Ms. Odonnell family. Fellow rafael manguel. It is great to see so many of our friends in the audience, including mrs. President emeritus larry bone and our trustees ravenel, currie and charters and nikko. Now and to celebrate the release of brilliant new book criminal injustice, this book represents the culmination years of ralphs hard work. Not long ago, the conventional wisdom held that the biggest problem with our criminal Justice System was that it was far too punitive and that what urban neighborhoods needed most was for the police to stop being so proactive in their efforts to fight crime. Ralph warned that this was a dire mistake, that the crime decline that transformed americas cities was a fragile achievement, and that cities around the country would regret their headlong rush towards. Deep policing and decarceration. Needless to say, hes been proven right. And ralph has dedicated professional life to doing everything in his power to restore Public Safety, especially for our most vulnerable citizens. It is therefore fitting that ralphs introducer tonight is commissioner bill bratton. Over the course of his long and distinguished. Commissioner bratton has saved countless lives. He oversaw the nypds transformative implementation of broken windows policing in the 1990s, which greatly contributed to the citys massive crime decline that decade. And he led a similarly dramatic transformation at the lapd during the 2000s at the federal level. Commissioner has served with distinction on. The Homeland Security advisory council, which he now and today he is the executive chairman of the Consulting Firm teneo risk and the author of the profession, a memoir of Community Race and the arc of policing in america. Im proud to say that commissioner bratton has had a long, fruitful relationship with the Manhattan Institute. His signature policing strategy grew from his intellectual partnership with the late George Kelling, the renowned scholar who coauthored the 1982 article that first introduced the concept of broken windows policing to the public kelling and commissioner bratton worked together on a 1994 piece for city journal explaining the nypd strategy for fighting crime, which has proven enormously influential. Hes also served as an exceed league generous mentor, collaborator and friend to ralph. And with that, ill hand it over to commissioner bratton. To first the commercial dont walk one to buy this book. It is extraordinary. And ill speak it in a moment. But first, a thank you. Thank you to the manhattan for its sponsorship of tonights event. But thank you. In the institute for the work that youve done over the decades to try shine a light on how to do things the right way and not to do them the wrong way. Because right at the moment we need a bright light on whats going on. Its being done the wrong way. And thats the strength of rafaels book. It is the right book at the right time because it takes apart so much of the misinformation, the lies, the misrepresents portion of so many of the ideas that are cheering our city, state and our country apart. Well, phil knew hed the first to tell you. I feel that hes not to the right. Hes not to the left. He wants sides to listen, to read, to see the strong arguments that he has developed from, his years of research and his exposure. Some of the best minds in, the criminal Justice System in america. A lot of them introduce him to relationship with the Manhattan Institute. His parents are here tonight, is very proud parents. And i can see where rafael comes from. His is the spitting image. Maybe rafaels i keep calling ralph. Well, but its rafael, the i guess the english of rafael. Rafael maybe the origins of his interest. This subject came from his dad, who was a detective in the nypd for 20 years during the turbulent eighties nineties, and then in the aftermath of 911. And so during a period of time of extraordinary change. So. So thank you for your service the city and to to to you and your wife. Thank you, rafael. I the opportunity to meet rafael several years ago, George Kelling was in his last year of life. He had had a long bout with cancer. George was a friend. Colleague mentor, coauthor. Its just an extraordinary individual who had influence on these issues. His seminal work with jim wilson broken windows. I was the practitioner of his seminal work broken windows. I was a practitioner of broken windows and put the theories into practice with Great Success because they understood you could not focus just on serious crime. You also had to focus on the disorder, the broken windows people saw every day, the disorder but we are not attending to with any effectiveness at the moment was rafael and his book basically looks at all these issues and explains the importance of them. I first met him when i went to New Hampshire where hes living with his wife, captain cole, went up there four times in the last year and on the first visit there was a young man working with george and they were collaborating on something of great interest to george. In his last year on this earth the george was very disappointed that so much of what he spent his life devoted to trying to educate the importance of Community Policing, the importance of broken windows that it was being attacked and being attacked successfully. The idea that he was about to leave this life, his lifes work, was being torn apart. He had the good fortune in that last year to meet rafael and i would like to think a lot