And I understand that it's hemorrhaging officers even without Mamdani in the mayor's office.
So the fiscal budget for the New York Police Department alone is $6.14 billion.
Okay, so that's just operational costs.
That's just salaries, insurance, paying into the pension program.
That doesn't include the pensions that they owe to other retired officers.
So if you take that into consideration, it's about $11 to $12 billion.
So they're budgeted for 35,000 officers, which is 35,000.
Correct.
I mean, I was crunching some numbers, and I think over half of cities are referred to as mid-majors or anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000 inhabitants.
And a vast majority of the police departments in the country are mid-majors who employ my former agency included are around 300 officers at most.
So a 35,000 person police department, New York City proper, policing, what is it, 9 million?
I mean, that's really the cream of the crop.
I mean, the largest personnel base and everything.
But when you have a 6.14 billion budget, you're pretty much the pulse of the profession.
Well, I would like to think that New York City faces a host of obstacles that more demographically and culturally healthy parts of the country do not.
But please elaborate further on why you think this is headed south.
So I don't know if you heard about this individual named George Floyd in 2020 that overdosed in police custody.
Oh, tell me about him.
But once that happened, it really, once those protests started, it was really a beleaguered and barely tenable profession as it was.
And once that happened, once we were having to staff these protests after protests after protest, and you're hearing, you know, in my city, it was hundreds of, I believe in all the protests that I managed in my last agency, I think I saw two black people total.
So I would have to deploy about 100 officers, which is a third of my department, to manage this protest with hundreds of white people screaming, you know, racist, you're murderers.
And, you know, we're supposed to have thick skin, but that really wears on you after a while.
And people get really tired of the job.
And you and I have discussed before the, you know, there's certain milestones of a police career that'll either make you stick it out, make you quit immediately, or make you have, you've got this small window of, do I want to work at this agency or do I want to take my pension and move somewhere else in the state?
So I just.
Well, tell me about some of those milestones.
How would that work for a typical officer?
So, I mean, I'd like to think that, you know, the people that are applying for the job were like when I was 21 years old, I'm this, you know, albeit pathologically altruistic.
You know, I'm going to save the world.
I'm going to get out there and put on this uniform and look sharp and I'm going to catch the bad guys.
And it takes about three or four years for you to realize, oh, I'm going to be waiting knee-deep in the scum of the earth for 25 to 30 years.
So it gets a little, you know, it wears on you pretty quick.
It changes you pretty quickly and destroys marriages and alcoholism.
You know, it's a whole different show in itself.
Well, well, to back up, to back up, when you go into a job like that, all optimistic and idealistic, don't you realize that in order to save the world, you have to muck out the slop that you're going to be dealing with these awful people?
Or is the reality of it just not something that the ordinary recruit would even imagine?
And myself included, I was very naive when I went out, very little life experience.
And I was plunged into the Southern California law enforcement profession.
And I learned very quickly that, you know, like you said, I was going to have to wade into it.
And that's what I signed up for, right?
And it just kept getting worse and worse.
And it changes you as a person.
And this is before we became the villains of the universe, the absolute vilified, evil white police officer that is the cause of every abysmal failure of every demographic on the planet.
And it's just been ramping up and ramping up.
And I came on the heels of the Rodney King, the Los Angeles riot.
So it was already a little testy, to say the least.
But now it's just reached this fevered pitch where it's to the point where, you know, they say, oh, black people have to have to talk from their parents before they can go out and just go to the movies or that old trope.
But now it's just, they're just openly, you know, a police car will drive through a neighborhood and it's immediately surrounded and people are jumping up and down on the police cars and the officers can do nothing.
They're being ambushed.
And it's just any vestiges of, you know, just authority that the uniform once held are completely gone.
And so you multiply that times 35,000 and it's you can see where we're going to go.
Well, just from your experience, if you came in right at sort of the tag end of the reverberations of the Rodney King riots, what were some of the stages of escalation of this anti-police, anti-white man in a uniform sentiment that eventually swept the country?
I know it seemed to have just reached fever pitch after Rodney King, I'm sorry, after George Floyd ascended into heaven.
But what are some of the stages, would you say?
So I always like to tell this story.
I remember one time I was this sergeant, I had probably close to 20 years on.
I was walking into the station and some brand new, just fresh off the academy recruit or rookie comes out and he goes, hey, Sergeant, I go, hey, how's it going, bud?
And he goes, man, I can't believe they pay us to do this.
And I looked at him and I said, don't worry, kid, that goes away.
But I remember one day I was, it was a Tuesday.
I made a traffic stop in the middle of early morning and I'm talking to this fellow in the car.
And as I stand up, I noticed that there's probably 15 to 20 black working-age men just standing out in front of their apartment complex.
One of them was filming me with one of the over-the-shoulder VHS camcorders.
And I said, wow, they must all have Tuesday off.
So this is early in your career.
This is probably 1994.
So like you said, once St. George of Floyd ascended into heaven, the thing that people don't understand is, well, A, all the police have cameras now.
And every single thing you do, there's going to be at least 20 people filming you with their phone and then posting you to the internet.
And I often say on our show is police are now taking unnecessary, completely just overt risks to their personal safety to avoid becoming the next Derek Chauvin.
We'd rather beg and plead.
We would rather be shot before we shoot just so that we won't get indicted.
That's how, I mean, it's being a police officer now is like walking on eggshells on ice skates on the edge of a 200-foot cliff.
Well, I must say, whenever I see these clips on the internet of officers interacting with the general public, often I'm struck by how incredibly patient and long-suffering they are.
And that's often one of the most frequent comments you'll be on, you're watching some YouTube thing.
And this poor guy is taking abuse, being very patient.
All the commenters say, wow, what self-control.
I ought to punch that swine in the nose.
But no, it's absolutely remarkable now.
Can I tell you what that is?
Yeah, what is that?
That's the officers playing to the camera.
I'm sure that's part of it.
It's a thousand percent.
