The psychology used to push soft-on-crime policies (10-20-2025--Hour2)

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 dpetecleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. All Right, So there is a fellow named Wesley Yang, one of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation. He is a writer for National Magazine as well as The New Yorker. He is the author of a book called The Souls of Yellowfolk. Wesley Yang is his name. And he took a look at the crime stats and also some of the psychology behind the promotion of certain narratives when it comes to crime data. Okay, And as I was going over in the last hour, right, this whole reform effort in the criminal justice system, it really really ramped up in twenty twenty, but it had been building prior. Right, It's been going on for like the last decade or so. Michael Brown, the Ferguson effect. You know, hands up, don't shoot that lie. And so in the sort of like the mid twenty tens, around twenty fifteen or so, we started seeing just this constant deluge of stories of police killing unarmed black men, right. And so the first thing Wesley Yang points out is that these are statistically rare events police shootings. No, no, actually he's talked about black on white, stranger on stranger killings. And he's talking about this in the immediate aftermath of Arena Zurutzka's murder on the Charlotte light rail line, when that video was really because nobody was talking about that story except us here in the Charlotte area for about two weeks, and then the video, through I think a freedom of information act request by local media outlets, got the video. The video then spread like wildfire on social media. And I always say this whenever I talk about crime data, whenever I talk about crime in general, you are way more likely to be killed by somebody you know, Okay, Like the vast majority of homicides occur with people that know each other. It is to satistically, very very rare that a random stranger is going to come up and murder you, okay. Number one. Number two, Another key point here on crime, particularly when you're looking at racial demographics and violent crime, it is that the vast majority of violent crime occurs in tra racially. In other words, white on white, black on black, Hispanic on Hispanic. Right, it's you're most likely to be victimized by a member of your own racial group. Okay, So always keep that in mind because I know a lot of people try to stir the pod and they want to racialize thing and like make everything about you know, race, But the vast majority of the crimes are intra racial, not interracial, and you are more likely to be victimized by somebody, you know. So keep that in mind. And so he looking at this data point of black on white stranger on stranger killings because that's what we saw in the Zarutzka murder and that film, right, it accounts. This is the data he's got is from twenty nineteen. There were four hundred twenty eight black on white stranger on stranger killings in twenty nineteen, four hundred and twenty eight. That accounts for three percent of all murders. That's it. Now, I'm not minimizing any one of the victims in any one of those cases, right, But that's simply a look at the data point. So that's number one, they are statistically rare events black on white stranger on strangers three percent of all murders. Number two, they are far more common. Those like that data point is actually more common than police killing of unarmed black men. So that's even rarer. And that was the focus of our national obsession for like a decade now. There were twelve killings of unarmed black men in twenty nineteen as the Black Lives Matter movement ramped up to its crescendo. Twelve four hundred and twenty eight black on white stranger on stranger killings for twenty eight versus twelve, that's the comparison. Yet all the attention was on the police killings, the twelve, not the four twenty eight. He says, a narrative can easily be fashioned online by exploiting what's called the availability heuristic, which causes your subconscious mind to confound the vividness and memorability of events for their incidents. That is what right wing accounts focusing on the black on white stranger killings are doing right now. Okay, So from the right and from the racialists and stuff, you know, racist people even. You got a whole bunch of people that are out there promoting and pushing these the videos, and they are tapping into this availability heuristic, which is of course what the whole of the media did from twenty fifteen through twenty twenty for police killings. Right. So it's the same dynamic, same thing culminating in the nationwide freakout that put American cities in flames and resulted in the deaths of thirty people, Which is pretty amazing when you step back and think of it, that thirty people died in the social justice racial reckoning riots, and that was almost three times as many people that had actually been killed by police. Unarmed men killed by police there were twelve, but in the riots there were thirty deaths. He goes on to say this created a pent up interest in re establishing the salience of the second point. The second point is that there are so few police killings, the goal of which is not a nationwide street freak out, but simply the changing of prosecutorial policies that allow for the catch and release of violent repeat offenders. As I documented in the first hour right. That's what happened, the media promoting this idea that black men are being murdered all over the place by white racist cops, when in fact there was like a four hundred you are, it's like four hundred percent or four if forty times the data goes the other way, black on white, stranger on stranger versus white on black police killing again, four hundred and twenty eight black on white stranger on stranger killings, twelve police killings of unarmed black men. But we get every single thing was about the twelve, not the four twenty eight, which then allowed organizations, activists and such who, as I went over with the MacArthur Foundation, wanted quote unquote reforms, and that's how we have the catch and release system that we have right now, and people like Arena Zarutzka paid the price for it. People are paying the price for this catch