The DOJ probes faked crime stats; MacArthur money funds soft on crime policies (10-20-2025--Hour1)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpeakclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for your support. Alrighty, so, the New York Post piece by Charles Gasparino headlined Trump's DOJ found evidence Democrats are skewing crime stats ahead of the midterm elections. No, really, nobody would do something like that to try to paint a rosier picture in order to not suffer the consequences of their policies. According to the Peace, officials in President Trump's Justice Department have been scrutinizing crime data over the last few months, and they have found evidence that Democrat politicians have been skewing crime stats ahead of the midterms. Illinois Democrat Governor JB. Pritzker, a vocal opponent of Trump's use of federal troops for both immigration enforcement and fighting big blue city crime has lately touted double digit declines in Chicago crime rates, where shootings and homicides on our highways are down sixty seventy eighty percent depending on where you look. Which that's a quote from Governor Pritzker shootings and homicides on our highways, which is a very limited data set. Nor like I'm going to take all the homicides in Chicago and I'm gonna throw out any of the homicides that occurred not on a highway, right. I don't understand who keeps track of this. Like, I've been following crime data for twenty plus years and I have never seen it broken down into a category. Of homicides on highways. Okay, now, yes, car crashes like fatalities on highways. Yes, homicides on highways. No, I guess it's like so like, if it's a drive by shooting and it's on the highway, then that would count. But if it's a drive by shooting on like a suburban residential street or something, or maybe in the downtown Chicago area not a highway, so that would not be counted. Is that the deal? I don't know. It's just a really bizarre thing to say. The number of felonies in Chicago, not to mention in New York, Los Angeles as well as Portland, is declining. Right, you keep hearing this, it's all declining. All these numbers are dropping well. According to the sources at the DOJ, the reason why the numbers are declining is because prosecutors are knocking down felonies to something less severe for political reasons. No really. Famous among them is Alvin Bragg, Manhattan District Attorney, who has continued to allow violent defenders to plead to misdemeanors instead of felonies, even after committing robberies or violent assaults. This is what you call juicing the stats. I have heard people call it juking the stats as well, but I don't I don't know which one is correct. I prefer juicing the stats, right, because you take the stat and then you just like beat it to a bloody pulp, right, wheeze it, you drain it, rather than juking, because like juking seems like like a football move, like in order to get around somebody, like you juke them, you know, which doesn't I don't know. I guess either could apply. I'm down a rabbit. Hole. Sorry. One Trump DOJ source pointed to the recent case of David Mazariegos, a sword wielding maniac who was arrested last week for the allegedly unprovoked killing of a straphanger that's what they call subway riders straphangers. A man named Nicola Tanzi. This maniac attacked this guy, stomping him on the head repeatedly outside of a Brooklyn subway station. He killed him, beat him to death, attacked him with the sword. Mazariegos, the maniac, has a long criminal record, and yet this past July, just before his latest ee want to act, a New York City judge lowered his bail in an assault case because prosecutors did not charge him with a felony, instead settling for a misdemeanor. See. So, if you knock the charges down from the violent crimes, now it's no longer a violent crime. See and it shows up in the stat as a misdemeanor, and it's not violent anymore. It's only the really serious violent crimes that we count. And this guy that murdered the straphanger is not an outlier. He is the norm. When the DOJ. Stats are released, they expect this to be in the coming weeks. They should be a wake up call for the Democrat Party, says Charles Gasparino at The New York Post. That's because these big city economies will continue to sour as more tax paying residents leave for places that provide safety. Of course, the Democrat leadership must also find the necessary guts to push back against the policies and policing edicts of far leftists like aoc Zoron Mamdani who are ascendant in the party. DOJ sources believe Governor Pritzker's recent talking points are part of a concerted effort by the National Democrats to hide the various forms of blight created by their support for police defunding measures, to appease the social justice types who believe law enforcement is racist. And finally, at the very end of this piece, again at the New York Post, Fox Business reporter Tuta lukaj Okay. Anyway, this reporter uncovered proof that even the good crime stats are actually horrible crunching other data on the NYPD website for reported acts of murder, rape, robbery, felony, assault, burglary, grand larceny. If you look at the number of reported acts. Those numbers rose every year from twenty twenty through twenty twenty three. Then the number dropped a bit in twenty twenty four, even with the decline from last year. We don't have obviously twenty twenty five stats yet, but I mean, and the key here is that they were looking at the number of reports rather than the disposition of the case through the charges. Right. Knocking down from a felony to a misdemeanor gives you this fake idea of what the stat is. But if you look at the number of reports, those numbers have they skyrocketed. They dropped off in twenty twenty four a little bit, yes, but it's still higher than all the way back to the year twenty thirteen. That was the last year Mayor Mike Bloomberg was mayor, and that marked the beginning of the end of Rudy Giuliani's crime crackdown. Twenty thirteen. The number so like, that's how high crime has gotten in New York City, for example, which brings me back to Mecklenburg County. You know, stories are powerful. 