It has to do with it.
If they are dealing, let's just say, if they're dealing with a black person on the traffic stop, which if you're looking at YouTube or wherever you're finding your body cameras, body cam videos, a vast majority of them, that's what those are, right?
Black female traffic stops.
And they say, hey, I pulled you over for this reason.
I need your license.
What for?
I just told you.
Well, you can't, you stopped me for no reason.
No, I didn't.
It just does this back and forth.
Where, like you said, the commoners say, I would just yank him out of the car, which is how it used to be done.
But now everyone is so terrified of the Monday morning quarterbacking.
We sit here and beg and plead and beg and ask.
And it used to be ask, tell, make.
But now it's ask, ask again, beg, beg some more, play to the camera.
It's basically a stage production.
And I mean, it's, it's.
People are in the misconception that officers are getting dressed going, oh, I can't wait to go out and catch me a black or a black suspect today.
No, that's the last thing we want.
You know, you pull over a car and you see it's a black driving and you go, oh, no.
And I mean, half of the time, if you're watching these body cams, instead of saying, I would just drag him out of the car and arrest him, I look at him now and say, I would just walk away.
I can barely even, I can barely even evaluate him anymore.
Oh, oh, evaluate these films that you're looking at.
It just flashes me back and just grinds away at me.
I cannot imagine how anybody, A, says, I'm going to be a police officer in a majority black city or I'm going to go out there and do proactive policing.
And hope that I don't get indicted for using appropriate force.
It's just, you watch those videos.
And of course, I mean, police officers do about a million, conduct about a million and a half contacts per day.
And that's across the country.
Across the country.
And that's, you know, anywhere from a parking ticket to a domestic violence to a trespassing and everything.
And, you know, we see a very tiny fraction of those.
And that can go both ways.
You can say, oh, well, that's cherry-picking.
You're just showing the bad ones.
Well, I can tell you from personal experience that the ones you see, you miss a thousand.
Okay.
That's that is an accurate depiction of life as a law enforcement officer when you look at those body cams.
Well, it must be so inefficient to spend all this time begging and wheedling and whining and persuading rather than, as you say, what is it?
To ask, tell, act?
Ask, tell, make is how it used to be.
Make.
Yes.
Ask, tell, make.
Well, you can't, well, eventually they seem to have to make, but it just takes so much longer to get down to business.
And let me tell you what happens with those real, just real quick.
I know we're on time.
So I make this, let's say I make this traffic stop for expired license plate, right?
Then this whole argument ensues.
They ask for my supervisor.
When they ask for a supervisor, you must bring the supervisor.
When they say, what's your bad number?
You have to get it.
Oh, you don't have to haul the supervisor out of his out of work.
You just have to give them the name and number of your supervisor.
If they say they want a supervisor, a supervisor must respond.
Are you kidding?
Absolutely not.
That is mandatory.
Any arrest in the country, anywhere?
If they say, I want your supervisor and you say no, you will be disciplined.
that's a fact so this is their little i did not realize that Absolutely.
And that's what I guess when they get to talk, when they get to talk, all blacks learn that, I guess.
Well, now that you know that, I don't know if you, if you put yourself through those body cams, you'll notice that they say the same thing every time.
Why'd you stop me, Foe?
They get on the phone with their mother.
They say, I want your supervisor and what's your badge number?
Okay.
And if they say, what's your badge number?
You are required by policy to provide it.
Yes.
It's presumably.
I'm not getting my badge number.
Well, it's presumably on your badge that you're wearing, right?
No, it should be, but it's very rare these days.
So just to wrap that thought up is, so I stop this person for expired registration and they say, I want your badge and I want your supervisor.
Then force is imminent, right?
Even if it's just pulling them out of the car, right?
So then the person's going to complain.
So what happens is for this expired registration ticket, which could have been a warning, you may have had an excuse for it.
It now becomes a complaint process where the person will file a complaint against the police department and that particular officer.
Takes weeks for the officer to be investigated.
He gets read his Garrity rights, which is basically Miranda for cops.
He has to, all the body cam has to be downloaded.
This whole huge investigation has to be conducted by the sergeant, which takes probably six man hours.
And then there's a use of force form that the sergeant also has to do, which takes another three man hours.
So just for making a traffic stop for expired registration, you're going to lose a sergeant and an officer.
The officer's morale is going to be stomped on, worried about if he's going to get in trouble.
So officers just say, I'm not going to do anything.
I'm just going to sit under a tree.
I'm going to play Candy Crush on my phone.
And if there's a crime in progress, I'll make sure I give adequate time for the bad guys to flee and I'll go take the useless report.
That's where we're at nationwide.
That sounds like an awfully cynical view of what happens.
Very true.
Well, so it's very, very clear to me that because police work is in such bad odor in the United States, it seems practically without regard to race, except for a few conservative white people who understand that policing is necessary.
That who in his right mind would want to take this job?
And given those built-in headwinds against getting any kind of competent people to apply to go to the police academy, you end up with psychopaths and criminals and thugs and just absolutely the wrong sort of people even showing up to be police officers anyway.
Let's take New York PD.
We're talking about New York Police Department.
In December of this year, they just finally, there were 30 officers that they had hired who had actually failed the background checks, but were secretly foisted through and put out on the streets.
It was either a whistleblower or somebody said, hey, wait a minute, this person should have failed out for this portion of the psychological examination.
So the union stepped in and said, hey, we just want to let these officers continue their career.
So instead of them, the probationary period for New York officers is two years, which is that's double what it normally is.
It's normally a year for the officer.
So instead of saying, hey, 30 officers that failed the psychological or had a felony conviction or shouldn't have been hired in the first place, you get to keep your job, but now you're on three years probation.
So it's so bad.
I mean, this little tiny little 30-person pocket of officers that were, for lack of a better term, illegally hired were backed up by the union, which you're not supposed to get union protection until you're off of probation.
That's a whole other story, but the union steps in and says, well, let's let these 31 criminals continue their jobs as police officers.
