Kash's Corner - Kash’s Corner: The Deadly Consequences of Defunding the Police and No Cash Bail

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Nov. 10, 2021 - Kash's Corner

27:09

Kash’s Corner: The Deadly Consequences of Defunding the Police and No Cash Bail

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	Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Cash's Corner.
	Hey An, it's great to be back with you.
	Cash, let's put on your public defender or public prosecutor hat or you know, from some time ago here.
	But today let's talk a little bit about you know basically crime across major US cities.
	There's been a significant uptick, especially in murder rate.
	Uh I also saw aggravated assault is a big one in the US.
	I saw some data that actually compared the US to Canada, and those are the two areas where there's a significant update in the US, but nothing comparable in Canada, interestingly.
	Very interesting, actually.
	And then there's been some work done that basically correlates this a bit with police budget cuts and so forth.
	So you know that let's let's open this up.
	I think crime, unfortunately, um significantly increased over the last one to two years.
	And when you have national calls to action or calls to change in policy, as we did as a result of the death of George Floyd, then what you I think you have is an overreach and an overcompensation to hit a political narrative and not actually address the issue.
	So for example, um, this call to defund the police.
	I mean, if you just said that alone by itself three years ago, people would have called you a lunatic.
	You cannot defund police officers.
	There's no society that can succeed without law enforcement.
	So that concept alone is a problem.
	But then you added two more layers to that.
	You added these communities that saw these riots occur throughout America who wanted to defund the police and they wanted to do all cash reform bail.
	And basically what that means is if you're arrested for a violent crime, usually you're detained until your court date.
	What they did in many of these cities that have seen an uptick in crime is they allowed those individuals arrested to be released immediately back into the street.
	And what we saw was those individuals were then committing even more crimes.
	And three, if you take um, and three, if you take the uh defunding the police, the no-cash bonds, and you actually focus on reducing criminal sentencing for those who have committed serious crimes,
	then I think you have the unfortunate trifecta of c of crime skyrocketing, at least in terms of serious crimes like murders, aggravated assaults, crimes involving weapons, guns, things like that, and also the narco trafficking trade will increase as a direct result.
	How how does that work?
	How does the narc what is that you know, this intersection point of the case?
	Sure, absolutely.
	Unfortunately, you know, the narco trafficking industry is a criminal industry driven by criminals.
	And the more of them that are out there to deal in narcotics and deal in weapons, the more bodies you have on the streets to do so, then the more increased manpower you have to distribute drugs, to distribute weapons, to distribute money.
	It's a pretty simple infrastructure that requires people.
	And if there's more criminals on the streets to deliver the product, then that crime is going to go up as well because the narco traffickers themselves are going to see more avenues and outlets to push their products through the American streets.
	So you know, another piece of this is, and this is something you know, we we've I've had guests on the show on American thought leaders on before, uh, talking about this specifically is the impact of actual defunding.
	I mean, I I have statistics here, you know, Austin had like a 30% budget cut to police, New York 15%, Minneapolis 15%.
	I mean, there's a whole there's a whole suite of of cities that have that have experienced that.
	And that there's also this sort of element that uh when you include some of the other things that you just mentioned of police starting to actually behave differently in terms of how they deal with uh uh people they're uh I guess alleged criminals or eventual criminals.
	Yeah.
	No, that's a that's a great point.
	My friends in law enforcement in the NYPD, in federal agencies who are like the FBI, are more timid today than they were two years ago to arrest someone or to perform their duties because they don't feel that they have the backing of their local leadership or their local governments, their mayors, their governors, and what have you to protect police action when it's lawful.
	I think when the police perform against the law or they themselves break the law, then there needs to be serious consequences for those individuals all day long.
	But you cannot hold an entire police department accountable for the actions of a very small few.
	I still believe the mass quantity of police officers and law enforcement individuals in this country are doing the job correctly.
	I do not think there is systemic racism.
	And that's another issue.
	That's another political issue that was injected into the law enforcement atmosphere by just saying there was systemic racism in American law enforcement.
	No, it's definitely not perfect, but it's not systemic, not in my decades-long experience doing uh law enforcement.
