Has Criminal Justice Reform Made Our Cities Unsafe? A Live Debate.

This episode debates whether recent criminal justice reforms have compromised urban safety, featuring expert opinions on both sides of the argument.

1. Some argue that reducing police funding and presence has led to increased crime rates and public fear.
2. Opponents of this view suggest that deeper social issues like poverty and racial injustice are the real culprits behind rising crime rates.
3. The debate highlights a division on whether more police and stricter penalties are necessary to ensure safety.
4. There's consensus on the need for balanced reforms that address both punishment and rehabilitation.
5. The discussion points to the need for nuanced policies that consider both immediate safety concerns and long-term social justice goals.

1: Introduction

Overview of the debate's context, focusing on the urgency of discussing criminal justice reform amid rising urban crime. Notable quote: Barry Weiss: "The United States locks up nearly 2 million people, representing 20% of the world's prison population."

2: Arguments For Reform

Discussion on how reforms aim to address systemic issues within the criminal justice system, emphasizing alternative approaches to incarceration. Notable quote: Lara Bazelon: "Our current DA is a centrist... Crime has dropped not only in San Francisco but in California across the board."

3: Arguments Against Reform

Arguments presented against reforms, citing increases in crime rates and public dissatisfaction as evidence of reform failure. Notable quote: Michael Schellenberger: "You need more police officers. That's a big thing that they got rid of, the progressive reforms."

4: Public and Expert Opinions

Highlights from the public and expert opinions showing diverse views on the effectiveness of criminal justice reforms. Notable quote: Camille Foster: "Criminal justice reform is not some particular fetish of the progressive left. It is a fundamental value of a free society."

5: Conclusion

Summary of the debate outcomes and reflections on the future of criminal justice reform. Notable quote: Barry Weiss: "At the end of the night, we polled them again and, well, listen, you'll see for yourself which side won."

1. Stay Informed: Follow local and national news on criminal justice issues to understand the impact of reforms in your area.
2. Engage Locally: Participate in community meetings and discussions to voice concerns and hear different perspectives on public safety and reform.
3. Support Balanced Policies: Advocate for policies that balance reform with the need for public safety, considering both alternative penalties and adequate policing.
4. Educate Others: Share information and insights on criminal justice reform to foster a more informed public discourse.
5. Vote Responsibly: Participate in elections and referendums that influence criminal justice policies, ensuring your views are represented in policy decisions.

The United States locks up nearly two million people, the highest number of prisoners for any country in the world. That represents about 20 percent of the world’s prison population, even though the U.S. makes up only around 5 percent of the global population.

It's not surprising that over the past two decades, more and more people have embraced the idea of criminal justice reform. In 2020, there were calls around the country to defund the police and divert money to programs meant to address the root causes of crime. Voters embraced reforms in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and beyond. Progressive prosecutors in many blue cities pledged to reduce sentences, stop prosecuting lower level offenses, and address police misconduct.

But crime has become, once again, a major issue for American voters. Sixty-three percent of Americans said that crime was “extremely or very serious” in the country, according to the annual Gallup survey on crime released in November. And many believe that criminal justice reform initiatives have exacerbated the problem.

That’s why The Free Press brought together four expert debaters last month in San Francisco—a city where everything from shampoo to gum is under lock and key at Walgreens—to ask: has criminal justice reform made our cities unsafe?

Arguing in the affirmative are Seneca Scott and Michael Shellenberger. Seneca is a labor leader, a community organizer, and founder of Neighbors Together Oakland. He ran for mayor of Oakland in 2022, focusing on solutions to homelessness, drug tourism, and violent crime. Michael is the founder of Public News and the best-selling author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

Arguing that, no, criminal justice reform has not made our cities unsafe are Kmele Foster and Lara Bazelon. Kmele is a commentator and co-host of the popular podcast The Fifth Column. He is a founding partner at Freethink, the award-winning digital media company. Lara is a professor at the University of San Francisco, where she holds the Barnett Chair in Trial Advocacy and directs the criminal and racial justice clinical programs. Lara is a former federal public defender and a former director of the Project for the Innocent, at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Before the debate, 87 percent of our audience said that, yes, criminal justice reform has made our cities unsafe. At the end of the night, we polled them again—and you’ll see for yourself which side won.

People

Seneca Scott, Michael Schellenberger, Lara Bazelon, Camille Foster

Companies

None

Books

"San Francisco" by Michael Schellenberger

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Speaker A
Hi.

Barry Weiss
Honestly, listeners, you're about to hear a taping of our most recent live debate in San Francisco, which was part of our America debate series, which we host in partnership with Fire. For our next live debate, we are heading to our nation's capital, Washington, DC. We will be there September 10 to debate the following proposition. Is the american dream still alive? Arguing that, yes, the american dream is very much still alive is economist Tyler Cowan and editor in chief of Reason magazine magazine Kathryn Mangu Ward. Facing off against them is New York Times writer and author David Leonhardt, as well as founding editor of Jacobin Bhaskar Sankara. These debates have been some of the most exciting things that we do. And for the San Francisco debate, the one you're about to hear, tickets sold out in less than 24 hours. So you're not going to want to miss this. And I urge you to get your tickets now. You can do that. Get tickets to the show and to the vip afterparty by heading to the fp.com events. That's the fp.com events. I can't wait to see you there. From the free press, this is honestly, I'm Barry Weiss. The United States locks up nearly 2 million people. That's the highest number of prisoners of any country in the world. And it's a number that represents 20% of the world's prison population, even though the US only makes up around 5% of the global population. So given this sky high incarceration rate, it's not surprising that over the past two decades, more and more people have embraced the idea of criminal justice reform. And 2020 was a watershed moment for this movement.

Speaker C
George Floyd, what was his crime? What was his name? George Floyd, what was his crime?

Barry Weiss
Around the country, there were calls to defund the police and to divert that money to programs meant to address the root causes of crime. Voters embraced reforms in San Francisco, but also in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and beyond. Progressive prosecutors in many blue cities pledged to reduce sentences, stop prosecuting lower level offenses, and to address police misconduct. But a lot has changed in the past few years. Crime has become once again a major issue for american voters.

Speaker A
Are you afraid to go outside in the dark, even in your own neighborhood? A new poll by Gallup shows Americans are fearing for their personal safety, and it's a 30 year high. I mean, this is not surprising. Crime is up in so many cities, so many of our communities.

Barry Weiss
63% of Americans said that crime was extremely or very serious in the country. According to the annual Gallup survey on crime released in November, and many believe that criminal justice reform initiatives have exacerbated the problem. If you live in one of the cities I mentioned, you know intimately what I'm talking about and you understand the stakes. That's why the free press recently brought together four expert debaters to talk about this subject in San Francisco. Why San Francisco?

Speaker A
Easy.

Barry Weiss
It's a city where everything from shampoo to gum is under lock and key. At Walgreens, its a city where signs hang in parked cars that read, please do not break into this car. No valuables here. It was the perfect place to ask our debaters, has criminal justice reform made our cities unsafe? Arguing for the proposition that, yes, criminal justice reform has made our cities unsafe is Seneca Scott. Seneca is a labor leader, a community organizer, and founder of neighbors together. Oakland Seneca ran for mayor of Oakland in 2022, and during his run he focused on solutions to the city's homelessness, drug tourism, and violent crime crises. Joining Seneca is Michael Schellenberger. Michael is the founder of public news and the best selling author of the book San why progressives ruin cities, which covers the very subjects that we discuss in this debate. Last time Michael and I were in San Francisco together was at Twitter headquarters, which is where we collaborated on the Twitter files. On the other side, arguing that no, criminal justice reform has not made our cities unsafe, is Camille Foster. Camille is a media entrepreneur, a commentator, and the co host of the popular podcast the fifth Column. He's also a founding partner at Freethink, an award winning digital media company. Camille also serves on the board of directors for the foundation for Individual Rights and expression. Joining Camille is Lara Bazelon. Lara is a professor at the University of San Francisco, where she holds the Barnett chair in trial advocacy and directs the criminal and racial justice clinical programs. Before that, she was a federal public defender and the director of an innocence project at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. After the break, you'll hear these four face off on the following have american cities become too soft on crime, or are deeper issues like poverty and income inequality the real problems to address and the real cause of the kind of scenes we've seen in San Francisco's streets? Is transforming the system a necessary and overdue step towards justice, or has criminal justice reform made our cities and our families unsafe? Each debater has five minutes for their opening arguments, followed by rebuttals, questions from me, and then finally closing remarks. Before the debate, a whopping 87% of our audience in San Francisco said that, yes, criminal justice reform has made our cities unsafe, and 13% voted no. At the end of the night, we polled them again and, well, listen, you'll see for yourself which side won. One last but very important thing, this debate was made possible with the generosity of an organization I really admire. It's fire, the foundation for individual rights and expression. If you care about free speech, if you believe it's worth defending, not just for people you agree with, but for people you vehemently disagree with, fire is an organization that should be on your radar. We'll be right back with Michael Schellenberger, Seneca Scott, Lara Bazelon and Camille Foster. And we'll kick it off with Shellenberger's opening statement. Stay with us.