of the influence of this magnificent book was through that exposure to george. Georges last work by the Manhattan Institute was a 3000 word, coauthored by rafael effectively defending Community Policing and that effectively was what made america safe. From that exposure, rafael developed a friendship and admiration, mentorship not only of me and him but him of me. Hes an extraordinary young man with extraordinary Research Capability and most importantly the ability to take what he has learned, what he has analyze and present it in a userfriendly fashion. So many writers and researchers effectively write for themselves and other researchers. Rafael rights for the people. On the left, on the right, in the center. The idea of trying to bring them to common ground, this issue of Public Safety is too important to be in the trenches throwing hand grenades at each other, finding a way to get us out of those trenches on the left and right, to get us into no mans land and have it become common ground. With this book he pushes back on a lot of the misinformation that has taken hold in the last several years and i am hoping if we can advocate forcefully hard, myself and many others who have had the opportunity to read it we can begin to turn the tide, the negative tied that is engulfed america over the last halfdozen years. We are in a perilous place at the moment, new yorkers, in a perilous place in years past, we got through it, we got through it with hard work, with inspiration, we got through it with knowledge. Rafaels hard work is providing us inspiration, providing us with knowledge, providing us with the groundwork platform to make a difference to once again take back the city from those who would destroy it, take back our state and take back our country. My prediction is this will be as influential in the criminal justice world as broken windows was in the 1980s. Why . It is common sense. It makes sense. So rafael, thank you for your credit will contribution to this area of research but more importantly to the real world, thank you. [applause] wow. When you get an introduction like that from someone as important as bill bratton just before you deliver a talk about your first book in a great room like this one at a club associated with one of the most elite universities in the world becomes impossible to resist the sense of accomplishment that im feeling right now. Before i get into the talk i want to take a quick moment to acknowledge some of the people who helped me get to where i am. My family, mom, dad, wife, friends, mentors, but also the supporters of the Manhattan Institute, the organization has given me a professional home. Our trustees and in particular mister nick grenell who has not only just generously supported this project but has been an incredible supporter of my work and the work of the institute for years now and i want you all to know how deeply appreciative i am for that support. I couldnt have done it without you. So now, if i am being honest my sense of accomplishment makes me a bit uneasy and the reason for that is it is in tension with the reality, the issues that im here to discuss, that reality is this isnt about me. Tonight, this book, the debate that it contributes to our first and foremost about the victims of the sort of injustices that inspired my books title. Injustices like a 2019 murder detailed in the books introduction of a young, unarmed chicago mother allegedly shot by a parolee with nine prior felony convictions including one for seconddegree murder. Injustices like the little boy who was forced to run for his life in that same city earlier this summer backpack info as he dodged a bullet cement for the group of young men he made the mistake of walking past at the time. Injustices like the young woman police say was stabbed to death in her Lower East Side apartment earlier this year by almost career criminal with not one, not two about three open cases. And finally, the incredibly strong woman who was robbed of her husband, detective jason rivera, and many of us he was murdered by a repeat offender out on probation. I wrote this book largely because i was tired of reading about the heinous crimes carried out by people who had no business being out on the street, stories the data make clear are not outliers. I wanted to do something about it. A desire that grew as i watched 2,020 unfold. In the wake of george lloyds murder and all the unrest and political grandstanding that followed it politicians and activists sought the neck and of a wave of policy proposals explicitly and that systematically lowering the transaction cost of Crime Commission in raising the transaction cost of Law Enforcement. According to the new york times, 30 states collectively past more than one hundred 40 Police Reform bills in the year following george lloyds death. This was unprecedented acceleration of a trend that had been slowly taking shape since at least 2,010 and to my mind the acceleration of this policy agenda was going to do real damage to Public Safety particularly in the communities reformers said they wanted to help, hence the subtitle, the push for the incarceration and d policing gets wronged and who it hurts most. I was entirely unsurprised when 2,020 saw homicide spike 20 across the United States, the largest 1year increase in generations and i remained unsurprised by the fact that between 2,020, and 2,020 one, more than a set alltime records for homicide and more than a dozen more cities flirted with her 1990s peaks. Over the last several years, serious Violent Crime, homicides in particular became a much larger problem in america. But not one whose effects are evenly distributed throughout our society. Violence has long been geographically and demographically hyperconcentrated. Here in new york about 3. 