	Certainly, you know, the statistics when it comes to, for example, you know, gun deaths of white this is what's usually sort of suggested when there's a white police officer.
	There's this kind of, you know, it's even been suggested that there's a genocide against uh, you know, blacks by white police officers, and the data just doesn't seem to bear that out whatsoever.
	No, the data bears out uh the exact opposite.
	Take Chicago, for instance, okay.
	Chicago last weekend alone, 52 gun crimes.
	And I don't mean carrying a gun, I mean 52 discharges of a firearm in the city of Chicago in 48 hours.
	That is insane.
	That's more than one an hour.
	And the mayor said that the reason for the spike in crime, literally, COVID.
	What she forgot to take into account was that they forced Chicago to defund the police.
	They forced they changed the policies in the judicial system to have cash bail, so criminals that are arrested are immediately released back into the community to commit more crimes.
	And then the third piece of it is also the number of illegal aliens who are committing crimes are now allowed back into the community, and we see it in major cities all over the w country to commit more crimes.
	So I believe not COVID and people coming out of a COVID coma as they were calling it, but rather these law enforcement specific policy decisions are impacting crime.
	And Chicago is unfortunately the best example that we have.
	New York is a close second, Minneapolis not too far behind, Portland and Los Angeles right behind them.
	Well, let's talk about actually let's talk about Portland a little bit, because Portland is this example of, you know, sort of skyrocketing crime, I think in general.
	Um, like I I've seen different estimates, but like 500%, a thousand percent, I don't, um, of of how that looks.
	And there's, you know, th there was a courthouse that's was occupied for months, you know.
	Um just kind of a and you know, we've gotten all sorts of reports of a general state of lawlessness there.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It's I mean, just step back and for those of you that are listening to this, think about this.
	A courthouse in the United States of America in 2020 was taken over by criminals.
	That's what happens in banana republics.
	That's not what happens in America.
	And the fact that it did happen should show people that lawlessness and poor policy decisions have led to real consequences in major cities across America.
	And Portland was basically an an occupied area.
	I mean, they literally had sections of the street that law enforcement were not allowed to go on and that people were just camped out in.
	And then they took over an entire courthouse and then they burned the courthouse.
	You cannot expect a society to have law enforcement and crime under control when the institutions that house law enforcement are literally on fire and occupied by criminals.
	It seems like or the situation in Portland, or at least there's a kind of a different language coming from the local government now, um, in terms of how to, you know, b basically call trying to stop the criminal alleged criminal behavior and so forth.
	Yeah.
	I think well it's unfortunately it's taken too long, it's taken Over a year for them to get there, but I think they have to live in their own lawlessness and have it impact their lives personally and directly, and so they can remove themselves from the political uh falsehood they've set up and see how bad it's affecting their citizens, and then they realize, wait, we actually need police officers to patrol the streets.
	We need police officers to arrest people committing crimes, and we need the judicial system to adjudicate them on whether or not they were innocent or guilty, and then you actually need prison sentence hand it down if you are found convicted of a serious crime.
	People need to be held accountable for that.
	So often, you know, what it what I heard said uh, you know, when you describe the situation, you know, Banana Republic uh with respect to the courthouse being occupied.
	Um, you know, people have said something similar about the the breach of the Capitol on January 6th, for example.
	Yeah, and look, th that should never have happened.
	I 100% agree.
	But going back to the top of the show that we were talking about how the defense of the national institutions is sort of blended with law enforcement intelligence and evidence sharing, right?
	Why on January 6th, when it has now publicly been admitted by the FBI that they had information that there could possibly be a situation like that at the United States Capitol, why weren't the cabinet secretaries under President Trump briefed?
	Why didn't the FBI put a thousand uniformed agents around the U.S. Capitol?
	Where was the fence?
	Right?
	These are the lackings of j that led to January 6th.
	These are the mistakes, intentional or otherwise, that led to January 6th.
	And if you look at the video from January 6th, and they still won't release all of it, an entire side of the Capitol, I believe it's the South Side, was totally unmanned.
	No police officers whatsoever.
	And that's where the crowd first came in through.
	And you have to ask yourself, what happened on January 6th?