That shows you how bad it is.
It's like, well, we need warm bodies.
This guy is a sexual predator or a stalker.
He has a domestic violence, but I hire him anyway because let's just fudge the numbers and hide the paperwork or lie and keep these.
Those 30 were, how much more often do you think that's happening?
So this is because they are so desperate to have just some tailor's dummy dressed in a uniform.
That's correct.
And that's not relegated to New York PD.
That's everywhere.
There is not a single police department in the country that could say, we are fully staffed.
We have just a smart amount of officers.
We couldn't handle another officer.
We almost have too many.
No agency, including mine, will ever be flush.
I mean, I was five to maybe eight officers down at all times.
And that's it's standard.
It's relative to the size of your department for injuries, you know, military leave, pregnancy, suspensions.
And those five to ten officers, me trying to manage the overtime budget to backfill for those officers, I couldn't balance that budget.
Now, imagine that on a hundred times scale.
It just, it burns through your money.
So I gather that the New York City Police Department also is Well, below the numbers that they ordinarily look for, right?
Right.
Like I said, they're budgeted for 35,000.
They're at about 33,700.
And according to their union boss, the Benevolent Association boss, his calculations show that there are 1,700 New York City police officers that are eligible to retire.
Now, that can be kind of a misleading term because after 20 years, you can retire from the New York Police Department with half of your pension.
Half your pension.
How long do you have to be in to get a full pension?
So it depends on how much overtime you earn, what your rank is, what you think your monthly check should be.
Like when I retired, I said, okay, I think I need about this much money.
I need to stay this long.
You can monitor your pension and how it ascends.
But after 20, you're eligible.
So that could be, I mean, for all intents and purposes, it could be 1,700 people that have done their 20 and went out.
Or it could be 1,700 that are just going to say, I don't want to work here anymore.
I'm going to go somewhere in upstate New York.
But if 1,700 can pull the plug, that's the term we use is pull the plug for retiring.
If 1,700 are eligible now, just let's take any rumor or conjecture aside.
If just those 1,700, let's just assume that half of those left, you're going to, you cannot recover from that spiral.
You can't back.
I mean, you're using a thimble to bail out a battleship.
You can't do it.
And you certainly can't afford it.
Well, how many, how large is a police academy class in New York City?
How many could they theoretically bring onto the force in a year's time or in any given period of time?
So they're touting, they touted that they hired 4,000 in the year 2025.
They're just about ready to, they're just about ready to graduate a 1,000-person academy.
So if you look at the statistics, I've searched high and low about how many people are retiring from the New York Police Department.
And the given number is about 316 per month as the average, which is the size of 300?
I see.
300, which is about the size of 75% of the agencies in the country.
Think about that.
So if 316 a month, let's just use their number.
If 316 leave per month, that's 3,792, which when I cross-check it, that's correct.
They lose about 4,000.
So they're saying, oh, yeah, we hired 4,000, but we lost 3,792.
So they're barely keeping their head above water if that.
Now, when they say they hired somebody, does that mean he graduated from the academy or he just went into the academy?
When they say they hired someone, that means, okay, all right, police officer, here, you have to buy your new uniform.
I didn't know that they had to buy their own stuff.
They have to pay about $2,500 of their own money for their uniforms.
One of their standards they changed was you used to have to pay a fee to take the written test.
Oh, I see to apply.
Right.
They got rid of that, which was to keep out the people that were just taken just for kicks.
Right.
I see.
So, you know, they say, oh, we're going to graduate this 1,000-person academy.
Now, the New York City Police Academy is six months long.
Okay.
That's pretty standard.
Six to eight is where you should be.
You should, I mean, that depends on, like when I was in the academy, you do, you know, you'd be in the classroom and then they'd let you go out onto the street for two weeks.
And then you'd come back thinking you were John Wayne and do more class.
And you had phase three coming in.
It lasted about six to eight months.
So their academy is six months.
Then the training period where the FTO, the field training officer, where you go out and your training officer says, all right, all right, rookie, let's go handle this.
Show me how you can do, you know, show me how you do.
That's about 12 weeks, which is pretty standard nationally.
So that's, that's 10 months.
Okay.
So 10 months, 1,000 officers.
So in 10 months, they lose 3,160.
So, by the time those 1,000 officers are through with FTO, let's just pretend.
Let's pretend, you know, fairy dust and rainbows that all 1,000 of those bottom-tier applicants make.
And you know that by definition, they are bottom-tier.
Oh, absolutely.
I don't know what pool they're drawing from anymore.
But so let's say in the 10 months it takes you to get those officers, you know, the background check, which costs tens of thousands of dollars per.
Okay, you get those thousand.
And it about 10 to 15 percent of all police academies fail out of the academy for behavior, for failing tests, for just can't do the physical.
I mean, a myriad of reasons.
Yeah.
So in the 10 months that it takes you to get this 1,000-person academy, and if you're in New Yorker, you're like, wow, 1,000 new cops.
Well, in the background, you just lost 3,160.
So you're 2,160 down by the time you put 1,000 new ones out.
And that's assuming they all pass.
It's absurd.
The attrition rate cannot be slowed.
Well, but that 1,000, you said the academy doesn't take a full year.
So if now, does a single class in New York City have 1,000 in it?
Or is that so?
The accumulated total for a single year is 1,000 new cops.
Yeah, this is a single academy.
And God, I had 125 people in my academy.
I don't know how they managed it.
A thousand?
How do you break that out?
Where do you think it's going to be?
But the training doesn't take a full year.
So if you, so theoretically, if it takes a half a year, then you can add 2,000 officers to the force in a year, right?
Well, the academy is six months, and then the field training program is four.
So it's a total of 10 to get these from hiring out on the street on probation.
Right.
Okay.
So even if you ran two 1,000-person academies concurrently, you're still going to be a thousand out based on the current retirements.
And it's just, it's ramping up.