Seneca Scott
Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the first podcast network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the hill, to this, to that. There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented law fair, debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all that every single day right here on America on trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcast. It's America on trial with Josh Hammerhead.

Michael Schellenberger
Thank you, everyone. What a pleasure to be here. Barry, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm so inspired by free press every day and what an amazing event. We all know what criminal justice reform refers to. It refers to what progressives and the radical left and the Democratic Party have been advocating for since the mid 1990s. The main goal is to reduce the prison population. The main goal is de incarceration with various sub goals, including reducing police presence, police interaction with, with people on the streets and elsewhere. But the main goal is to reduce incarceration. It starts in 1996 by George Soros donation to legalize medical marijuana. Great cause. Totally support it. I was there at the beginning in the late nineties, but then after that, Soros really leads an effort to pursue criminal justice reform. And they've achieved their goals. I mean, I'm not sure how much more there is to do. You can see overall incarceration has plummeted in the United States. A massive decline, 26% decline in both state and federal prison population between 2012 and 2022. That's during a period where the overall population of the United States increased by 9 million. So they've, I mean, the progressive and libertarian reforms, they've been implemented. You can see California has led that even before 2012, huge reductions in the prison population here in California. The result is that California now has a much lower per capita incarceration rate than. Than nationwide. So California in particular, but San Francisco as well, are really important test cases for the criminal justice reform. So let's see how it's gone. You can see in San Francisco, they've halved the overall jail population since the, really, the mid 1990s. A big part of that is just not prosecuting anybody anymore for shoplifting. All of you know that the rates of prosecution is 15%, down from around 60% around the year 2014, which is when a really crucial proposition 47 was passed that decriminalized up to $950 worth of shoplifting and hard drug use. I voted for that because I'm a bleeding heart liberal, and I support that kind of thing. But I don't think there's any question that that reduced the consequences and incentives against shoplifting. What do San Francisco residents say? I mean, I'm glad to have a lot of support in the audience, but really, you're just reflective of where San Franciscans are at. One out of four San Franciscans suffered was a victim of crime last year. 42% of those crime victims were victimized more than once. Only half of y'all, only half of people that are victims of crime in San Francisco report those crimes. That's actually high. Nationwide, it's only 40%. So all of the numbers that you might hear, you have to remember those are just the people that are reporting. And we have no idea how reporting rates have changed over the years. But you can see when you talk to the public, the public is very clear that we're in a crime crisis. 47% of the public said that think that crime had increased over the last year in the year 2060%, in the year 2010. And an incredible 70% of Americans said that crime went up over the last year. It's a huge increase. How are we doing on other metrics? What other things should we look at? A big focus has been reducing the consequences of illegal drug use and illegal drug dealing. It's been catastrophic. 112,000 deaths from drugs last year. Overdoses and poisonings, up from 20,000 in the year 2000. That's more than 50%. That's 50% more than the total people that died in Hiroshima dying every year because we refuse to require people to get drug treatment and let them die on the streets. Of course, it's worse in San Francisco. Even the New York Times has to admit it at least twice. 2.5 times more drug deaths per capita in San Francisco than elsewhere in the United States. What about homelessness. It's catastrophic. 30% increase in California and homelessness, which is, of course, illegal camping from 2010 to 2020, even as homelessness declined by 18% during that same period. What does the public say? The public says since the year 2020, it's been particularly bad. The percentage of Americans who say that they worry frequently or occasionally about being a victim of crime rose from 35% in the year 2019% to 50% last year. Was that big increase in crime? Was that because of an increase in poverty? It was not because of that. It was not because of an increase in poverty. Poverty declined over the last four years. You can see a big decrease in poverty as we saw an increase in crime. So if anybody says that it was because of increasing inequality or poverty, they don't have the data for them. What is it then that drove such a big increase in crime over the last three years? Well, it might have had something to do with this huge reduction of people in the prisons. Some amount of decarceration is good. I believe in it. People should be diverted into rehab if you can. But the progressives and libertarians, they went too far. That's all. They just went too far. They just got too far ahead of themselves. Policing is critical. Let's look at the two cities that are considered the safest. One's conservative, one's liberal. Dallas and Boston considered the safest. San Francisco, one of the least safe. What is the difference? They have more police officers. They have so many more police officers in Dallas and Boston. It's so simple. You need more police officers. That's a big thing that they got rid of, the progressive reforms. So we know that policing reduces crime without necessarily increasing incarceration. Much more to say. Thank you very much.

Barry Weiss
Thank you, Michael. Next up is Laura Basilan.

Speaker A
Good evening. As some of you may have heard, we actually recalled our progressive DA back in 2022. Progressives actually are not in charge of anything in San Francisco anymore. Our current DA is a centrist. Our mayor is a centrist. The DCCC is controlled by centrists. And since the pandemic, which started obviously in 2020 and ended several years later, crime has dropped not only in San Francisco, but in California across the board. And that actually includes retail theft and property crimes by over 30%. So while my opponents are going to spend the evening talking about how progressives and their policies encourage people to loot and to rob and to murder, it's not true. In fact, if what they were saying was true, which is that we need to return to this tough on crime era and lock more people up, then red states would be peaceful hamlets, and they're not. The states with the most violent crime are controlled by hard right conservatives. Louisiana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. Some of the blue cities that you're gonna hear my opponents rail against, including San Francisco and places like Seattle, have roughly half the murder rates of their red state counterparts. We're gonna hear a lot of discussion about rolling back criminal justice reforms and replacing them with what Mister Schellenberger calls, quote, swifter and more certain prison sentences. Again, this idea that returning to tough on crime is going to cut down on crime. But the problem with this argument is that study after study has shown that that doesn't work, that in fact, draconian laws and sentences have nothing caused crime to drop. Death penalty states have homicide rates double and triple those of non death penalty states. So much for deterrence. We've also heard a lot about defunding the police. And lack of police defunding never happened in San Francisco or for that matter, in Oakland. And in fact, every year since 2020, the police budget has gone up. San Francisco has also cracked down on drug using and drug dealing. Now, if you are caught with 5 grams or more of drugs, and to be clear, that's one teaspoon, you are not eligible for diversion. Most people face jail or prison time. Arrests and convictions have shot up. A big goal of all of this was to stop ods, to stop open air drug dealing. But in fact, overdoses shot up in 2023. They were a record high in San Francisco of 806. As you heard Barry say, this country has less than 5% of the world's population and 20% of its incarcerated population. And yet we have the highest rate of crime of any industrialized country and the highest rates of recidivism. If that isn't a radical failure, I don't know what is. The arguments that you're going to hear tonight or to enrich the prison industrial complex, but we spend too much money on it already, way too much. Most of it goes to six figure salaries for the guards and new construction, not for affordable housing, but for prisons that we don't need. The legislative analyst's office for. The governor has said that we could safely close four prisons in California right now and save $1 billion. And believe me, we need to save money. We are facing a massive budget deficit, and yet the governor chose to cut housing services and homebuyer programs instead. Prison closures, zero. The truth is that most low level offenders, they do much better in treatment courts than in prison. And no diversion is not a get out of jail free card. It is a carrot and a stick approach, meaning that you have a charge. You often have to plead guilty to go into these programs. And then, yes, if you abide by a very strict series of benchmarks, with access to resources, with treatment, with counseling, with vocational training, you can work it off. But if you don't, you face jail and prison time. That's the stick. It is far better at cutting rates of recidivism than dumping people into prison where they get no services and letting them out a few years later with a bus pass. We've heard so much talk recently in the media and in these viral videos about how progressives are these woke fools who view the world in a binary of victims and victimizers. And truthfully, that is a lazy caricature. We are not done with criminal justice reform. Our prison system is bloated, it is abusive, it is harmful. Shrinking it further is just common sense. It is an enormous waste of our taxpayer dollars and wiping out what is admittedly a frayed social safety net, just eviscerating it and cutting off money and services as part of some kind of a tough love approach. That isn't common sense at all. I'm just going to say quickly that cherry picking anecdotes and quoting the silliest things that are said by those on the left and the right, that may get clicks and applause. But those kinds of distortions, they feed our worst impulses to be angry and vindictive and vengeful and hateful toward each other, rather than to collaborate and seek solutions that actually work. I hope we talk about some of those tonight, because we're better than that. Thank you.

Barry Weiss
Thanks, Laura.