	Now look, I was chief of staff of the Department of Defense on the 6th.
	We had offered the Capitol Police and Mayor Bowser of Washington, D.C., thousands of National Guardsmen and women two days before January 6th, and they turned us down.
	So it could have been prevented.
	So could it could it have been just not not a lot of information sharing happening?
	I think it was not enough information sharing happening, and I think what people now are starting to realize is that the protecting of the U.S. Capitol on a day like January 6th is a law enforcement function.
	You cannot have the United States military descend and occupy the area around the United States Capitol.
	It's literally illegal.
	But they can assist their law enforcement partners through a request from the mayor or the governor or the Capitol Police.
	And that's what should have happened, and that's what we told them they might want to consider, but they flat out rejected it for political reasons, I believe.
	So and and to add to our discussions on the events of January 6th, when I was serving as chief of staff at the Defense Department, I had the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of the Army, who the National Guard reports to, create a written timeline that they all signed off on as to the events that unfolded 48 hours prior,
	all the way through January 6th and into the next day, so that the American public in Congress would have an actual TikTok signed off by the three most important leaders in the Defense Department as of their actions and the actions of our employees.
	And so it shows minute by minute the calls that were placed to Mayor Bowser when we went to the Capitol Police, our meeting, me and the SECDEF and the chairman meeting with the president of the United States two days before, where he authorized the use of up to 10 or 20,000 National Guardsmen and women around the country should law enforcement make that request.
	So we had that request ahead of time from the president, and that was part one of what the law requires.
	Part two is a request from local government.
	And it shows when we, the Defense Department preemptively went to local government and said, in case you guys need us, we're ready to go now, but we need your request, and they said we don't need you.
	And I think those actions have been overlooked by too many.
	And these congressional inquiries they're doing, they purposely don't want to look at what actually happened because the incident could have been prevented, should never have happened, and it was a failure of law enforcement on that day, mostly the FBI.
	And so just to to dig on this a little tiny bit because it's interesting.
	Um, what prompted you to issue such a large possible deployment of National Guard?
	Well, so the ethos in the United States military is prepare for the worst, hope for the best, right?
	Uh to put it mildly.
	So we knew from uh just the media cycle, and and I'll give you a perfect example.
	It's not like this intelligence was classified.
	Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts were all closed.
	They were all boarded up on January 6th.
	It's not like they had better information than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who's in responsible for domestic intelligence, right?
	People had an idea that something bad could happen.
	So we prepared.
	And we know it takes us days to mobilize 10,000, 20,000 National Guardsmen and Women.
	We have to pull them out of their daily lives, away from their families, dress them, rehearse them, train them, and then deploy them.
	So that's why we acted early, because we knew we couldn't do it at the call at the drop of a dime on the day of the incident.
	And that's what people are now just starting to realize that it was a law enforcement function where you could have staged federal law enforcement, the FBI, DHS, what have you, agents, and they should have built a fence around the Capitol prior to January 6th, and this event could have been avoided.
	I can't even remember exactly where this comes from to be perfectly, but I've seen it described in a number of uh in a number of publications that there was a concern about optics.
	Of course.
	And this is so the idea, just the idea of having, you know, National Guard and such numbers deployed um visually with was something that uh you know w w wasn't acceptable.
	Well, then that's and uh for me that's a political position.
	And optics have to give way, become secondary to protecting American citizens when you have information that leads you to believe they might be in danger, especially on a day like January 6th.
	And so the optics argument I I I disagree with completely because the safety of the members of Congress and the safety of the American public on a day like that have to be the priority and not what it looks like.
	And there are many ways that we could we didn't have people, we don't have them in mish with machine guns, with weapons.
	We didn't even have any of our guardsmen armed.
	We just had them in uniform with the bright yellow jackets doing traffic control.
	So there's ways to tamp it down and control the optics if that's what you want to do.
	So let's let's kind of jump back to talking about this uh you know uptick in crime, specifically the the murder rates are you know essentially I mean, it it it's just such a huge increase that it's impossible to miss if you if you absolutely yeah the murder rates for cities like Chicago,
	New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and other major cities across the U.S. are up a minimum, a minimum of 30% year over year for the last 18 months.