5 of street segments see 50 of the citys Violent Crime and every year for well over a decade a minimum of 95 of all shooting victims in the city are either black or hispanic, the vast majority of them mailed. Uncomfortable as it may make people in certain circles you will see similar disparities in the statistics of shooting suspects. Nationally black males constitute 70 of the population and makeup, murdered at 10 times the rate of their white counterparts. Crimes like homicide are tightly clustered in a relative handful of neighborhoods in and around american cities. In 2019 the National Murder rate was 5 per one hundred thousand. The ten most dangerous chicago neighborhoods on the other hand which are 95. 7 black and latino, 2019 homicide rate was 61. 7 per 100,000. As high as that number is it understates how dangerous some of those neighborhoods are. West Garfield Park for example had a 2019 murder rate of 131 per 100,000. My book highlights data like these for two reasons. First, a thorough understanding how violence is concentrated helps us understand who will suffer the most should a particular program diminished Public Safety and biological extension, who it is that will gain the most should a particular policy program enhance Public Safety which takes us to the second reason i highlight this data. The reality of crime concentration can contextualize some of the disparities and enforcement statistics that we hear so much about. Disparities that are often seized upon to make a case from asti carteret should and d policing as a means of pursuing racial equity. If the most serious crimes are occurring in very small parts of our cities and affecting a particular Demographic Group more than others than it is entirely reasonable for enforcement resources to be disproportionately deployed to these areas and by extension to see disparities arise from that uneven distribution of Law Enforcement resources. If we accept as legitimate the decision to police neighborhoods where victimization rates are highest we must also accept as legitimate that police are going to interact disproportionately with the people spending time in those neighborhoods. To focus on the disparate rate of interactions is to ignore really important context that accounts for a, undermines the assertion that Law Enforcement disparities are driven exclusively by racial animus. Another example of this very thing could be found in the studies of Racial Disparities in incarceration which show that when you control for the type and severity of the crime committed as well as the age and connell history of of the offenders and question the Racial Disparities and sentencing shrink substantially leading us to the same conclusion drawn by the National Academies of science in 2014 meta analysis of the literature on disparities in incarceration which i will quote verbatim, quote, racial bias in this coronation are not the primary causes of disparities in sentencing decisions or rates of imprisonment. Overall when statistical controls are used to take account of the characteristics, criminal records and personal characteristics, black defendants are on average sentenced somewhat but not substantially more severely than whites. Contextualizing the data is a major theme of this book. Placing the data in their proper context often mutes the rhetorical impact of the harshest critiques of american criminal justice. Two prominent examples include the charges that america has amassed incarceration and Police Violence problem. Lets start with mass incarceration. We often hear it lamented that the United States houses 5 of the worlds population but 25 of its prisoners, whether the us as an incarceration rate that significant a higher than that of other developed democracies, much of that difference can be attributed to the simple if sad fact the United States is home to more pockets of highly concentrated criminal violence, violence of the sort that would result in lengthy prison terms even in the countries that were so often unfavorably compared with. In 2018 germany, england and wales experienced approximately 3200 homicides with combined population of 142. 2 million people. By contrast, just a few neighborhoods in four american cities, chicago, detroit, st. Louis, and baltimore, with combined population of just over 470,000 saw 336 homicides. Just a few american neighborhoods, 10 of the homicides, experienced in three whole countries despite housing less than half of one of those countries combined population. I would also note here that germany sentences a higher percentage of convicted murderers to life in prison than those the us and in the uk, the mandatory minimum for illegal gun possession is 5 years in prison. Such offenses are regularly met in cities like new york. So no, our competitor of lovely higher incarceration is not primarily a function of a more punitive approach to crime. What about Police Violence . It turns out that it has gotten less common over the last few decades and is now not very common at all. In 1971 the nypd shot over 220 people. That number is now down in the low 20s. The problem is you wouldnt notice from listening to the critiques of Law Enforcement that are often amplified in our nations legacy media outlets. You will see a lot of if you are just a casual consumer of the Media Coverage is a hyperfocus on statistically rare but highly salient anecdotes of alleged Police Misconduct as well as data on police presented in the least favorable light possible. Sometimes the injustice of a particular Police Action is plain to the untrained eye. The murder of george floyd is a clear example of that but the reality is police use force in the range of one of all arrests. They fire their guns in 0. 