Seneca Scott
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair recent criminal justice reform has worked precisely as its architects envision the accelerated, managed decline of american cities at the benefit of the global elite. In Oakland in 2020, following the election, ideologically driven astroturf progressives who swiftly defunded and dismantled our police. As a consequence, Oakland legislation and stolen cars. We also lead the nation in retail theft. We have witnessed violent crime soared to record highs. The resulting exodus of businesses and taxpayers has led to a fiscal crisis and $117 million deficit. Now, I'm no national expert on criminal justice reform, so perhaps it is easier for me to detect the intellectual dishonesty, covert racism, infertilization of the black and brown community, and the monetization of so called reform masquerading poorly as genuine change now, I promised my mother that I would be nice today. So while I will not call anyone an idiot, the word useful comes to mind when I think of the misguided activists who are fueling missed opportunities to enact real, meaningful reform around crime and poverty in America. Oakland's descent into lawlessness is celebrated during the summer of love, where police reform swept progressive controlled cities, Prop 47 and local movements to defund the police led to a shocking acceleration of robberies and violent crime and an exodus of businesses and taxpayers. The most alarming part of his story in Oakland is that we were warned when Oakland progressive proposed cutting 50% of Oakland's budget in 2020, a minority of pragmatic council members formed a reimagined public safety task force to pump the brakes and get input from residents. Despite impassioned pleas from the only five of twelve members of this task force not to simply slash the police budget without responsible, well thought out alternatives, they were publicly ridiculed, ignored, and some of them ran out of town. In fact, us black people who live in these impacted neighborhoods were pretty much united in the fact that we did not want to cut the police budget when Oakland had less than 700 officers, when we're supposed to have 1100. However, our white, affluent neighbors were pretty much united, the progressive ones, that is. And in fact, if they did want to cut the budget for our sake, of course the budget was slash, operations, dismantle, and the rest is history now. As a result, Oakland has become a national punchline, losing all three professional sports teams in just five years. Iconic businesses like in n Out, shuttering profitable locations and fleeing the city due to violent crime. We've had to change our airport name to San Francisco to trick people to fly into our city. We are at risk of losing 911 funding permanently in just a few short weeks due to poor response time. 50% of working class residents in Oakland's flatlands have less than dollar 600 stayed for emergency. When we lose the catalytic converter, have our windows to Bipdez or attires popped onto krepek roads, it perpetuates the cycle of poverty and desperation. The likelihood of punishment is significantly more impactful on human behavior than its severity. Misguided bail reforms, decriminalized retail theft, and overall lack of police coverage have led to cities with little rule of law. This should be undeniable. So what's really going on? As always, follow the money. One example. Pierre Omidyard, a billionaire founder of eBay, has funneled millions of dollars to police abolitionist movement. Simultaneously, he's invested in security ventures like Bond, an app offering licensed bodyguard, and deep Sentinel, an AI enhanced security camera currently available for sale in Oakland, California. This is a plot from the movie Robocop, played out in real time. As public safety deteriorates and police departments grapple with budget cuts and staffing shortages, the market for private security has exploded, conveniently enriching Omidyar as well as the myriad of NGO's that poverty pimp off the pain and suffering of the working class. This scenario has intensified the class divide in public safety. Affluent communities can afford robust private security, while low income neighborhoods are increasingly vulnerable. A more local example would be the prolific progressive philanthropist Quinn Delaney and her husband, real estate developer Wayne Jordan. They have spent millions on local police abolitionist movements like the anti police terror project, all while benefiting from crime depressed property value. To expand their extensive commercial real estate portfolio, they reside in a $6 million house in Piedmont, an affluent enclave. A city in the city in Oakland. The driving force of all cities is commerce. Cities are special for the economic mobility that they can provide the common person. Responsible leaders protect commerce. Failure to do so leads to dysfunctional cities, at best, in the emergence of neo feudalism, at worst. Thank you.

Barry Weiss
Last up is Camille. And, Camille, if you want to go a little over, too.

Speaker C
No, that's not necessary. I saw someone tweet that they want us to get to the discussion quickly. I am eager to oblige them in that context. And, Barry, I want to forgive you in advance. I'm new to San Francisco as well. The reality is that we always do these land acknowledgments at the beginning of these events, and we did not do one today. So if you're feeling uncomfortable or triggered, I want to apologize for Barry. In truth, what I'd actually like to do, and that was a bit of a palate cleanser. Cause I wanna try to set the table here. We talked a little bit, and I know Michael tried to define criminal justice reform, but I'd like to try to do that from a kind of philosophical standpoint. There is a temptation to just dig into San Francisco and Oakland and their world famous dysfunctions. I don't know that that is actually going to serve us particularly well this evening. Particularly because from my standpoint, criminal justice reform is not some particular fetish of the progressive left. It is a fundamental value of a free society. It is on par with free speech in the sense that one has to always be prepared to defend these particular ideas. One always has to be prepared to scrutinize the state's monopoly on the use of force. That is a thing that's happening in this country. So I wanna talk about it from that standpoint. And again, a determined commitment to scrutinize and restrain the government, not only on the use of forces, is how we're defining things. In which case, criminal justice reform is about ensuring that policing and the judicial system are transparent and accountable and impartial and effective. Now, what does effective mean there? Does that mean letting people out of prison who are going to offend again? Does that mean exploding crime rates? Certainly doesn't mean that. But I'll tell you what else it doesn't mean. From my standpoint, criminal justice reform is not necessarily or fundamentally about racial equity or police abolition. I am certainly not for those things. When I first received the invitation to participate in this exchange, I was a little confused. I didn't know if I would be on Michael Schellenberger's side or if I'd be paired up with Laura Bazelon. I have been a fierce and severe critic of the various activists who are engaged in advocating for all manner of destructive policies under the guise of criminal justice reform. I think it is a tremendous shame that we have relinquished that particular phrase to them and that we allow them to describe what they are doing as criminal justice reform. I know some very prominent entrepreneurs who devote their resources to helping police departments do things like purchase drones. Police departments purchasing drones. Libertarians can't possibly be in favor of that. No, it's criminal justice reform. Those drones were used to apprehend a murder suspect. They reduced the number of interactions between police and the civilian population while allowing them to effectually go out and find someone and bring them and bring them in, that is criminal justice reform. To the extent you want to get bunk science out of courtrooms because you know that bite mark evidence shouldn't be used to prosecute and incarcerate people. You are a criminal justice reform advocate, Michael Schellenberger, who is an advocate for things like ensuring that law enforcement is perhaps toned down a little bit, and that the social service advocates who are going out and dealing with, say, homeless people or people in mental health crisis are a bit more robust. This is a kind of criminal justice reform, is it not? We are talking about making certain that these policies are working for everyone in their communities. It doesn't need to be racialized. We don't need to engage in conspiracy theories about what the motives of these people are front lines of these issues. For years I can remember a story that I worked on about a place called Kenosha Wisconsin, which at this point is now pretty notorious. But at the time that I went there in 2017 to report on this story, I met a man named Michael Bell. He was a retired military officer, and his son had been killed in 2004 in the driveway of his family home. He was killed by a police officer. He was killed by a police officer when two other officers were restraining him. And he was killed because, per the police officers, he had tried to reach for an officer's gun. In two days, those officers were cleared of all suspicion. It was deemed a good shoot, and it was deemed a good shoot by an internal investigation that was carried out by members of the same department that this police officer worked for, and that was totally above board and legal in the state of Wisconsin. In 2004, it took Michael Bell ten years, ten years to manage to pass legislation that actually required independent investigations of all police involved shootings in the state of Wisconsin. And it made Wisconsin the first state in the country to do so. That is criminal justice reform. It is effective, it is effectual, and it inspired other states to do precisely the same thing. But even at the time that I did that report, it was still the case that in the overwhelming majority of states in the country, that is precisely how police investigations could still be done legally. This proposition is interesting, and if it were narrowly about whether or not racial fetishism in the context of these debates was destructive and whether or not it promoted a kind of culture of malfeasance and a sense of disillusionment among law enforcement and demonization of law enforcement, I would be totally in favor of it. But if it's framed in the context of criminal justice reform itself being responsible for the disillusionment of society, I can't endorse that proposition, and neither should you. Switch sides.

Seneca Scott
This is easy.

Barry Weiss
Okay, we're gonna do, like, a quick round robin, and then I'll open it up a little bit more. But, Michael, I'd love you to respond to two things that the opposition brought up. One, Laura's point about the fact that the states with the most violent crime or the cities with the most violent crime are the reddest. And the second, I'd love for you to contend with Camille's sort of. I can't even believe I'm using this word problematizing, complicating the notion of what criminal justice reform is. He's saying to you, Michael, you're against an overbearing state, certainly when it comes to surveillance, certainly when it comes to speech and all kinds of other issues. So why aren't you on that side?

Seneca Scott
Yeah.