	And basically it's impossible to not notice, as you said.
	That's a lot more people dying in America due to criminal activity than ever before.
	And so even places like New York, which just basically finished their their primary for their mayoral candidate, right?
	And the Democratic candidate who won the primary on the Democratic side is a former police officer whose campaign was we need more law enforcement.
	That's what he ran on.
	That should tell you everything you need to know.
	The Democrat in the most populous city in the United States of America, uh coming off the heels of De Blasio's failed policies on law enforcement, ran on the opposite and said, we need to fund the police.
	We need more law enforcement because that city has seen a 55% increase in homicides.
	That's crazy and unacceptable if you're a New Yorker, and it should it should alert the rest of the nation that the policies that they were floating for political reasons have not worked.
	So but of course, these are actually local policies, right?
	You this this is interesting.
	You know, you suggested there's this kind of uh, you know, national push.
	At the Same time there's local policies that are impacted.
	Um, how does that work in your mind?
	So I think the local policies are just basically replicated the throughout the country in cities that have chosen to defund the police and they sort of just spill over into our most populous areas.
	So, like look, Los Angeles has implemented these same policies about bail and about defunding the police and about reducing criminal penalties.
	They've done that in in uh Atlanta, they've done that in Portland, they've done that in Chicago.
	They've done that.
	So when you have your most populated regions with um in the United States committing more crime than has been committed in recent history, it's going to connect across the United States, and people are going to start seeing those connections.
	It's not just a one-off.
	It's not one city in one state is seeing this explosion in crime.
	It's unfortunately across the United States.
	So before we jump into another topic, Cash, any any quick thoughts on how this can be resolved?
	Oof, I wish there were well actually I take that back.
	It's it's not a complicated fix to tamp down criminal activity.
	You have to prop up your support for law enforcement and the judicial process.
	As a former federal public defender and a federal prosecutor having been on both sides of the aisle and adjudicating that process, you cannot allow a 50% increase in homicides.
	You cannot allow an increase in narco trafficking through our streets.
	And the only way you tamp that down and reduce it is by putting law enforcement and police back on the streets to investigate and to arrest when they see criminal activity and give them the tools and resources they need so they do their jobs.
	I mean, I don't know if you saw this, but there was a whole outfit in Portland, Oregon, uh a unit of an entire police department that resigned.
	A hundred officers resigned because they are afraid that they cannot perform the duties that they signed up to do with the laws that they have been given by the local law enforcement.
	And that's just one example.
	But you can't allow that type of behavior to occur in the cities across America, and that's how you have to allow a greater exchange of evidence as well.
	And that's sort of my point from the January 6th stuff.
	If you're if you're mandating that, not mandating, or if you're you're saying that, which I am, that federal agencies should have shared some of the intelligence they had, like the FBI should have shared the intelligence they had about events leading up to January 6th, because it wasn't that hard to find.
	It was all over Twitter and the internet.
	Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks found it.
	Um they should have taken a more exhaustive approach and a more preparatory approach with DHS and called in other cabinet officials and said, this is a law enforcement function, it's our job to protect the citizens and the United States Capitol, and this is what we're doing to prepare.
	And they totally failed.
	100%.
	I mean, and I just flip it on the reverse for people who say, well, cash, why didn't the United States military do it?
	And where was the NSA and where was the CIA?
	Those are not domestic intelligence agencies.
	They don't, they weren't built and constructed to surveil uh local law enforcement matters.
	And same with the U.S. military.
	They are there to fight overseas and protect the borders of our nation.
	Um, and in a rare instance, allow the National Guard to help local law enforcement authorities.
	I think it was a total total failure on law enforcement on that day.
	And I was on the phone calls on January 4th, 5th, and 6th with the president, with the chief of staff, with the uh attorney general, with the Department of Homeland Security, and the only person missing from that, those phone calls was the director of the FBI.
	He was nowhere to be found.
	Fascinating.
	And this is reflected on this timeline that you published that the DOD published.
	Yeah, so the timeline has all the major players uh that were involved in the events leading up to January 6th.