And now everyone is waiting with bated breath to see what their new mayor does.
And he's kept on this, Jessica Tish is the commissioner who has never once a day in her life worn a police uniform or worked a beat.
Well, wait, doesn't she wear a uniform when she's on TV?
She does now, but she was never a police officer.
She was never a police officer.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Yeah, what was she doing before?
She worked at the Counterterrorism Bureau as a civilian specialist.
She was the Deputy Commissioner of Information Technology.
I have no idea what that is.
Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.
Your guesses is going to be.
What are her qualifications?
She's a woman and a black and a lesbian, or what else does she know how to do?
She's a blonde woman, and she probably is going to do what she is told.
So, I mean, a lot of people need to remember that police chiefs are appointed by the mayor and they are at will.
They can be dismissed on day two.
And county sheriffs are elected officials.
They are emboldened only to their or endeared only to their constituents.
Well, this Tish, wasn't Tish the previous police?
She's not new, so it's not as though she's a brand new hire for this, right?
Right.
Right.
She was a, I believe she was an interim because they had a sex for overtime scandal that shook things up over there for a while.
And I'm not exactly certain how she rose to these lofty heights, but it certainly wasn't, she didn't work her way up from a flat foot walking the streets of Brooklyn to be this gritty.
I know what you guys are going through because I've done it myself type chief.
Oh, dear.
Well, now, the fact is, if being a cop in New York City, you tell me it's also badly paid compared to other departments.
That sounds incredible to me.
You'd think you'd pay a lot of money to put up with all the rigors of New York City, but they're poorly paid, are they?
The starting salary is around $60,000 in New York City.
I don't think you could live in a cardboard box for $60,000 in New York City.
And then after five and a half years, they say, oh, you could earn up to $120,000 which is still peanuts living in New York City.
And what they're trying to do is they're saying, okay, if we're going to pay into these people's pension, we don't want to pay them handsomely only to have them leave after they're vested and then owe them forever.
It's that lower pay has to make sure it's the last attempt to get people that want to do the job for the right reasons.
I mean, it's like that kid.
I can't believe they pay us to do this.
I never knew how much I was going to be paid when I was hired.
I never paid attention to it.
I said, I want to be a police officer and that's going to be me.
And then I went, wow, they pay us to do it.
I was the same way.
But if they're paying them $60,000 in poor pay, overworked conditions, lowered standards, and over-the-top violent crime nonstop every day breeds corruption.
I mean, it's just corruption.
How does violent crime breed corruption?
Well, if you're out there on the streets, you're dealing with the worst of the worst, these drug dealers, robbers, you're managing informants, you're only making $60,000.
You're like, well, I can barely make rent a month.
Oh, I see.
I see.
So it's a real temptation to be on the take from these guys who are flashing big rolls of $100 bills.
Being overworked and underpaid in a violent society breeds corruption.
And they are, I can't even imagine.
I mean, there's movies about it.
I can't even imagine what's going on there now.
I mean, a sex for overtime.
I'm looking at this going, okay, I was a police officer for 30 years.
I'm like, how does that thought even enter your mind?
And how do you just delve out this overtime?
Wait, so what was the deal?
So a girl who wanted overtime would offer herself to the guy who's in charge.
And she gets rewarded by overtime.
Close.
The male, high-ranking, the most high-ranking uniformed officer said, I want sex from you.
I'll give you money if you let me.
So it's the opposite.
She wasn't looking for money.
He was looking for sex.
And she said, well, I might as well make some money on it.
And she made like $200,000 in this sex overtime sex.
Yes, I remember these astonishing numbers, but they're not enough hours in the week, are they?
So she was just given overtime pay for doing something else.
Which is funny because she was a, I believe she was a lieutenant.
How is a lieutenant going to earn overtime?
You know, once you get promoted past sergeant, there is no overtime, your salary.
So I don't know.
I mean, they may be different.
Last year, they had 55 New York City police officers of all varying ranks making over $100,000 in overtime alone.
So you had cops making $250,000, $270,000 a year by just scamming the system and working 1,100 hours extra.
I mean, and that happens in every agency, every size, but their overtime is so out of control.
I believe they're allotted for $538 million.
New York, New Year's Eve alone is an all-hands-on-deck type event.
That's going to cost them $10 million right there.
$10 million in overtime.
So I mean, they spent $1.1 billion on overtime last year, which was, I think, $400 to $500 million over their budget.
So that money comes from somewhere.
Yes, it sure does.
But now, what would be the sensible way to reduce overtime?
Well, how do you avoid it?
I mean, s say say you've got New Year's Eve and everybody needs to be out there to make sure that the people in New York aren't shooting each other.
So how do you avoid spending overtimes?
That means somebody's, well, how would you avoid having to spend all that overtime if you were a sensible police officer?
A police department.
You can't.
Oh, and that's the concern.
You have to have a certain amount of people staffing a borough in New York, right?
That's just for the lack of, for just, you know, I don't know what their numbers are.
Let's say I have to have 50 patrol officers working in this borough.
That's what's been deemed to be the mandatory minimum.
That's the phrasing.
And they have a union, right?
So the union says, hey, we're not going to respond to calls if you don't give us enough personnel for our safety.
That's what the union gets into.
And so if they say, oh, we have a stabbing and there's only one unit clear, that stabbing is going to sit until there's a second unit clear because you can't send one officer to in-progress or a violent call like that.
You got to send two.
Right.
So you won't have enough officers.
You know, people are going to call in sick.
You don't have enough.
You're just the pot to pull from the cupboard is bare.
So you have to pull people in on overtime.
You have to say, hey, here's 10 hours of overtime for your shift.
Come help me get my staffing to the minimum levels to function.
And so it's so bad that NYPD is going to put out 600, I believe, academy recruits on the streets.
All right, you haven't quite graduated yet, or you're a brand new rookie, but we need you out here.
And you got somebody that is either brand spanking new to the job or has not even finished the academy and you dump them into where at least a million people are going to congregate.