Michael Schellenberger
Great question. So, I mean, on the first issue, you may notice that Laura referred to red states, blue states. If you do that analysis with red states, blue cities, you get a very different analysis. What really holds up is the total amount of police officers. So if you look at the, you know, I mentioned Dallas and Boston, that's a conservative city. And a liberal city have the highest rankings of perception of safety. Of those cities, San Francisco is significantly lower. And you see that correlation between more police, less crime, greater perception of safety is very strong. So if you're going to look for a correlation, I think that would be the one that you want to look for. And then in terms of the. I think it's nice to get right into the nuances of this question. I didn't have a chance to get into homicides. We saw a very significant spike in homicides after the George Floyd protests. We now there's broad agreement of something called the Ferguson effect, which is that when you demonize the police before you even get to defunding them, I mean, that's the amazing thing. When you just demonize the police and disparage the police, the police pull back. They don't get out of their cars, they don't walk around, they don't interact with the folks that are likely to commit homicide or other crimes. So that Ferguson effect is pretty well established now, of course, named after the 2014 killing in Ferguson. But we've seen the disparagement of police contributing to that pulling back, and the emboldenment, when you come, that's for homicides, which is the emperor of all crimes. When you get to things like people breaking the law because of their addiction, camping in public, using drugs in public, defecating in public, it's usually almost always due to substance use disorder or addiction or to some other mental illness. Those folks Laura mentioned, well, we should be getting folks into rehab. I totally agree. The only thing you have to remember is that we got rid, in terms of the carrots and sticks. We got rid of the sticks when I went to the Netherlands. When you travel around the world, you talk to people, you have to use some amount of coercion to get addicts and people with psychiatric disorders into the care they need. Often that's a court order. Often they're in a group home. But some amount of coercion so they don't end up on the street smoking fentanyl and meth and dying like we've seen. So I do share that sense of wanting that nuance. If we can keep people out of prison, we should. I mean, nobody wants to put people in prison, but I just think that the criminal justice, the progressive criminal justice movement just went too far. There are some amount of people that should be diverted. The new district attorney has pulled back on that. That's why we saw the jail population in San Francisco rise from around 800 to 1100 over the last two years. That's good. She just said very reasonably, we were diverting too many people. We shouldn't be having so many people diverted. There's some people that are hardcore psychopaths or, you know, that are just not going to be redeemable. And you have to show that discernment as the district attorney and the judges.

Barry Weiss
Laura, you were involved. Chesa Boudin's name came up and he was, of course, the progressive DA that was elected in 2020 on a platform of radical reform. He talked about ending the prosecution of so called quality of life crimes. He said, we need to move away from tough on crime policies. And you worked closely with him. Tell us about why you think he failed. And was it the result of his policies or a misconception about the policies he was championing?

Speaker A
Okay, let's get to chase and the chase of two and a half years in 1 second. But a couple of quick things to Michael's points. One of them is criminal justice statistics. Crime, violent crime. It's really a Rorschach test. And this isn't coming from a liberal mouthpiece. The city journal, which is the publication of the very conservative Manhattan Institute, has said repeatedly that basically you can just take these raw numbers and use them to whatever political ends that you really want. And it is also not true that red states, blue cities, when you take the 20 largest cities, and obviously crime is going to be greater in urban, densely packed areas than it is in more rural and smaller places. But when you take the 20 biggest and 16 are run by Democrats and four by Republicans, and you look at the crime rates, basically the statistical differences are somewhat insignificant. The republican states tend to fall in the middle, excuse me, cities. So we're not really talking about red state, blue state, blue state city, red state city. It's all a mix. And I think experts really agree that people take these statistics and inject their feelings in them and make them into what they need to support the particular argument that they're making now as to having this progressive in San Francisco and having the recall. I think a couple of things happened. First of all, we had obviously this extraordinary event in all of our lives, the pandemic, which scrambled everyone's existence in ways that I think we're still recovering from. I also think that, and I'm not blaming any one particular progressive DA, but I think that there is messaging issues where somehow there is this impression that psychopaths are getting diversion that never happened. If you commit violent crimes in any city, including ones with progressive Das, you are going to go to trial or plead guilty, and you're getting time. We are not letting murderers out with, like, you know, I don't know, a piece of candy and a letter of referral. That's not happening. And I think this idea that diversion doesn't come with any sort of a consequence, that there's nothing hanging over your head, that's said by people who've never actually been in a diversion program. Many of my clients have been. And when you flunk out of it, there's a big consequence. You're going to jail. So I think that part of this maybe does rest on the left, that we're afraid to talk about the fact that there are sticks. Maybe that's part of the issue. Part of the issue, too, is I think that these viral videos, which everybody just saw and everyone loves to watch and talk about, they drive policy. And so when you are allowing the scariest, most visible people to create and drive an entire policy, you are making this enormous mistake and ignoring all of the invisible, not particularly scary people underneath. And in fact, like scooping them up and sticking them in prison or institutionalizing them, which is expensive and frankly stupid, because that's not helpful and it's not going to make them productive, better citizens. And also it's embarrassing. We are a civilized nation. We stand for these incredible ideals and this idea that, like, some giant chunk of our population is completely disposable and we're just going to get rid of them so we don't have to look at them anymore and don't have to deal with it anymore, is honestly beneath us.

Barry Weiss
Seneca, do you think it's a messaging problem, as Laura is saying?

Seneca Scott
No, it's not just a messaging problem, but I would say that Oakland is not a safe city. We're clockwork orange. I mean, we have people running around looking for the old ultraviolence. When you say that our das are not letting people off with slaps on the wrist, that's patently false. It just came out today that Da Price wants to let someone who was murdered and kidnapped someone out of jail in just a few short years. I don't have the exact numbers, but the recall's going on. You can check the twitter for the pan price recall space. And it's laid out in excruciating detail. These families are feeling fel, they're feeling mocked. They feel like DA Price is a public defender, not a district attorney. Here's a big blind spot. If you've never spent any time on the other side of the law, you don't get how it is to be a criminal. So I stole cannabis for most of my adult life. We have equity programs. I'm safe now. But let me tell you, when you're in the criminal underworld, we go backwards from what happens when you get caught. We are very, my former self, criminals are very deliberate and intelligent in how they plot and they go backwards from how do I get caught and what is the severity of punishment. So I'm not going to take this automatic weapon because it adds more time. If I get caught, I'm going to use a semi automatic weapon. But if there is no getting caught because there's no police, if there's no fingerprinting, like Oakland, who got rid of our CSI, do the budget cut. Now, you've heard that the first 48 is crucial in catching a criminal. We don't have that anymore because we dismantled our police. That is a demonstrable cut to public safety due to failed policy. So it's not a messaging problem. I can point to policy. I can point to the authors of the policy. I can point to the funders of the people who pass the policy. And it all works uniquely. So, no, it's not a messaging problem. We have an agenda. Criminal justice reform has been hijacked. I agree with you. We have a need for criminal justice reform. People riding around with crack shouldn't get more sentences than rich white people with coke. Absolutely. I back all of that. What we're seeing now isn't reform because it leads to children. If you talk to them, here's what they say. Auntie Pam is going to let me out. She got me. So it's not a messaging problem so much as this cause and effect of failure to uphold rule of law. You have to hold a baseline rule of law. Once you lose it, just like a riot, the riot police are not sufficient. You've got to bring in a national guard once things get out of control. So, no, I think it's much more than a messaging problem. It's a deep rooted issue of failed policy. And architects of these policy, who, again, are getting exactly what they want, they're doing this on behalf of their funders so they can swoop in and buy up our distressed asset. This is not a very complicated plot, but it is insidious.

Barry Weiss
Camille, now I'd love for you to respond to what Seneca just said, and I think the hard thing about this side of the proposition is that the evidence of their side is everywhere you look. And it's certainly in the videos that we showed at the beginning of this, whether they're cherry picked or not, we could have a discussion about it. The evidence of your side is more invisible to people. It's behind bars, arguably. So I'd love for you to also speak to that.

Speaker C
Well, I certainly think that using viral videos to inform our policy response or to shape our ideas is probably not the best course of action. Certainly the case that hands up, don't shoot didn't turn out to be true. Not really a great way to form policy, but in much the same way lock them up, like it seems to me, isn't necessarily a great strategy for really understanding the causes of crime or exactly how to address what's happening here, or the actual defects with respect to how criminal justice is operating in particular places. I am inclined to agree with a great many things that are being said over here. Particular the closure rates, like the case. Closure rates in places like Chicago, in San Francisco and Oakland haven't been phenomenal for a very long time. Murder is de facto legal in places like Chicago, but that's not a policy decision. Murder is not, in fact, legal to the extent it is a policy decision. It has everything to do with how the law is implemented. You will get no disagreement from me whatsoever if we start to talk about whether or not there is a sufficient competency in law enforcement and in local city governments across the country, in many, many places that are struggling. No, there isn't sufficient competency there. We know that law enforcement, police departments in San Francisco and in various other places have been not even so much underfunded, but understaffed, even more so for a very long time. And I would agree forcefully as well, with the idea that when you make arrests, you actually create a severe disincentive for people to commit crimes. All of that is true. But to the extent those things aren't happening right now, it isn't necessarily because particular liberal policies have been endorsed. And I think it's incumbent upon people who are insisting on building more prisons, throwing more people in jail in order to try and solve these problems, for them to acknowledge the dissonance that may exist for a conservative or a libertarian who doesn't believe that public schools are necessarily particularly good or going to be run very well, and for them to simultaneously believe that the police departments and the jails that you'll build with taxpayer dollars will be run in a safe and effective manner and that they will be all to the good, it's unlikely to be the case. So the very hard question, and this is the difficult position that I'm actually in, I'm going to tell you that it's complicated. We don't understand why crime rates dropped in this country in the 1990s, in the 1980s, from the 1970s. We don't know. There are theories about lead paint, about broken windows. We do not know. And in much the same way, the crime spike that we saw in 2020 was caused by a great many things. There were a bunch of contributing factors. But if we're going to get serious about this, and if we're going to view, as Laura, I think, correctly pointed out, the people who are engaged in this crime, as well as the people who are residents of these various communities, who are the victims of this crime, in some cases, twice victimized. Right. You have to. Someone in your family was murdered, and you still have to live here, and you know that the murder rate has gone up. When a murder rate goes up just a few points in a particular neighborhood, and all the crime is concentrated in that neighborhood, it is devastating. But I can't tell you that there are simple, quick solutions. I can tell you that my major concern here on this debate stage, I'll try to be succinct here, is that we will go back and forth between excessively permissive policy, or at least a very tendency not to prosecute in certain instances and trying to be exceptionally hard with respect to a robust criminal justice response. Going hard on the drug war again, as if it worked before. It didn't work before.