03 of all arrests. A study of one million calls for Service Across three Police Departments, because it resulted in 114,000 criminal arrests, Police Officers used physical force in less then one of those arrests, that entire data set captures just one fatal police shooting. 98 of the cases in which police did use force in that data set the suspect sustained either no or very mild injury. As important as it is to me that you all understand the statistical realities are present in the book, it is even more important to me that you understand what i am not arguing. Im not arguing the criminal Justice System is perfect. Im not arguing that there isnt a subset of americas prison and jail population constituted by people whose incarceration does not serve a legitimate and illogical end. Im not arguing police dont make mistakes or abuse their power and im not arguing that when cops do mess up that the mechanisms meant to ensure accountability are batting a thousand. However, the fact that the institutions traditionally relied upon to play major roles in the position of Public Safety arent perfect does not justify the sorts of radical reorganizations or imaginings being proposed today in the name of equity. Calls for mass incarceration and d policing must be forcefully resisted. Not out of antipathy for commonlaw offenders but out of a deep and sincere empathy for the communities those offenders harm. Such resistance begins with understanding precisely what it is that the advocates of this misguided program get wrong and who they will hurt most if they get their way. Only then can we bring true justice to the community suffering under the weight of americas Violent Crime problem. Thank you. [applause] with that we have some time for audience questions. s there might going around . If not, there is. Raise your hand, wait for the mike and we will go from there. Gentlemen in the blue shirt, its coming to you. You are running the nypd and just based on the statistics you enumerated, what three four things would you do differently than what is being done right now to remedy this . Im not sure i would do much very differently. One of the biggest problems i see when i look at the date on colonel justice outcomes are data from the city of chicago where the average homicide, 12 prior arrests, 20 of those individuals have 20 prior arrests, the same in new york city, what that tells you, the Police Department is doing a pretty good job focusing its resources on the individuals that pose the greatest dangers to the community. It also tells you the criminal Justice System around policing is failing to do its part to back them up in those efforts. I do think what the nypd learned from the 1990s, they are continuing to deploy resources to the neighborhoods that need the most, places where crime is most concentrated, hotspot so to speak, but what we failed to understand and appreciate as a society particularly in the city is the efforts of the nypd can only do so much good if the colonel Justice System will allow them to do it. Of prosecutors refused to prosecute and judges refused to incarcerate and parole boards refused to hold anybody inside, the effects of nypd officers arrest on Community Safety is going to be increasingly muted and i think that is where we are today. Question here upfront . Hang on for the microphone here. What legislation, the last two years, up in albany, created a mess. There are a few things that happened in the criminal Justice Reform at the state level. We had the bail reform which im sure you all heard about and been told that its not having any impact on crime, dont you worry but they are wrong. Its playing it is obvious they are wrong. What they like to do is aggregate the, let funding population into one big pile and say that these individuals who have one prior arrest or firsttime offenders are not going out and hurting anyone. They failed to tell you that when you look at the population of people most likely to be held in a system that is properly functioning with respect to that, those individuals have a high recidivism rate. One of the things we see in new york is a massive jump particularly of violent offenders with open cases so both with respect to total arrest and violent felony arrests weve seen a 25 increase in their share offenders constituted by people with open cases. Thats a major hole in the bail reform defense. The other piece of legislation alongside bail reforms discovery reform which drastically increased the compliance burden associated with kernel prosecution in new york state. This was done without any funding to allow prosecutors to absorb that new burden and that was done by design. This is to starve the beast approached a model justice. We dont like this thing so lets give that thing work it cant handle and no new money with which to do it with forced prosecutors to spend increasing time doing grunt