You're talking about New Year's Eve.
Right.
I mean, I've put together major events, major protests.
You would not believe what it costs at a mid-major agency like I was at at New York PD.
I mean, New Year's Eve alone is going to cost them 10 million in overtime alone.
And imagine if one event cooks off, if one lone wolf, everyone's going to, it's just, it would be mass hysteria.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it does seem to me that for something like New Year's Eve, you know, you're going to have to have basically everybody on the force working.
It seems to me that if you, there must be some way to plan it so that some people had been off the week before or the month or something so that you could for this one one event, New Year's Eve, that you can plan for well in advance, you could do it without overtime.
Is that just physically or financially impossible?
It's impossible to have everybody on a regular day of work on New Year's Eve.
And don't forget it's holiday pay.
Okay, so that's double.
Thanks to the unions.
Right.
And so you would think, okay, yeah, let's staff this this way and that way and make sure, but it's all hand, they're canceling leave.
They're saying everybody that has a pulse needs to be on the street on New Year's Eve because it's going to be this massive crowd.
We're going to have to use dump trucks and concrete barriers to block off the streets so we don't get run into.
And we have to have every canine out sniffing for bombs.
And I mean, almost every single New York police officer, detective and chief down, is going to be out walking around on New Year's Eve.
And you just can't.
Just to give you an example, like when I was having these protests, I would need about 50 to 100 officers.
And normally the rule for a police officer is anything over four hours of overtime.
Yep, you're taking it.
It doesn't matter what it is.
Okay.
So if you're offering these 10 to 12 hour overtime shifts and people are going, no, I don't want it.
Those protests are brutal.
That's bad.
Okay.
Because overtime, cops will do just about anything for overtime.
But I was ordering people in.
And so New York PD is canceling leave.
It's mandatory.
Get your butt in here, which is destroys morale.
I mean, some of those people have just finished their 10-hour shift for the day.
And they're going to double them back and work overtime.
I mean, you want to talk about it.
But they're going to pay.
But they're going to pay them quite handsomely for this overall.
Oh, for sure.
Yes.
Well, this sounds like a problem that has nothing to do with either New York City or policing black people or the new mayor coming in.
This is an inherent problem to policing that the country has not yet figured out how to solve.
And once you've vilified police officers, we listen.
We are very testy, very finicky, very grudge-holding people.
You tell us we're the problem.
We're going to leave.
And if you're 1,700 down now or 1,300 and you have 1,700 that can leave, and the rumor, it's just a rumor that 5,000 may quit on New Year's Day.
I mean, I find that hard to believe, just as you do.
But if even a fraction of those people quit, you know, leave the profession.
And when we say quit, very few people say, I don't want to be a cop anymore.
I'm going to go sell insurance.
That's very rare.
What they're doing is they're saying, okay, I'm vested in the New York State pension system.
I'm going to leave New York PD.
I'm going to go to upstate New York.
I don't know any cities upstate.
Let's just say Albany.
I'm going to go there.
I'll take a significant pay cut, but I won't be ground to the bone and under the thumb of a mayor who has expressly stated how much he hates police officers and wants to defund us.
And he's left the last vestige of what we recognize as New York police, this female who's never worked a day on the street in her life.
If he's leaving her in, I think just as a, it's a little bit of a carrot, a little bit of a carrot, and then it's going to be the stick.
He's going to put somebody else in.
He can pick whoever he wants.
I mean, she's a perfect example.
He can pick somebody, you know, an accountant, you know, from wherever he wants and say, all right, you're my police chief now.
What do I got to do?
Well, you have to run a police department, but I've never been a cop.
That doesn't matter.
And nothing destroys cops' morale more than that.
I mean, they got to follow this person who's never walked a single day in their shoes.
Well, now, the fact that Mamdani gets sworn in January 1st, my guess, or I believe that's when it happens.
Yes.
My guess is, my guess is that people are going to wait around a little bit.
They're not going to immediately, those 1,700 people, they're not all going to turn in their papers and say bye-bye.
For one reason, if all 1,700, now, I gather in order to protect their pension, they need to stay in the state of New York.
Does that help?
Well, if you're vested, your pension is not going to go anywhere.
But if you want to, I mean, when I changed states, you know, that I lost all that time served.
I had to, you know, redo my time served started over.
Thankfully, I was young enough.
But if they stay within the state, it's just plug and play.
That's the okay.
Well, then all these 1,700 guys, if they're going to look for some other job within state, are you telling me that they won't have any difficulty finding those jobs?
And maybe because suddenly you've got 1,700 experienced New York City PD guys all looking for the same jobs, right?
Or in Albany and everywhere else, Troy and Schenectady, are they still all hurting for job for police officers?
They're going to say, hey, please come.
Absolutely.
And they're going to say, okay, look at this.
I get this 20-year experienced New York PD homicide detective that'll come work patrol for me for $50,000.
Come on.
Right.
I mean, it's so bad.
Even Texas is saying, Hey, NYPD, we saw who your mayor is.
Come on over.
This is what we offer.
Right.
And that's a completely different ball of wax.
That's the rule I always found was anywhere from seven to nine years is where you can say, okay, I'm willing to change states and start over.
But once you've done 10 in a police like a place like New York where it's 20 now, you're pretty much halfway done and you'd be loath to leave 20 and up.
That means in 20 years, you're fully vested.
Right.
Yeah, 20 now since the lingo, sorry.
But yeah, so if you've done 10, you wouldn't want to go, I'm going to go work in North Dakota because then you'd be starting all over.
I mean, your pension would say, it would sit there in New York, but you wouldn't be able to draw it until you're, I think it's into your 60s.
That money stays, but then you'd be starting over.
You'd have to do another 20 somewhere else.
I see, I see, right, right.
So there are incentives to stay within the state, but if you don't have, well, but there are other people who can afford, if they haven't been that long, they can afford to go to Texas and start all over.
Right.
Which is what I did.