Barry Weiss
Okay, well, let me put. Let me maybe, and let's open it up to discussion here. Is it true? I mean, Camille's sitting here saying we don't really know why crime went down. Maybe it was broken windows, maybe it was lend paid. We don't really know why. I don't know. Just to pull a few numbers, you know? In Portland, homicides increased by 506% between 2016 and 2022. In Philadelphia, homicides increased by 180% between 2016 and 2023. I think, Michael, you would say we do know why.

Michael Schellenberger
Yeah, I think there's. I mean, not only that, but I think there's a pretty strong consensus at this point. I mean, I mentioned the New York Times has now come around to endorse the Ferguson effect, which was? Which is, you know, the New York Times is the house newspaper of the Democratic Party and George Soros and all the rest. So, you know, they've come around to embracing the Ferguson effect. Ferguson effect was invented by a conservative at the Manhattan Institute, and she did so by interviewing the police chief in Ferguson and also interviewing folks on the street. There's a very. It's like, you know, you see it in the movies. There's a police, and the people, you know, that they're interacting with all day long have deep relationships. And so when those police pull back and when the police are delegitimized. So I, you know, I think we get into cities and whatever, but I think that if we can agree on something, I hope it's that we need a lot more police. You know, one of the most surprising things for me with San Francisco was realizing that the Europeans have much higher levels of police per capita than we have. The model that we want to move towards is something we call swift and certain. It's not the length of the sentence. It's really. But it is making that intervention. We have seen. You know, there is a racial part of this. In my book, I have a character is a recovering addict who's white, a recovering attitude who is black. The recovering act, who was white, got arrested one time and had. The consequences were so serious, he had to go into rehab. The recovery, these are real life characters. The character in the book who's black multiple times was let off, and his addiction over 20 years got worse and worse. So in that supposedly being softer and kinder, it actually was much more cruel. And so you need a system that has this balance of carrots and sticks where there's real consequences for people. It's not 20 years in prison, but it is some amount of coercion to have a consequence, which hopefully includes getting into recovery.

Barry Weiss
Do you guys believe that the Ferguson effect is real? And do you agree when Michael says, we all agree we need more police? Do you actually agree with that?

Speaker C
I actually do believe the Ferguson effect is real. And I want to be clear that my. We don't really know is not that we can't point to any factors that are helping to drive these trends. It's that it's inherently complicated. The two gentlemen that you just referred to, why are their outcomes very different? There are certain people who would insist that, well, race played a huge role, et cetera, but it is enormously complicated.

Speaker A
And I also think. I mean, no, I don't agree that we. To be clear, I do not agree that we need more police. And I want to echo Camille's point about bureaucracies and institutions that all of a sudden, people who are so suspicious of various things, like public schools, just absolutely want to throw more money at the police. I think we should back up and talk about the police. Oakland has been under a consent decree, a federal consent decree for over 20 years that they cannot get out of because they have engulfed in scandal after scandal after scandal. Right now, every single death penalty case that came out of Alameda county, which encompasses Oklahoma, is under federal review by a judge. Why? Because prosecutors and police used very corrupt tactics, including prosecutors repeatedly striking black people and jewish people from these juries because they thought it would make them more likely to convict and sentence people to death. These are not blue ribbon, amazing institutions. And this idea that, like, oh, we just need more. We just need to pay them more overtime. And this idea that, like, oh, the Ferguson effect. And we're supposed to, what, feel bad for the police? Like, do your job. Do your job. If I refuse to teach my students. Cause, like, I just decided that they didn't share my political views, and it was just too hostile in there, and I felt like I was getting too much pushback, I would be fired. I just don't think that, like, refusing to get out of your car and refusing to make arrests because you're mad that it's not a felony anymore and instead it's a misdemeanor. And by the way, it's still a crime. You can still arrest people. It's not an okay thing. And so I think we need to back up the same thing with San Francisco. Scandal after scandal, these racist text messages, homophobia, sexism, corruption. I don't think the answer is okay. We definitely need more of this same kind of thing, and then we'll be safer. And I think the other thing that we need to say about this is these binaries, this idea that there's victims and there's victimizers, and in these communities, oftentimes there's both in the same family or the same person, that, in other words, this is like a communal thing that encaptures everyone. It's not as simple as just separating people out because one person is good and one person is bad. I think that this idea that, like, everyone is noble, including everyone who's been accused of a crime, is ridiculous. And I think that this idea that, you know, on the other side, we're going to use this other extreme caricature, is equally ridiculous.

Barry Weiss
Seneca, do you want to jump in?

Seneca Scott
I think it's ironic. You mentioned Oakford's negotiated settlement agreement. After 20 years of being under trusteeship. How is it not his fault? The guy makes a million dollars a year. He has a financial incentive to keep us there. Police chief Elon Armstrong moved us from 20 check marks down to two in just eight months working with the police commission. His reward was getting fired for trumped up charges. Why or not? Decision to fire him with one of the lawyers who gets paid $250,000 a year from negotiator settlement agreement. It's a cash cow. Robert Warsaw is a criminal to use him. Not living in Oakland, where we've seen the devastating effect of that budget stripped from us, is absolutely beyond apparel and insulting for people who have to live with the derivative in the public safety. As a result of that, I will also say I've represented law enforcement as a union official. I represented federal law enforcement as a union official. I organized transportation Security Administration as the lead organizer for the west coast maybe, I don't know, 2000, 910. It totally changed my perspective on what policing means in Oakland. People got fired and OPD was fine for stopping riots that destroyed black businesses. In 2020. There is a blue flu. There's a blue flu. I don't like it. I've been critical of it to the point where even my police friends have said, hey, you supposed to have our back. No, they should do their job. But when they're punished for doing their job, we're only human. The cops number one goal is to make it home safe. If that is compromised and I don't get rewarded from it. Another thing is this. The police are not elitist. They're blue collar. They're the working class. True famous people have mentioned this before. And if you're picking between the elite and the cops, there are people who will pick the police. Think about where they come from. They don't come from affluent trappings. So it's very nuanced. I hated LAPD. I still don't like them. If you ask me about LAPD, I say, do you find them? Ten years ago. But why? Because I felt the oppression. I felt. I got pulled over for every little thing. There was an over pollution of the black and brown community as they fished for things. And you saw the consequences. You have a sheriff that's in jail. That guy's in jail right now. So just because the sewage is blocked up doesn't mean you get rid of sewage. I agree with that. We're not saying criminal justice reform isn't valid or needed. We're saying that the latest rendition, the latest policies that we've seen since 2020 have had nothing to do with reform and have had everything to do with an agenda. The evidence is there. It is clear as day.

Michael Schellenberger
Just a quick thing on police, because.

Barry Weiss
I think you, you guys can just jump in.

Michael Schellenberger
Been some idea. I think there's been suggested that somehow there's a lot of conflict within the literature. Actually, the literature is overwhelming on policing. I mean, the Obama administration in 2016 did a huge review. The Department of Justice published it. Meta analysis, 10% reduction in crime with a 10% increase in police. Why would anybody be against that? Another study done in 2020, another big review, ten to 17 police officers results in one fewer homicide every year. You know, another meta analysis, 40 big studies, found a 13% reduction in crime with having, you know, police stops. So, I mean, if you want to reduce over incarceration, one good way to do that is to prevent crime. And when, and we know that. We know how to do that now. I mean, police really, it's about hot spots. It's about having police presence in places that are high crime areas. It's having that police community interaction look, the stop and frisks and the stopping the cars. It's much more controversial. There is evidence that it reduces crime, but just the hot spots alone, having police where we know homicides and other big crimes occurred, that's just such a winner. That would seem to me like something that we would agree on. And I don't totally understand, honestly, Laura, why you wouldn't be in favor of more police. It doesn't necessarily mean more incarceration. I think it actually can mean less crime and therefore less incarceration.