work and paperwork which raised the transaction cost of criminal prosecution forcing prosecutors to triage cases. Or delay them entirely. Those legislative efforts have been backed up by raise the age requirement which made it impossible to charge even the most chronic teenager offenders and Adult Criminal Court which had disastrous results, weve seen acute recidivism rate jump in that population and now more legislation which makes it more difficult to send people back to prison for probation terms, these are very characteristic of the move to d carson rate on a massive scale. They proven to be disastrous in other jurisdictions as well. I was going to ask especially in light of the political changes in new york city, eric adams talks a good game about wanting to curb crime, where does this politically, this emphasis, where did this come from . How do you see it . How did it come about and how can it be solved . Part of it comes from a fading memory of how bad things were in the 1970s, 80s come and 90s and a fading memory of how we got to the point we were in the mid2000s, safety makes us comfortable and reduces the sense that we have to be, have a sense of urgency with respect to issues surrounding Public Safety. It made people much less comfortable operating system that has long been characterized as overly punitive and there is evidence to suggest that we overcorrected in the 1990s in the punitive direction. The problem is that has been met with an attempt to throw the baby out with the bathwater rather than reformat the margins which is what should have been done. I dont think anyone worth their salt would have her argue the colonel Justice System is perfect, that it has never made mistakes. The question is, what risks are we willing to take with the lives of people who live in neighborhoods that most people in this room understandably would never dare set foot in . What risks are we willing to take with their lives as a result of wanting to make ourselves feel better . A lot of people would be made to feel guilty by virtue of the misrepresentation of what the data on criminal justice say and are trying to assuage that guilt by backtracking in ways that have been absolutely disastrous for lowincome communities of color. You said in your speech that the us has a disproportionate percentage of its population incarcerated but it is not dort due to more punitive laws and he went on to cite various punitive laws European Countries have done so far but the fact still remains that the us still has a significantly larger portion of its population incarcerated than these European Countries. Why is that . Simply because we have a lot more crime. Most of the United States is as safe as any place in the world. What is different here is that we have a number of pockets of concentrated crime that occurs at levels that would be very difficult for most people to imagine. When you talk about a homicide rate of 131 per 100,000 like exists in west Garfield Park, we understand that is comparison to what the National Rate is but no idea what that is really like in terms of living in a community. What it means is when you leave the house you genuinely dont know if youre going to have to fight at some point during the day before you come home. You dont know if youre going to have to dodge a bullet. The United States has a lot of that. This is something a lot of people understanding the context of the gun control debate between here and highlighted the we have so many guns in the us and that is why we have a higher Violent Crime rate than other western european democracies and completely forget that reality when we talk about disparities and incarceration. We would do well to remember the terrible distinction the United States has, work to correct it but the main reason we incarcerate so many people compared to other countries is our crime and the fact that we have more resources with which to do this than a lot of other countries, brazil has significantly more Violent Crime than the United States but lower incarceration rate. I dont think its because they prefer not to incarcerate potential murderers and robbers and rapists, just that they dont have the wealth the United States has at its disposal to dedicate to its colonel justice apparatus. My friend on the left. Fantastic job congratulations. Many cities are struggling with early retirement of their Police Forces or struggling to recruit Police Officers. President biden recently reversed course, endorsed funding for Police Departments, republicans might do the same. My question is increase in funding enough to address the retention and hiring problem least apart are facing or do you have any other recommendations for this problem . Its not enough because i dont think the recruitment and retention crisis is a function of the resources being dedicated to recruitment and retention. Weve seen particularly in the last couple years the profession of policing and it is a profession be demonized in a way that i dont think any other profession has seen and it makes people question themselves, why on earth would i take a job that requires me to wearable approve best and have a gun, only to be, metaphorically, spit on by the public that i am risking my life to serve. These are questions i asked myself in 2010 when i took the oath at the nypd. My father sitting here today talked me out of becoming a cop precisely because of the reality that even back then Police Officers couldnt count