Yes, I see.
I see.
You get vested and then you can move.
So then you'll have New York's, New York, NYPD will owe you for the rest of your life at some point, right?
When you get to a certain age.
Then what will Mamdani have to do in order to keep swarms of officers from buggering off?
So here's what I think is going to happen.
Okay.
He's leaving the chief in there because he knows that if he pulled that chief out of the right way, everybody would say, whoa.
He doesn't want to give them the chance to see who he's planning on putting in yet.
Oh, I see.
So you think he's going to hold on to her for now and then he's going to find his rainbow lesbian one-legged African or something.
Right, right.
What he's trying to do is saying, oh, look, I know I was defunding the police before, but I take it all back.
Look, I'm even going to leave this chief.
You know, here's my peace offering to you.
Look, guys, don't leave.
And then the second that there is this controversial plague 24-7, 365 use of force of NYPD on the innocent, unarmed poor was just minding his own business, black man, the world is going to explode.
And this Bandami guy is going to say, oh, fine, here it is.
Here is my hide to hang on the fence.
Here is the beginning of my legacy.
Boom, indict him, indict her, indict him.
And all these indictments that the New York PD is going to go, okay, we knew it.
We just wanted to see how you would react.
Goodbye.
So they're waiting for some telltale action on his part that the ordinary police officer is going to think is outrageous.
There's two things we look for.
We look for that.
How is this mayor going to react when questionable things happen?
And the police chief, if the mayor says, hey, police chief, you're going to condemn this, regardless of what the chief thinks, right?
The police chief does the mayor's bidding.
There's no way around it.
And we want to see if somebody we know and respect, the veteran officer, says, hey, guys, I came up here to Troy.
And I do like three or four calls a day.
There's no mandatory overtime.
There's no protest.
The people up here love us.
It's great.
As soon as 35,000 officers, we are high school with guns is the joke.
Police department.
It's the politics and the bickering and rumor mill.
We are notorious.
Once that word gets out, everybody will go, well, if he did it, man, he was the greatest here at New York.
If he did it and he's loving his life, I'm going to do it too.
And that's all it takes.
Well, that makes you wonder why they haven't all left already.
Right?
It's, I mean, it's.
Why are they still there?
It's because you're in that.
I think a lot of them are in that no man's land that they've done 10 to 12.
And, like, well, if I can just stick it out for another eight, if I can just hide under a tree, do zero proactive policing, which that's gone.
If I can just sit under a tree and not make any traffic stops, not make any pedestrian stops, just do the bare minimum, right?
I'll handle my three or four stabbings and two shootings per shift, 40 hours a week, and then my mandatory 20 to 30 extra hours that I'm ordered to stay over, right?
Because there's not enough people.
If I can just tough that out for eight more years, I'm out of here.
Well, that grinds you down to a nub.
I mean, it just destroys you physically and mentally.
And that's what's coming.
I mean, it's just they're so overworked.
The crime that they have there, it's just, I mean, if some of the people where I live had any idea, I've been to New York several times.
The second the sun goes down in that city, you better watch out.
You can feel it.
And if officers are wading into that voluntarily, you could you can only last so long.
You can't do 25 years of that.
You can't.
Well, so your prediction is that Mamdani will simply accelerate a defection process that's been going on for some time.
He'll just cause the stampede.
And then there's no greater recruiting tool than disgruntled former police officers.
And Uncle Mike, I want to be a police officer.
Kid, you're an idiot if you become a cop.
There is no stronger anti-recruiting tool than that.
I see all of these police officers.
Well, police officers have traditionally been father and son, have they not?
Or at least cousin and uncle, and that kind of thing.
Especially Newark PD.
I mean, the earliest, almost everybody was a legacy.
Right?
And now, if you're if your nephew just turned 21 and he wants to be a New York City cop and you've retired and you've seen all your all these officers ambushed, these sex scandals, these people that are getting promoted that never even should have been cops in the first place, while very high-qualified, very upstanding, hard-working cops are passed over for promotion and specialty assignments.
You don't want your nephew to go through that.
You want your nephew to get killed.
And if your nephew insists, you go, hey, why don't you do this?
Listen to my advice here.
Go up, go work, you know, Ithaca.
Go work up there.
It's going to be cold.
It's going to be windy, but you're not going to get attacked.
And you're not going to have a socialist, Muslim, cop-hating mayor who is controlling whatever chief he wants by puppet strings to just wait, waiting to pounce on any minor misstep that you make so that you can be indicted or lose your job.
That's the first one of those that he does, that's going to determine, that'll be the temp.
That'll be the canary.
Well, tell me something.
Mandami himself must know perfectly well that without police officers, that place just becomes chaos, unlivable, absolutely unlivable.
He must know he needs police officers, even though he's defund the police.
And once it's their responsibility, they have got to have some sort of realization that they have to have a police force.
And so that isn't.
Go ahead.
Yes.
Sorry.
So isn't he going to at least think in terms of maintaining a city that isn't just descending into constant warfare?
So here's how police officers are.
Like, hey, we're out here doing it.
We're telling you it's bad.
And they say, oh, no, we're going to defund and we're going to indict you.
And then the cops go, hey, you need to stop treating us like this.
We're going to leave.
It's bad.
If you get rid of us, we're going to, the city's going to go down.
And it's time after time, you see these, you know, these type of blue mayors, right?
Just say, no, it's not that.
It's the police are the problem.
The second the city goes down, like you just said, here's what cops do: they fold their arms and go, told you.
And we are so, we're, we're very vindictive people.
I'm not going to lie.
We're going to say, oh, you wanted to tell me I was the bad guy?
You wanted to pretend that what I was telling you wasn't the truth?
Okay.
Oh, you want me back now, huh?
Oh, you called me racist, but now what?
Suddenly I'm unracist?
No, that's not going to work.
And that is contagious.
Once an old, you know, like a 25-year-old flatfoot New York cop folds his arms and says, Don't you answer that call, kid?