Speaker A
I think what I'm saying is I'm not in favor of more bad policing. And you just heard your compatriot talk about what it's like to be pulled over for no reason, to be surveilled, to be accused of something that you didn't do. And I think, coming from where I'm coming from, which is that I've spent, I don't know, 24 years on that side, seeing my clients over policed, over incarcerated, defending people who've been wrongfully convicted and buried alive because of unbelievable misconduct, and seeing the people who do that to them, the police who do that to them, get rewarded, never punished. The unbelievable harm that I see caused, and I don't really see, quite frankly, a whole lot of reform happening. I think we could have a whole back and forth, and we're not going to, because it's too in the weeds of about Oakland having, you know, 14 different police chiefs in eight years and all the turnover and just the insanity of that and the disruption and all of it. And I don't know about the recent firing and whether it was deserved or not, but it's just scandal after scandal after scandal. I'm not saying that every police officer is bad. I'm saying that this is a culture where there just isn't that much accountability. When you're looking at it from my perspective, when you're seeing people on the back end and this. Sorry, I'm going to get a little emotional, but I just had a client sort of come through this, and I saw firsthand what happened to him from beginning in a really bad situation and being homeless and then moving through that whole system and not getting enough services and then ending up incarcerated, and then what happened to him, what the police did to him, and then also what the guards did, and then what happened when he got out, which is that he died homeless of an overdose. And so when I look at all of that and I see those harms being perpetuated by law enforcement and by prosecutors, it's extremely upsetting. And I don't see accountability. I see legal doctrine that insulates them from liability.

Michael Schellenberger
But, Laura, would you.

Speaker A
So that, to me, is disturbing. And then this idea that we're just gonna have more of the same, that's just, to me, like, more and more harm.

Michael Schellenberger
Well, so just let me see if we agree. So, first of all, it's not more of the same. Police killings of African Americans declined from 217 per year on average in the seventies to half of that by the early two thousands. In 2022, it was 36 African Americans. You know, unarmed African Americans killed by police. We've made huge reforms, but I'm reducing.

Speaker A
I'm asking about shootings.

Michael Schellenberger
One other final point, which is that do we really think that cops are gonna perform better if they are working overtime? Stressed out fewer of them? Less time for training? Of course not. We know that police, more police means there's more time for training. It's easier to fire the bad apples when you have more police that you feel confident you've got a sufficiently sized force. I mean, just look at Boston, look at Dallas. I mean, what those two cities have in common is they've really supported their police. They're still wanting to hire police officers. But I have a hard time believing that you think that police officers are going to perform better or be kinder or better at their jobs if there's fewer of them and they're more stressed out. That doesn't make any sense.

Speaker A
But I'm not saying that. But I, that's nothing. Not at all what I just said. I didn't, I didn't. I mean, again, I feel like this, like language of, you know, we want to strip away all law enforcement and have some kind of anarchical state and just hoards of people coming here and committing crimes.

Michael Schellenberger
I didn't say that. So please don't character.

Speaker A
That's not what I'm saying.

Michael Schellenberger
Surely you agree that more police offers more opportunity for better policing and fewer police creates more stress and makes it harder to do a good job.

Speaker A
I don't agree that.

Seneca Scott
Simply said in Oakland, though, I said.

Speaker A
I don't want more police. And when I said that, what I mean is what exactly? What I just said before, which is causing the kinds of harms that have been caused for generation after generation, including up until recently and including today, continually, and having no accountability. And I don't really see any reforms taking place in a lot of these police departments. I'm not saying strip away all police and have no police. I'm saying we need to have better police. And I'm not really hearing solutions for how to make that happen. But go ahead, Camille.

Speaker C
And what I said in my opening remarks was that a lot of police departments are in fact, understaffed, that they aren't making arrests because they're not in these various places. So there can be some room for agreement and disagreement. But again, it's, for me, I want to make an appeal to nuance and I don't want to take over anything. But it would be interesting to talk about some particular areas, like drug policy, for example, where I know you and I probably have some pretty profound disagreements. It's interesting that you mentioned the hundred thousand odd people that are dying from overdose and what a profound crisis that is. And it's something that has been going on. It didn't start recently. As a result of particular reforms. It's been going on for decades. We've been seeing overdose deaths increase. And part of what's skyrocketing those overdose deaths isn't merely a decision not to enforce the law. It is actually particular, particularly robust efforts to try and limit the number of the volume of drugs that are being produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies, which has created a more robust black market and means more illegally manufactured fentanyl is coming out of these really disturbingly bad chinese factories. Illicit drugs flooding the streets that are more potent and that are, in fact, being used to adulterate other kinds of drugs. And most of the overdose deaths, it seems something like over 70% of them, according to the CDC, are people who are taking adulterated drugs because of drug prohibition. So what I'm saying here, to be very clear, is drug prohibition and not a lack of enforcement of drug laws has contributed profoundly, and there isn't a tremendous amount of disagreement about this, but it's contributed profoundly to making illegal drugs more addictive, more dangerous, and importantly, more fatal. Are we going to be willing to take a look at policies that may not seem attractive on the surface, like decriminalization or better yet, in some instances, legalization of these drugs, if in fact it means that it causes less harm on net? Or is it more comfortable to say, we don't like drugs, so we lock people up when we find that they have them? I want to get us away from these simplistic binaries. Laura would like to get us away from these simplistic binaries because we recognize that these are deeply complicated problems. It's not always so complicated, but in many instances it is.

Barry Weiss
I want Michael to respond to the decriminalization topic. And then I'd love for. I'd love to ask each of you a simple question, which is what a good, functioning criminal justice system should look like, and maybe point to an example or two. But, Michael, please respond.

Michael Schellenberger
Well, sure. I mean, I would just say, look, over the last three years, coincidentally, right after my book came out, I think that politicians have been moving in the right direction, totally coincidentally, and San Francisco voters have moved in the right direction and, you know, ending, you know, having some accountability for people receiving cash, welfare, having to pass drug tests on the policing issue. Look, it's very simple. I also would like there to be fewer bad police. The way to do that is to have more police so you can get rid of the bad apples, improve the training, and not have to make choices about whether to have the police at Union Square so people can safely shop in a very high end shopping district, and taking those police away from neighborhoods that are high, that have high murder rates. We shouldn't have to choose between that. Plenty of police. We need abundant police. So that's the first thing. Two separate crimes, homicide. That's about interacting with people, giving people hope in the system, believing that the system is fair, understanding that the system is fair for them, that they're stopped. With this discourse of demonizing the police, we can say, oh, police should do their jobs, and maybe that makes us feel good, but in terms of actually making helping police, to do a good job, they have to feel high status. It's like everybody in their job, they want to feel like their job is special and their public servants, in terms of drugs, look, it's very clear. You go to the Netherlands, go to Portugal, you talk to folks in Europe. They didn't have the big increase of drug deaths that we had. We went from 20,000 deaths to 112,000 deaths in 24 years. That's insane. That did not happen in the Netherlands and Portugal. When you interview them, they just say to you bluntly, you guys got rid of all the sticks. You just have carrots left. And they're not really carrots anymore. If it's an entitlement, if it's not something that you earn. So you have to have some, you know, people that are suffering a psychiatric disorder, in this case, substance use disorder, addiction, they've lost control of their behaviors. They need the pressure. Recovering addicts will tell you they needed the threat of jail in order to go through their rehabilitation. It's actually unfair and cruel to them to not provide that court ordered mandate to them to restore the drug courts. I will say the state's coming back in the right direction. Gavin Newsom has done two of the three things that we say we need to deal with the addiction and homeless crisis. The first was to restore some amount of coercion through the courts. He called him care courts and people. We passed it. He said he wanted some more money to do mandatory drug treatment and psychiatric care. That got passed barely in the last election. And then the third party, he needs to have a centralized statewide system, let's call it calpsych. That's what we need to have a european style approach where we don't need to put people in prison for a long time. They just, a lot of these guys just need rehab. They need to be in a group home. They need to get into recovery, as millions of people do every year with that intervention, that pressure to do it. Otherwise, you're just going to stay on the street smoking methamphetamine and die.

Barry Weiss
After the break, I ask these debaters what a good functioning criminal justice system should actually look like. Stay with us. I dont know about you, but I always feel like Im searching, searching for new restaurants in my neighborhood, searching for better jeans, searching for better hypoallergenic detergents. Okay, that last one might just be me. I search everywhere, on Google, Instagram, Twitter, resi, everywhere. But when youre hiring for your business, the best way to search is not to search at all. Don't search, match, match, match with indeed, indeed is your matching and hiring platform. Ditch the busy work and the endless scrolling and use indeed for scheduling, screening and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster. And indeed doesn't just help you hire faster. A recent survey showed that 93% of employers agree that indeed delivers the highest quality matches compared to other job sites. Indeed's matching engine constantly learns from your preferences, so the more you use indeed, the better it gets. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@indeed.com. honestly. Just go to indeed.com honestly right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com honestly, terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you. Need indeed. Before we get to closing statements, this went by in a second. Would love for each of you to weigh in on a positive vision. Okay, you become, call it Da of San Francisco or Oakland. What do you do? What are the first few things you do to improve the kind of situation, Seneca, that you've been talking about tonight?