on the support of their communities, when they were engaged in something that looked controversial on video. Lots of people particularly people we want in policing, people with high levels of education, high levels of psychological stability, people we want to become cops and serve their communities, these are people who have other options and when they raise those options alongside a career in policing it is not at all surprising to me given the rhetoric of the last few years that they choose other options. We are all worse off work. What i dont want to see happen in the United States particularly in new york city is for the delta between the average cop and the average perp to shrink and thats what we are going to see if we make policing the sort of job only people without options want to do. [applause] in the back row. We are moving in that direction, choosing Police Officers. We see a lot of cities lowering requirements at the wrong time but thats not the issue i want to bring up. 65 people were shot in chicago in the last weekend. The majority of them were shot in what we would normally call drivebys. Supposedly they were not known to the people who shot them. What is the impact . This raises the impact of drugs and gangs on shootings, most of these shootings i would predict, as a former police officer, were retaliatory involving drugs and gangs and possibly someone who ratted on someone else and this is an issue politicians and the media refused to address and it ties very much in to your discussion that it is primarily young minority males shooting other young minority males that only gets attention when a few, quote, innocent people are caught up in the gunplay. You make some good points. The direct answer to your question, gangs are playing a huge part of the shooting of violence in the city of chicago. Drugs are smaller part than you might think, the dea unclassified report in 2015 that looked at the percentage of shootings that were a result of drugrelated gangs and it was only 5 of all the shootings but gangrelated shootings contributed the majority of a large plurality of all shootings but the drug point is an interesting one because often times if we talk about the drug debate, we often hear lots of terrible stories about people spending decades in prison for simple drug possession which doesnt actually really happen, only 14 of all of them, have violent, histories are lengthy criminal histories. It also ignores the fact that Drug Enforcement isnt really about drug use. Drug enforcement is often understood to pretext Violent Crime, one of the reasons crack was treated more harshly than cocaine in the 1980s. We hear a lot about was sort of racist construction of the antidrug abuse act which established the one hundredone sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine. What people dont tell you is the antidrug abuse act of 1986 was cosponsored by 16 of the 19 members of the congressional black caucus, not just voted forward cosponsored. By 97 to 3. Black americans played a huge role in the advent of rockefeller drug laws which is the minimum for crack cocaine. Great scholar i recommend to all of you, black silent majority by michael fortner. It is important for us to understand when we hear talk about drug rehabilitation or ending the drug war we are talking about taking an important tool out of the belt of Law Enforcement officers trying to impact Violent Crime anyway they can and theres a massive overlap between people who engage in drug offenses and people who engage in serious violent offenses. One statistic on this, in 2017 the baltimore Police Department identified hundred homicide suspects, 7 in 10 had one prior arrest for drugs. The idea that drug offender can be understood to mean nonviolent offender is deeply wrong, deeply misguided and when we hear about drugs its important to make the point you made the they actually do drive the most serious forms of violence, a lot more than in the past. But that is a tool Police Officers need to retain in the near term. Any others . Second question here . The mike is coming to you. Why not give her a shot because she hasnt asked a question yet. Actually for gavin. I was actually she asked my previous question, the disparity between us and europe with gangrelated violence. I was going to ask a more generic question you touched on throughout your speech. How much of this is less a policing issue, Police Departments are well oiled machine to understand the tactics and philosophy behind the criminal elliott criminology etc. And more of this is failure of the judicial process, prosecutorial process and how do we fix the system through legislative reform . How to force these das to effectuate their mandate and prosecute crime, to let communities fall into chaos and commonality. The general answer to your question, it is a political process. They stop voting in prosecutors, what do we do when they win the election. Alan bragg is not does not hide the fact he wanted to decarcerate on a massive scale. You could go on his website before the election and read what he was going to say in his memo that everyone was shocked to read. We pretended the rest at the Justice System. Continues to operate like a well oiled machine, doesnt need maintenance. Larry krasner, 70 of eligible voters at the primary. Good ideas are waiting, none of those good ideas is to stop all the bad ideas. If theres a really good reason, for policies like three strikes and youre o,