That's who the young cops, you know, hold on, hang on to.
They say, oh, yeah, I'm just going to ignore that call.
I'm going to say I'm unavailable.
We will make him eat his words at the expense of the safety of the city and its citizens.
I mean, that's just the hard fact.
It'll get to that point that the cops will say, that an experienced officer is going to say to a rookie, don't bother to answer that call.
And he's doubling down on the whole civilian mental health response teams.
I don't know if you're familiar with that.
Yes, yes.
Oh, I've heard about that.
That is, and let me tell you, let's pretend you hit the streets, Mr. Taylor, and you of New York City.
And I say, citizen officer or citizen violence interruptor Taylor, please respond to 1234 Fifth Street.
There's a naked black man who's having a mental episode.
We need you to go de-escalate and get him the proper resource.
Are you going to go?
Well, if that's my job, I suppose I am.
Okay.
Am I unarmed?
Do I have rest powers?
Completely unarmed.
They're total civilians.
They have no rest powers.
And so you know what's going to happen?
The cops are going to hear those calls go out and they're going to sit by a tree and go, and they're going to laugh on it.
Have fun.
And those people will say, forget that.
And they're going to quit.
Right?
And then I think after a couple of those, yes, they are going to quit.
I'm telling you right now, the misconception that the mental health calls are easily one of the most common calls in law enforcement.
It's hands down what we're trained the most on, how to respond to and de-escalate mental health episodes.
The second one of those people says, this guy, this big giant black guy was having a quote-unquote mental episode and stabbed two of our people to death.
Everyone's going to go, goodbye.
It doesn't matter how idiotic his plan is.
It's been tried all over the country.
It's just quietly being, never mind, that was a bad idea.
And he's doubling down on it.
Oh, is that part of the plan with him?
Oh, you're going to have these, okay, you're going to have these social workers.
No harms, no rest powers.
Do they even have radio contact with headquarters?
Who knows?
He wants them to deal with the homeless too.
He wants police involvement removed from dealing with the homeless and dealing with a mental health episode.
90% of mental health episodes, there's going to be violence.
It's not just people saying, well, I'm really struggling with my finances and I just don't feel right in the head.
Could you please get me some help?
Certainly, Mr. New Yorker.
That's not how it works.
You go into this apartment where there's no furniture.
There's holes punched into the wall.
There's no bottom sheet on the mattress.
The heat's turned up to 105.
And there's a naked man screaming that he's seeing monsters in his eyes.
He's got a butcher knife.
Okay, now we're here to help, sir.
We are not the police.
We're here to help you get mental health.
I mean, it's absurd.
And the cops are snickering going, oh, please do it, please.
Because we hate those calls, you know?
And we're going to have to go.
We'll gather around and go, okay, let's listen.
Let's listen.
And then they'll, they'll, okay, civilian team on scene.
And help, help over the, over the radio.
And the police are going to be going, laughing.
And the mayor is going to go, hmm.
I either have to admit that I need the police to deal with mental health stuff or just let my people keep getting killed.
That Absolutely absurd.
They'll all resign, presumably.
They will.
I promise you they will.
I mean, the violence interrupts in what is it, Cleveland, they're getting in shootings and dealing drugs and they're raping on duty while they're these violence interruptors.
That's going to work out real well.
And if the background checks for New York cops is at rock bottom, what do you think those background checks could be like?
Well, isn't it?
It's my understanding to these so-called violence interrupters are often guys who were violent themselves.
Right.
They've got some sort of hood background and they're supposed to have street credibility and they're supposed to swagger into a shootout or something and say, hey, bro, cut that out or something.
Hey, man, we're talking about de-escalate.
Yes, yes.
Oh, de-escalate.
That's how they do it.
Here's another one.
One of his other key plans.
It's deal breaker.
So officers get in trouble.
They get a complaint.
Let's say they, I don't know, let's just say a bad demeanor.
Let's go.
They use excessive force, a bad one.
Okay.
Okay.
Mamdani wants to take away the ultimate say, the final signature on any disciplinary action is the chief of police.
He wants to take the entire disciplinary process out of the hands of the chain of command of the officer and put it into a civilian disciplinary board.
Really?
For people who have no nothing, no idea about anything.
Correct.
And who do you think he's going to put in there?
Oh, my name is Laquisia Jackson.
I was a BLM supporter.
But I'm an Antifa general.
I mean, it's the cops are going to go, wait a minute.
So the whole world is out to get me.
I'm going to get at least two complaints a week, which ruin my inner peace.
And my fate, the fate of my career and my livelihood is going to be in the hands of this five-person panel that hates me.
No thanks.
That is, if he implements that, you want to talk about accelerating it.
The first person that has some legitimate discipline that would, you know, that would, you know, if I were handling it, it would be a 40-hour suspension.
And it's in the hands of a civilian board, they can say, terminate him.
Can you imagine?
Somebody that has no idea of what you deal with every day and hates you is in charge of the livelihood on that's on the law enforcement end.
We're not even talking about the civilians out there that are, you know, I'm going to have your job.
I'm going to have your bait every day.
It's not survivable.
You know, all of this seems so obvious.
And Mamdani, so far as I can tell, is not a completely stupid man.
And as you say, this has already been tried before, and it has failed.
And I have a, I don't know any of the details about it.
I just remember reading about it.
But Asheville, North Carolina, back in the, that's full of hits, sort of this hippie mountain town in North Carolina, cutesy little place, boutiques and restaurants.
And they, of course, had a police force.
Well, when the BLM madness just swept the country, they were part of this idiocy that said, oh, police, the problem.
We just get rid of the police.
Well, the obvious things happened, but the people of Asheville were smart enough to realize, well, gosh, we made a mistake.
So they went back to hiring the police.
And some of the guys who'd been fired, they came back.
So in some respects, it's self-correcting.
Now, even if eventually it would become self-correcting, a place like New York City, as you say, the scale is so huge.
Correct.