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They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are, visit creative video dot com. Alrighty, so there's a fella from Ashville. I don't know if he's from Ashville actually, because like very few people are actually from Ashville, but he lives out there and he sort of exploded onto the Twitter verse scene during Hurricane Helene a year ago. His name is Matt van Swoll, real name, and. He would do a lot of videography and stuff of like the damage. And then he became very disillusioned with the local government response. The governor at the time, my good friend Ray Cooper, and so he had this sort of walk way moment from the Democrat party. He'd always considered himself to be a Democrat and he's became very disillusioned. And he's got a massive following now on Twitter, formerly known as x. Yeah. He's got three hundred and sixty five thousand followers now, Okay, And over the last few weeks, I want to say, he has now turned his attention to the outrageousness of what I call our catch and release court system here in Charlotte. And it's not just in Charlotte, it's all over the place. But we keep proving that, like we really are committed to this bit, right. And so he's got another case. And so he just he posted some of these cases and he just puts them out there, and he's got this one. I think this was today, yeah, today, this morning. Herbert Jordan, a Charlotte man who has been arrested fifty previous times. That's five oh fifty times, including for allegedly assaulting a police officer as well as assaulting women. And he has just been arrested again for assaulting a woman while out on bond, and he gets arrested again for another assault on a female and he was given five thousand dollars bond. It's just nuts. Why is this happening? How does this keep happening? Well, if you go to the Mecklenburg County website mechanc dot gov. In fact, if you go to CJS dot mechnc dot gov, CJS criminal Justice and Safety, I believe is what the CJS stands for. And they've got a nice little write up there about the Safety and Justice Challenge. In twenty twenty, this is from the county's own website. Okay, In twenty twenty, Mecklenberg County was awarded its second grant in the amount of one million dollars from the MacArthur Foundation. Now, if that name rings a bell, it's because they fund a lot of NPR programming and such. It's part of the Safety and Justice Challenge that the MacArthur Foundation was part of and still is as I understand it, and the money is to be used was to be used to continue supporting the county's efforts to develop and implement strategies capable of positively impacting the main drivers of the local jail population. I'm going to get to the root cause. In twenty twenty, okay, they got Mecklenberg got its second grant. In twenty twenty two, the county was awarded another three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to ensure recent reforms were sustainable. Okay, so they put the reforms in place at the height of the fiery but mostly peaceful rioting. They started with this, you know, reform agenda. The MacArthur Foundations throwing all this money around. Mecklenburg picks up a bunch of grants, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of oh here. It is total investment in Mecklinberg County so far three point three million dollars. Well, what is the MacArthur Foundation buying? Right? You don't just hand out this money for no reason. To continue safely reducing the jail population. That's the goal. To safely reduce the jail population. The county plans to implement strategies. Now, there's a lot of pr corporate gobblygook in here, okay, but these strategies aimed at addressing system and efficiencies, enhancing existing services, providing non jail alternatives for defendants, and increasing community engagement in local justice system reform. This will include enhancing services provided to defendants pre trial, implementing more meaningful first appearance hearings, and improving case processing, and partnering with residents to identify and implement community led programs and policy interventions. They touted the fact that between twenty fourteen and twenty seventeen, Mecklenberg County reduced its jail population by eleven percent, but they want that number to be higher. They want a further reduction of another seventeen percent. That's the point. That's what MacArthur is funding, a reduction in the number of people in the county jail. Does it start making sense now as to why people keep getting released with no bond. Here's a great idea. 