Seneca Scott
Well, first is we need to uphold rule of law and follow the laws in the book. So let's take open their drug markets. We have 72 hours rv parking in Oakland. That's what the law says. Why is that law in place? Because rvs leak sewage. Rvs have the potential for fires. We have over three vehicle fires a day in homeless encampments alone in Oakland. So that contributes to a sort of history of environmental racism in these black and brown neighborhoods. That homelessness are consolidated again. That goes missing from our environmentalists. The way to stop it is you have to have some sort of rule of law. We have graffiti everywhere. There are rvs everywhere. Guess what? They're not from here. Oakland's homelessness has gone 70% since 2018, if not more. I mean, that's conservative. It doubled in the eviction moratorium. Our homelessness doubled during COVID when we had an eviction moratorium in place to prevent just that. What does that mean? It is evidence of drug tourism. We know now for a fact that fugitives are hiding in these drug places because not only are they not going to get stopped, not only is there no police to solve anything, they can continue to do crime. We had an rv stop in San Francisco. $600,000 made the news today. So these have become open to drug markets in very lucrative places. Another issue is treatment is always a big thing that we forget. But I wanted to talk about the potency, because I agree with you. But there's an issue here, doses that are $1.50 for the current dose, $1.50 goes for $5 in Nevada. So if I'm in Nevada, and I know I'm paying three and a half times more for dope, and I know I can get a check from Oakland to San Francisco that literally can cover my entire drug habit, where am I going? So we need less incentive. We need to decentivize this behavior. It is a social contract that people have to uphold. It is not compassionate to allow people to exist in this condition with their limbs falling off and dying from overdoses. It's not compassionate for any of us. So I think that we need to restore order. We need to admit to ourselves that we've gone too far. And four, I'm a former progressive. I can't fly the flag anymore because they've made no progress. But I will say this. Clean house. When you're saying you don't think that we don't need cops, you regularly rub shoulders with people who say all cops are bastards and we don't need copse. Abolish police. You've got to jettison those people from your circle for me to take you seriously. Otherwise it's a grift to me. You've got to call them out. Those same people who say abolish police also chastise me for being a legal firearm owner. So how you don't like guns and don't want police? Who's going to take all the guns? Other people with guns? And when the people with guns are done taking all the guns from everyone else, are they gonna give their guns up? We're not thinking these things through logically because these people are ideologue. You have to get them out of your space in order to move forward with truly nuanced and pragmatic policy.

Barry Weiss
Laura, do you wanna respond quickly before.

Speaker A
We get to the criminal justice vision? I mean, I think that there's ideologues in both spaces. I don't think that that's unique to any one side. And I feel like what Camille and I have been saying pretty much all night, that this is a complicated, nuanced problem that has multiple causations. We're not here talking about abolishing prisons, nor are we purporting to speak for people who want to do that or have an anarchistic state. So I feel like that's kind of a straw man argument. Like, we're not saying that. I think in terms of, do you.

Barry Weiss
Think the people that say abolish the police are wrong?

Speaker A
I don't agree with abolish the police, nor do I agree with lock everyone up. And we need more prison sentences for everyone, and we need to build more prisons. We just need to have them be nicer. Nor do I agree that we need a one giant government agency that's somehow going to be able to incarcerate and institutionalize everyone who we find scary and problematic. Like, I don't agree with any of those things. They're extreme. And I don't think we're really here to talk about things at the extremes. Why would we? That's not driving policy anyway. Those are the kinds of things, again, this is like clickbait and headlines, but it's not actually the things that are going to affect all of us. These aren't policies that are ever going to go into effect. A lot of the things that we've been talking about never happened. There are more police per capita in San Francisco than in many other similarly sized cities. So I feel like a lot of this is just sort of fear mongering, but in terms, and just sort of extremitizing, if that's a word. Maybe it's not everyone's position.

Barry Weiss
So point to something that's working.

Speaker A
Yes. Okay.

Barry Weiss
What does good look like?

Speaker A
So I think there's a couple of things. Like, one thing that I was thinking about is Detroit. So, you know, everyone loves to drag Detroit, but in the past couple of years, their homicide rates have plummeted. And part of it is that policing has changed, and they have recruited officers differently. So this is really about, like, smart recruiting. It's not about no police. It's about better police. They're really thinking through that. At the same time, the prosecutors are working on backlogs. They're, you know, going through rape kits. They're prosecuting people. They're going through their gun cases, and also they're using federal funds to do these community based violence intervention and interruption programs, which were working very well in many cities before the pandemic and then completely fell apart because basically everything fell apart in the pandemic. And what I would also say is that once things get into the actual system itself, swift and short prison sentences for everyone, it doesn't work. I mean, I don't know if anyone in this audience has ever been in prisons. I've been in, I think most of them in state of California right now. I can tell you that they're unsanitary, they're filthy, they're dangerous. There's no programming. And most people, they don't end up doing life, they get out and they're completely damaged. And we know that there are other ways of doing things. Yes, some people have to go to prison or as my client's dad likes to say, sit down, but some people don't. Most people actually respond to other kinds of incentives with sticks. So I would say that. And the other thing I would say is a lot of what we're talking about right now, it's so downstream. And what we don't talk about is how little we invest in our youth and our kids and the poverty of our public schools, the terrible education, the lack of a safety net. I'm just thinking about my client and, like, all the things that could have been possible for him if just one or two interventions had taken place. And instead we just punish people like him, try them as an adult for drug possession rather than like, give him a mentor when he was on the varsity basketball team and in the gifted and talented program. Yeah, he was running the streets and doing some bad stuff because he was homeless and he smelled bad and he was a teenage boy and he wanted respect and he wanted nice things. And we don't have the ability to really, like, grab people like that. He wasn't perfect. He's not like some noble person. He had a lot of flaws. He was also an amazing human being who shouldn't be dead at 30. And I think part of this is like, not understanding that and waiting until the end and then just being angry and vindictive and punitive in a way that is expensive and wasteful and abusive.

Barry Weiss
30 seconds.

Speaker C
Portugal, Switzerland, you mentioned them earlier. They have very permissive drug laws. I think it's noteworthy that I mentioned that our prohibition, our approach with prohibition has made the drugs more dangerous, and we've just kind of glided over that point. But well intentioned policy that yields very bad outcomes, but that we can't scrutinize because it is politically unpopular. To scrutinize it are a huge problem for us. And again, I think it is a cause, the most prominent cause of this explosion, overdose deaths. And that's a huge problem.

Barry Weiss
I think we need a separate debate on drug legalization. We are now going to go to closing statements and we're going to go in the same order we began. Michael Schellenberger, we'll start with you. Let's get two minutes on the clock.

Michael Schellenberger
Great. Thank you so much, everybody, for coming. What a pleasure to be here and an honor to represent an effort to have a more sensible approach to criminal justice. I think things are moving in the right direction in California and in San Francisco, Francisco, just back on the streets yesterday, certainly some of the areas south of Market have improved. You have a district attorney here who's really committed to this. Yes, it's men accepting that there's some trade offs, that you can't take the jail population down to 700, 800. It's going up to 1100, probably go up to 1500. And I think that's kind of a metaphor for the broader initiative here, is to be practical about this. We need more police officers. They're going to be better trained. They're going to be less stressed out. They're going to be more capable of helping people. Somewhere between. Somewhere between 30 and 50% more police officers across the board in California, Laura gave the example of Detroit. We have 16 cities where people ranked safety. Detroit is dead last. 46% say it's safe, and the vast majority say it's unsafe. So it's not a great model. Much better model is western Europe. You do have a single centralized addiction and care system, so you can have people that getting the care that they need, that's how you deliver the nuance that I think everybody here said they were committed to. Some people are just psychopaths and violent. They're going to end up in prison. Some people are just addicts. They just need rehab. Some people have a more serious mental illness and need some sort of long term court order. That's what that centralized care system would deliver. It's what exists in every civilized country, and it's a big part of the reason why we're not a civilized country right now. Gavin has heard the feedback. He's moved us in a direction in terms of more court ordered care, also some more money for that. But it needs to go the next step to get calcite to go all the way in terms of drugs. They haven't had the drug problem in Europe. More dangerous drugs, more addiction, more death. You've got to suppress open air drug dealing in Portugal. I asked the head of the portuguese drug program, what would you do if someone were shooting heroin in public in Lisbon? He said that person would be arrested, they would be brought to the police station. I was shocked. I was told that people just use heroin publicly in Lisbon. Not the case. Also not the case in Amsterdam. They even limit the potency of marijuana in Netherlands. So a practical approach is the direction we're headed. A practical approach is what we need. Thank you all very much.