But it would seem to me that somebody like Mamdaddy and even some of the people around him must realize that they have got a potential catastrophe in their hands if they do all the utterly screwball things you're suggesting they're liable to do.
Maybe not, I guess.
And we can't, we'd be here all day if we wanted to take the fork in the road where he's, you know, if the landlord doesn't fix the property or the fixed rental rent rates and all that.
And if you don't, we're going to seize your property.
Police are paid via the tax base.
Okay.
If people say, oh, you're going to take my property, well, goodbye.
And, you know, and we could sit here and say, oh, the tax base is the tax base that.
But if you vilify them too, if you start taking their property, I mean, it's the same thing as with police.
The second you hang my hide on the fence for using what I felt was appropriate force.
If you're a landlord and you get your building seized by the government, by the local government, because you didn't give them all the things they had grown accustomed to, presumably.
That's very overt nod to socialism.
And if you're a property owner, aren't you going, whoa, if that's how it's going to be, goodbye, right?
Well, apparently there are a lot of pretty well-heeled New Yorkers who are trying to figure out, well, how much time do I have to live outside the city in order not to be a taxpayer in the city of New York and the state of New York?
And that's all going to cut into their revenue.
And if the hoodlums start running wild, as you predict, then ordinary people are going to say, time for me to bug her off.
She's not the police officers.
And I guess it's all in that sense as well.
Officers leaving, the tax base shrinking, everything going to, I'm just stirred with a spoon, and there's no way out.
I think I read that 800,000 New York residents have fled the state in a year.
This is New York City or New York?
It's in New York City proper.
Yeah.
I see.
It's 800,000.
Let's see.
New York has seen a significant population loss since 2020.
Wonder why, 2020.
That seems to be the magic year, right?
So over half a million residents by 2024.
And there's 350,000 left in 2022.
I read that there's about 800,000 or 500,000 to 800,000 getting ready to leave now.
And it's just, it's a sinking ship.
And then once the tax, like you said, the tax base and the people who wanted to be hardworking citizens and wanted to get up and go to work every day who are getting set ablaze on the on the subway and thrown in front of the tracks in the subway and then hit with hit in the face with a stick with a nail on it and conked over the head.
I mean, just there's hundreds of these stories.
You say, I could live in peace somewhere else.
Well, it was nice while it lasted.
See ya.
You know, I understand that some of the industries that are supposed to have been the heart throb, the heartbeat of New York City, the finance industry, for example, a lot of those people have left.
You don't have to be on Wall Street to be working in Wall Street.
You don't have to be there to be swinging these slick deals that make these people into billionaires.
So all of that can just go across the river, go out of state.
Well, we will have to see, Officer John.
I can't argue myself into believing that you're wrong.
We've known each other quite a while, and I'm rarely wrong, unfortunately.
This is what I don't want to be wrong about.
I mean, just here's not to get off too far.
I know we're running out of time, but the Chicago mayor, Mr. Brandon Johnson, he just went out.
I don't know if it was social media or how he announced it, but he said, oh, all teenagers come down to the New York, to the New Year's Eve celebration.
Teens, come down to the New York City.
That's inciting a riot.
I mean, that's going to, do you think anything similar is going to happen in New York?
They're going, oh, we got a new mayor.
We've got a police chief or a police department that's going to be waiting with bated breath to see how he reacts.
This is the perfect time to go crazy.
It's going to get hot.
It's coming.
Okay.
Well, usually I'm not paying much attention to New York City on New Year's Eve, but maybe I should.
Of course, it might not happen New Year's Eve.
It could happen Year's Day or it could even wait until, as you say, the first time the mayor turns some disciplinary case over to a bunch of cop-hating African Americans, then I would think that would really just trigger a huge exodus.
Even the ones who are going to have to start over in another state, they're just not going to be able to stomach being a cop in New York City.
Who is going to be the canary in the coal mine?
And how long will this vestige of the old NYPD, the woman that never once wore a uniform?
But anyway, that's kind of what is per their union.
That's kind of what's holding them together: is oh, well, if he left her in, so maybe he'll just, maybe it's business as usual.
That's a red herring.
That's him saying, oh, look, look over here.
I'm just, everything's fine.
Of course, I'm not going to do anything to the police department.
I'm keeping your chief.
Look at this.
And thinking that that's somehow going to assuage all of these concerns when it's not.
It's like you said, the very first hide that he hangs on the fence, say, look at this, we will not tolerate this.
And New York PD, everyone's going to go, oh, I do that every day.
Goodbye.
Well, on that note, dear me.
Well, we'll keep an eye on it.
And yes, you are a knowledgeable, experienced, and clear-sighted guy.
So I, you know, I like New York City.
I've been there.
I used to love it.
It's all sorts of exciting things are going on there.
But and I would hate to see it just sink into the Hudson River, but it looks like that could happen.
The whole place burned down.
Well, we hope it doesn't happen.
I was sitting in a bar where there's wishbones that were left behind by World War I soldiers as they shipped out.
And I was drinking a beer at a table that Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt once imbibed.
I mean, what a magnificent city.
And it's just, it's going to be razed to the ground.
And I just said it might be burned down.
Well, that might not work out so well because I understand the new fire department chief has never been a firewoman.
So yet another Mamdani contribution to the ultimate destruction of what was once a great city.
Well, we'll see.
We'll see.
Well, Officer John, always a pleasure to have you on.
Always, I tend to think that after a conversation with you, I am a sadder but wiser man.
I hate to say, I think I'm becoming, I've officially become a nihilist, but I mean, the truth hurts, I suppose.
I mean, someday you and I will get together and talk about something good.
I was reading Shakespearean sonnets last night because those are your favorites.
So I'm trying to do something positive, but this one is, it's not going to end well.
I don't think it's going to end like a Shakespearean sonnet.
No.
Okay.
Well, thanks very much.
Always a pleasure.
And we'll get together, I'm sure, over the new year at some point.
Thank you very much.
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