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I just gave you the numbers. Three point three million dollars that's been given to Mecklenburg County Court System and they've they've got a whold write up on their website. They're proud of this, they're proud. Of the work, doing the work right with the. Goal to clear out the jails. That's the goal. They want a reduction in the jail population. And the sort of baseline reduction that the MacArthur Foundation proposes is twenty five percent. And so while Mecklenberg was clearing out the jail population. Prior to twenty seventeen, got jail jail numbers down eleven percent. They want it now reduced another seventeen percent on top of that, and. How do you do that? Mecklenberg County's Criminal Justice Services and Criminal Justice Advisory Group partnered with New York State Psychiatric Institute to create a comprehensive implicit bias training for criminal justice professionals, and that could be anybody. This training examines how unconscious or implicit biases can affect an individual's thought processes and decision making in both subtle and overt ways. What's this about the disproportionality and disparities at the decision points of arrest, filing charges, and booking into jail. In other words, there is an overrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics in the jail, and so they have a higher number of a proportion as a proportion of the jail population than you see in the general population. And so therefore that disparity is proof of systemic racism. Remember this is from like five years ago. This was what the Left was doing in everything. All sorts of disparities that you see in outcomes is proof of racism. That was their baseline argument. So the MacArthur Foundation is going around the country funding these programs, funding these trainings and such, and again from this bulletin, dubious racial quotas are being used to determine who goes to jail and who stays free, and the decisions making it possible are happening behind closed doors, funded by big bucks from an unaccountable left wing organization in Chicago, with leaders tied to radical movements, including one key official tied to a movement aimed openly at abolishing police across America. One of the key forces behind this disturbing trend is the MacArthur Foundation, a tax exempt behemoth with some seven billion dollars that is showering huge grants on police departments and law enforcement agencies nationwide. Well and as I just read, also our court system. MacArthur is buying drastic policy changes outside of the democratic process and the reach of voters. No kings, anybody, what does democracy look like? Show me what democracy looks like? Oh you street chanters yesterday, where are you on this? You're okay with all of this? You're okay with some unnamed shadowy foundation pumping millions of dollars to change policies behind the scenes. They refuse records requests. They say, we don't have to give you information. Foyas don't matter. Freedom of Information Act requests don't matter to us because we're we're a private entity. With the nearly two hundred and fifty million dollars spent so far on the Safety and Justice Challenge, the point is to reduce the number of criminals behind bars in communities across America. Again, that's what this is. So like, I come across this, this initiative, the Safety and Justice Challenge, and I do a quick search in Mecklenburg and sure enough, there it is three point three million dollars that's come into Mecklenburg County from the MacArthur Foundation. This is what they're buying. They're buying decarceration. And so when we see these stories somebody with fifty arrests, violent rap sheet arrests, how is this person getting released over and over and over and over again. Well, that would be the Safety and Justice Challenge, the implicit bias. See, it's not that this person is a danger or a threat to his fellow citizens. No, no, no, it's that the system is racist against him. That's why he keeps beaten up on women. Don't you say it's racism. According to the bulletin, this starts from the false assumption, a false assumption that is ubiquitous in the MacArthur Foundation's work, even beyond its criminal justice programs. This false assumption that the reason that people from quote, communities of color are arrested and jailed more often is because of racism in police and government. But countless studies and reports have pointed out the flaw in this thinking, behind the idea that alleged systemic racism is responsible for this issue. It is not. It's not like you may have a better case to. Make on things like you know, being pulled over more often, that kind of stuff, like you know, ticketing and that sort of thing, But when it comes to violent offenses, like the data is pretty clear here. You got a dead body, Like that's a stat like, there's no way, there's no way to dress that up as some form of systemic racism, you know, changing policy and systems with big money rather than through the legislative process and public debate is what they are doing. Launched more than five years ago, the scheme has more than fifty jurisdictions in more than thirty states involved. So when I was a kid, my grandpa died with Alzheimer's, and before he died, my mom and my dad took care of him as he got worse. Forty years ago, there were no treatments and not much support for caregivers and family. But things are different today because of the work of so many people, including the Alzheimer's Association of Western Carolina. It's a