Speaker A
So just really quickly, I think that there's a difference between saying that a city is doing much better than it has been. And then the rebuttal being, will people feel like it's unsafe. People feel this, people feel that talking about is feelings. It's kind of vibes. That's a lot of what criminal justice statistics are and viral videos and people feeling a certain way. And I think that it's harder to focus on actual facts on the ground and just a much more collective experience. Like when Barry was saying, you know, it's everywhere in San Francisco. It's everywhere. It's not actually everywhere. It is in these hot spots. And it's really horrible and upsetting and just gross to have to deal with. But that's not like our whole city. It's not our whole lived experience. And I don't think the answer to all of that is to just vitiate or write off an entire population. But what I really wanted to talk about in my remaining minute and 8 seconds is actually something that we've been doing more in my clinic where we teach law students how to be lawyers, which is seeing how there is really a prison to pipeline situation going on, and intervening in schools in, in these disciplinary cases before students can get suspended or expelled, and doing remedial measures, defending them, but also doing things like restorative justice, also doing things like really serious rehabilitative programming with them. Because what we know about kids, and when I say kids, I mean we have laws in California that acknowledge that the human brain isn't actually really fully baked until you're 26. And we have youthful offender laws. When you focus on people in that age range who are the most likely to offend, the most likely to be problematic, and you get in early and you intervene, that is actually, I think, our future and what we so desperately need to focus on is getting people, while there's still a chance for them to grow and to change and get them help and support, rather than to just throw them to the wayside and then act like we're surprised when five and ten and 15 years later, they're causing all kinds of problems. And so I think what I would say my plea is really to focus on those people in particular and push and devote more resources to them.

Barry Weiss
Mister Scott, thank you.

Seneca Scott
Thank you, Barry and the free press for having us. Thank you, all of you for coming, keeping an open mind, and being a wonderful audience. So it is easier to build strong children than to repair broken mental Frederick Douglass. Now, while I'm no expert on criminal justice reform, as I've said before, I am an expert at spotting woke hypocrisy as a former union leader in California, I not only had an inside look at the incubation of progressive policy, I was one of its architects. I regularly made political decisions from my home in Silver Lake House, Los Angeles, that affected neighbors in Oakland, California. The Haralda intersectionality lens that progressives claim to work through seems to conveniently drop off when discussing things like early childhood nutrition, the connection to knowledge retention, and our plummeting literacy rates. Just two years ago, I blew the whistle on Oakland School District for serving our children highly processed, barely edible food and stomach. School shelf stable, not even fit for prisoners. Students were going hungry, and we ended up having to buy food for the poor students whose parents could not supplement it. That's wrong. Not a peep from the progressives. None of them cared. Food is paramount for motivation. How do you know someone loves you? They feed you. If you're not feeding someone, you don't care about them. We don't care about our children. Woke Phonics entered Oakland in 2016. Prior Oakland had celebrated seven straight years of the number one phonics improvement race in reading improvements in the state of California. Fast forward since they decided phonics was racist. Now we are reading worse than pre brown border versus board of education. We've gone back to the forties and sharecropping. This is not an accident. This is on purpose. So if we're going to look at the root causes, if you want to prevent the next generation of child soldiers who were raising an open school district because of lack of care, mentorship opportunities, nutritious food, and most importantly, quality education, we're going to continue to cycle. So I chose that asymmetrical approach because a lot has already been said here. Michael's brilliant. He had it all laid out. So my job was easy tonight. But I want everyone to think about that. If the children are the number one people committing violent crime and we're not paying attention to them, we're not even feeding them in their school. Do we really care?

Barry Weiss
Thanks, Danica Camille Foster last word started with 17% or 13% maybe. Let's see if you can move something.

Speaker C
Yeah, I'll try to make it worse. I appreciate the empathetic tone that you ended on there. I also appreciate that it was, again, it was broader than simply, we need to put people in jail. We're talking about children in many instances who are growing up in desperate situations, who need help. Can an effective criminal justice system deter people from committing crimes in the first place? I think it can. How do we get to an effective criminal justice system. Is it simply a matter of hiring more police officers and building more prisons? The same people who operate those prisons would be the people who operate the schools. Clearly that is not enough. I can't imagine that anyone in this room believes that's enough. I opened by suggesting that criminal justice reform is an obligation of a sensible person who cares about the maintenance and sustenance of a free society. I continue to believe that. And quite frankly, everyone on this stage has advocated for important reforms of various kinds. In addition to suggesting that perhaps we ought to be tougher with people with respect to drugs or the progressives have, you know, dark motives that they're pursuing. I don't use words like wokeness because I don't think they go quite far enough. Indoctrination in schools is bad. People who prioritize race and racial disparities over actually addressing deprivation are mistaken and misguided. If we're going to have sophisticated conversations about these issues, it has to also include how we think about our carceral system. And it certainly ought to be include how we think about drug policy. I have raised several times now the number of overdose deaths that we've seen in this country, and I've tried to link that to our actual policies of prohibition. The link there is tangible and discernible. It is something that you ought to look into yourself, dear audience and dear listener at home. So that is my appeal to you to allow this to be complicated, because it is complicated. Do not oversimplify this. Do not vote in favor of this proposition.

Barry Weiss
Okay, it is time. It's time for you guys to vote. So take out your phone again. These guys started with 87. They started with 13%. See where we end up? So you're going to text vote two to the number up there on the screen and you're going to text a. A if you want to vote for these guys, b if you want to vote for these guys. While we're tabulating the votes, I want to do some brief thank yous. First of all, I want to thank the incredible team at the free press that put this on. I also want to thank fire for their generous support. Support. There are several, yes. Especially greg lukianoff, alicia glennon, ashley adams and the whole fireteam. While we are tabulating the votes. Again. A for these guys. B for these guys. A quick lightning round. I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that Donald Trump is in San Francisco tonight. Weird. I don't know who's going, like maybe some of you are going to the after party at David Sachs's. I'd be curious how that goes, but I was shy. I forgot that was tonight. And I ran into some Trump supporters and I wondered if I was actually in San Francisco. But totally, you know, not off topic, but sort of on topic, given what just happened in New York. Just quickly, favorite true crime tv show or podcast? Camille, I'm going to you first.

Speaker C
Mastermind on Netflix. It's very good.

Barry Weiss
Lara.

Speaker A
Ugh, there's so many. Okay, so season one of suspect is so good. It's this compilation between Wondry and campsite media. And it starts with this murder. It's real. That happens in this apartment in Seattle, but it happens during a Halloween party. So literally everyone's in a costume. And that's the very first episode. And then you just try to figure out who the two different suspects are and kind of what happened. And it's absolutely wild and there's touch DNA, and there's jury deliberations and there's.

Barry Weiss
Are you a producer of this show?

Speaker A
I could go on. It's great.

Barry Weiss
Michael Schellenberg.

Michael Schellenberger
I can't stand true crime, but I love, if you haven't seen it, watch Seattle is dying for real true crime.

Seneca Scott
I like homicide. Life on the street. Rest in peace, Andre Prior.

Speaker A
Nice.

Barry Weiss
Okay, guys, if you were going to commit one crime, this is a landmine question, but I'm asking it, what would it be? Michael Schellenberger.

Michael Schellenberger
Barry, come on. I can't even think of one.

Barry Weiss
Camille? Sure. Laura?

Speaker A
I think money laundering. We haven't talked about financial crimes. I don't know about you all, but I'd love to have some more money.

Barry Weiss
Mister Scott.

Seneca Scott
I want to fly my drones where the FAA won't let me.

Barry Weiss
And last but not least, if you were gonna change the one law in San Francisco or Oakland or federally, what would that law be?

Seneca Scott
Taxes.

Barry Weiss
Lower or higher?

Seneca Scott
Lower.

Speaker A
Lower.

Barry Weiss
Okay.

Speaker A
I would eradicate the death penalty.

Speaker C
I was gonna say the controlled substances act, but I would actually get rid of taxes, too.

Barry Weiss
Oh, here we go. Here we go. So the votes are in. As criminal justice reform made our cities unsafe. They had a lot to lose. And they did lose a little.

Seneca Scott
It could have been worse.

Barry Weiss
They're up by eleven points. And so we gotta give it to Camille and Laura based on the rules of tonight's debate. Last thing I want to say, what you saw here tonight, I think is really representative of what we're trying to do at the Free press. Everyone on stage has either published in the free press, been a guest on one of our podcasts been profiled in the case of Seneca. And as you learned tonight, they have very different views and, in fact, are sort of unpinned down able in their positions. That's something that we celebrate at the free press. So if you're not yet a subscriber, this is the last plug, I promise. Go to the FP.com and check out what we do. And we're so, so thrilled that all of you came out tonight. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Michael Schellenberger
You're amazing.

Speaker A
Amazing.

Barry Weiss
I love it. One great.

Speaker A
Oh, my God, you're so phenomenal.

Barry Weiss
Thank you for listening to watch the full debate, and it was an incredibly fun night. Please go to thefp.com watch. You can watch the whole thing there. And lucky for you, we have more live debates in store. Our next debate is going to be on the state of the american dream, and it will take place in Washington, DC on September 10. You can get your tickets now@thefp.com. events last but not least, we live in a culture where it seems like a lot of people have given up on the idea of talking across the political divide. They're scared of being accused of heresy if they consider the other side of an argument out loud and in public. But as you all know, as listeners to this show know, we don't believe that at honestly, and we don't believe that at the free press. We haven't given up. We believe that there are valid and good arguments on every side of the political aisle and that most importantly, the issues that matter most to Americans are worth talking about and hashing out without fear. That is at the very core of our mission. We believe that free speech makes free people and that free people need a free press. So if you believe that, too, and if you like this debate, please go to the free Press's website@thefp.com and become a subscriber today. See you next time.