	As I said, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman, the Secretary of the Army, DHS Secretary, President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, the Attorney General at Times was on some of the phone calls, congressional leadership, the speaker, the majority leader, the minority leader, all these individuals we were fielding calls from and engaging with constantly to make sure they're they were safe, their people were safe and their needs were being met.
	But the one person that was noticeably absent, even upon request, was Christopher Ray, the director of the FBI, when everyone on those phone calls agreed that January 6th was a law enforcement matter, not a Department of Defense matter.
	Fascinating.
	That's something something to dig into into the future.
	Yeah.
	Absolutely.
	I think it's worth looking at.
	Let briefly, you know, as we finish up, let's just talk about these, you know, basically the recent airstrikes the administration ordered against the Iran-backed militias on the Iraq-Syria border.
	Um, you know, this I I hope everyone is aware of this.
	I mean, it didn't get quite the media attention, perhaps, that that something of this significance might be.
	Yeah.
	Well, I think you're correct, it didn't.
	I was actually looking at the major media outlets uh when the reporting broke about our strikes against the Shia militia groups, and um it was not being covered by some of the major mainstream media outlets, and if it was, it was a blip at the very bottom of the web page.
	And I, having run counterterrorism for White House and having run the intelligence community under President Trump, I believe these strikes are driven by intelligence that we collect against foreign terrorists.
	I mean, make no mistake about it.
	Shia militia groups, such as the ones that were attacked, are designated foreign terrorist organizations by the United States of America.
	They are a proxy fighting force of the Iranian regime, which is the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism.
	So if the evidence showed that our troops were under threat or allies were under threat, then I totally agree with the Biden administration that these strikes were appropriate and needed to be taken.
	Now I'm outside of government, so I don't know what the intel says, but I can't imagine a world where they would have just decided to launch rockets uh into a foreign country without justification.
	Well, I mean, especially since uh, you know, the Biden administration is taking a very different uh line on Iran than the previous administration.
	I yeah, it's and the timing's interesting because Raissi was just elected the new president of Iran.
	He hasn't been sworn in yet, but Raissi is an individual who's sanctioned by the United States government and who's also more conservative than his predecessor, who's still currently Rahani, who's currently still in uh the Iranian regime.
	So maybe they were trying to get these strikes off before, and it's no secret that the Biden administration wants to rejoin the JCPOA, the Iran deal, which I totally disagree with.
	And maybe they were looking to get these strikes in before the new administration comes in, because he's made it abundantly clear that he's not going to deal with America.
	But I don't know.
	Um had does this change the situation in your mind at all?
	I think so.
	I mean, if you just look at the news, it's sort of a back and forth.
	We it we attacked them, they retaliated, you know.
	So now what's our response going to be to their retaliation and launching rockets at our service members in the area in Syria and Iraq?
	You know, there has to be a stern response.
	And of course, having been the chief of staff at DOD, you know, we conducted airstrikes against targets like this.
	We were prepared not just for the first iteration, but what would happen in case they responded?
	What would be the retaliation and what would be our response?
	And I'm sure they went through those metrics because that's what the DOD does.
	But only the commander-in-chief can give the call to do X, Y or Z. So I I firmly believe the Department of Defense is prepared and has options for the president.
	But like when like it was my job when I did it, we just presented the president with the options and our advice, and then the president makes a decision.
	So we're just gonna have to wait and see if we're gonna engage in more strikes.
	But if I can just say one thing, I think the disparate treatment that we received when we conducted airstrikes, if you recall the barrel bombs in Syria against the chemical facilities and whatnot, Congress was outraged, or certain factions of Congress were outraged that we didn't consult them or inform them ahead of time.
	I don't hear that same level of uh outrage now that President Biden has ordered the exact same style of strikes for the exact same reasons.
	And I think there needs to be questioning as to why is it okay to attack one president and not attack the next one if they're doing the exact same thing based on the exact same intelligence.
	Um and um I think unfortunately, again, shows the politicization of the national security apparatus of America, and that's just not good for us.
	So, to everybody watching, if you have any burning questions for cash, please remember to put them in the comments below if you're watching on epoch TV, of course.

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