great organization with awesome people with huge hearts. I've been a supporter for twenty five years. This cause means a lot to me. I participate in the annual Walk to end Alzheimer's and I'm leading a Charlotte team again this year, and it's called once again Pete's Pack. You can sign up and you can join the team and walk with us. It's on October eighteenth that truest field sign up at alz dot org slash walk and then you can search for my team name Pete's Pack. There's also a link at thepetepod dot com. There's also a link in the description of this podcast. Also, I'll be am seeing the Gastonia Walk on October eleventh and so You can make a team and join that one too, or make a donation and help me hit my goal of five thousand dollars. If you do, I really appreciate it. There are a bunch of other walks all over the Carolinas. You can go to alz dot org slash walk for all the dates and locations. We're closer than ever to stopping Alzheimer's. Can you help us get there? Will you walk with me? For a different future, for families, for more time for treatments. This is why we walk. From the text line driven by liberty Buick GMC from the grumpy Major, He says, this MacArthur Foundation program is appropriately named. It is one hundred percent a challenge to safety and justice. True, it's called the Safety plus Justice Challenge. That's right. It is challenging these things. So they've pumped two hundred and fifty million dollars on this safety and Justice challenge across the country. Three point three million of it at least has come into Mecklenburg County's court system, and they are changing policy and systems with this money rather than going through a legislative process or public debate. Launched more than five years ago, they've got fifty jurisdictions in thirty states involved. Already. Over on its Facebook. Page, MacArthur Program Operatives and its partners have defended their view that reducing jail populations would not cause increases in crime. They say, quote narratives connecting these reforms to rising crime rates are misleading and damaging. So again, this goes back six years, five six years. That's the window where all of this stuff ramped up, right COVID, yes, twenty twenty, but more importantly, the fiery but sometimes peaceful rioting that. Occurred after George Floyd's death. Right, that's when the left had a fever for this kind of reform. Everybody you know literally literally took a knee in the face of these demands, and everybody thought, this is why Roy Cooper, my good friend ray, former governor of North Carolina, now running for US Senate and trying to run away from his Criminal Justice Equity task Force that he put together, with the co chairs of that task force being the current governor, but then Attorney General Josh Stein and Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls, and their blueprint that they put together on this task force is right in line with the safety and Justice Challenge program goals. It's all the same philosophy, the quote reform philosophy, and so five years ago they're like, no, no, no, no, these reforms they got nothing to do with increases in crime, No, no, nothing at all related. We just want to make sure that we don't have people in jails. The Criminal Justice Reform Schemes goal, it continues, is to reduce over incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails. Local judges and law enforcement officials all signed off. Among the strings attached to the grants were demands that, under the guise of racial justice and equity, more and more criminals be released from detention and less people be placed there. Despite the ongoing surgeon crime. Local authorities agreed to obey the foundation's quotas by ensuring almost twenty five percent less people in local jails. It's a quota system. MacArthur has been instrumental in peddling the narrative that American police are racist and that law enforcement perpetuates white supremacy. The Center for American Progress led a Mayer Plan, for instance, called for rejecting outdated tough on crime approaches, claiming that being tough on crime was racist because it allegedly has a disproportionate effect on black and Latino communities. The MacArthur Foundation also showered money on the left wing Brennan Center for Justice so it could produce a report. That report headlined reducing racial and ethnic Disparities in Jails Recommendations for local practice. Right, this is the scaffolding upon which all of these reforms, this catch and release philosophy is built. Among other debunked left wing talking points taking aim at police, the report argued that police supposedly suffer from implicit racial bias. Right. That's what the report showed, and that's what the Social Injustice Challenge gives Mecklenburg County the training implicit bias training. Ironically, despite the MacArthur Foundation's condescending attitudes towards both police and minorities, polls show Black and Latino Americans overwhelmingly want the same amount or even more police in their communities, not less. Indeed, black and Latino Americans, like all Americans, also want criminals taken off the streets, rather than allowing them to roam free, terrorizing their families, their businesses, and their neighborhoods. Because the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. This is how you destabilize a society, and that's really the goal. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.