and release system that was put in place using the twelve unarmed deaths per year, using the twelve and paying no attention to the four hundred and twenty eight. He says, yes, thirty deaths directly attributed to violence during the riots and the largest two years spike and murder deaths in American history, resulting in thousands of excess deaths above the prior baseline as law enforcement was delegitimized for several years. Did you know that it was the largest spike, The largest two year spike in murder deaths in American history occurred after the summer of fiery but mostly peaceful riots. Even amidst the spike, the rate remained lower than its peak in the nineties because crime had been so thoroughly reduced in the prior thirty years, while instances of police violence have also declined drastically, a kind of public policy miracle, nearly unprecedented in modern history. That's what happened before twenty twenty. That's what was going on. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life and art. Stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. Started in nineteen ninety seven and Minhill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos, and albums. The Trusted talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories, all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. 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. All right, so this is from the somebody hang on, somebody did ask me where can this article be found? Okay, not an article. It was a series of tweets that Wesley Yang put out back on or around September eighth. See, but that's see that like, that's my process. That's my show prep process. I like collect stuff and then when I build a topic and then i've I've got stuff from you know, it'll go back a year or two sometimes and I'll just have all of this stuff and then I connect it all together. So that's Wesley Yang, and you can follow him on Twitter at wes Yang at wes Yang and then just go search back in like September. I usually link this up on the show prep page at Patreon as well. It's free. So here is from FBI crime data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Justice Statistics, okay, their Uniform Crime Reporting Program or the UCR. This throughout my entire career, this was always pointed to as sort of the gold standard when doing crime reporting, trying to figure out crime stats, although it seems like in recent years some cities have begun juicing these stats as well. Some cities don't even participate, they don't tell the FBI this stuff. So this is the best that we have to go on though, And this is compiled over at the Global Statistics dot com website, and it's a breakdown crime stats by race. Okay, So first off, remember whites make up a majority of the population, so you would expect to see the total number of whites arrested to be higher than all other racial categories. That's what you should expect to see, and that is in fact what we do see. Okay, The total number of arrests in America in twenty twenty four was just under five point eight million arrests. Total arrests of the five point eight or sorry, three point nine were whites. Then there was another one million Hispanic and one point six million black arrests. For violent crimes, there were four hundred seven thousand, So out of the five point eight million arrests, four hundred seven thousand of them were for violent crimes. And when you look at those data points again, whites make up just a little under half at one hundred ninety six thousand, Blacks at one thirty four thousand, and Hispanics at seventy six thousand. However, if you are looking at proportionality, which is what the left has used in order to foment all of these quote unquote criminal justice reforms, they would say that, okay, four hundred and seven thousand violent crime arrests, whites make up sixty percent of the population, therefore sixty percent of the arrests should be whites, but it's not. It's under half. So whites are underrepresented in the total number of arrests for violent crimes. And what the thinking on the left goes is that, well, that's proof that the system is racist, because it's not making the arrest of the white person for the violent crime. That has been their argument. Going deeper, this is now the percentage of the population. As I mentioned, Whites make up fifty nine percent or sixty percent, roughly fifty nine percent of the population. Hispanics make up nineteen percent, African Americans make up thirteen Asian Americans make up six Okay, so white Americans fifty nine percent of the population. They are victimized fifty three percent of the time. So there's an underrepresentation of whites being victimized by crime. But what did I say earlier? What was one of the first stats I always give? You are more likely right to suffer violent crime at the hands of somebody you know, And it's intraracial white on white, black on black, which is why you see Also African Americans thirteen percent of the total population, they are victimized twenty five percent of the crimes. So they are they are overrepresented in the victimization category, which means what it means that when you have a black offender, you have black victims. And the soft on crime time policies are actually disproportionately harming Black Americans. And yet we're told that this is the humane thing and the equitable thing to do, and I just disagree. I think it's actually inhumane. I think it's pretty atrocious that you're damning people in neighborhoods or in areas in cities to being victimized by violent crime repeatedly. They're at greater risk. Why would you be doing that and then holding yourself up as some sort of moral standard bearer. It's just it's grotesque. It's just grotesque. 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 all 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 in going over the FBI crime data again. This is for twenty twenty four because obviously we don't have all of the data for twenty twenty five. Yet they have and this is I remember every year when they would put out this UCR, the uniform crime reporting numbers, and Charlotte would show up on the list, and some publication would do like, here are the most dangerous cities, and they would rank the cities based on the UCR data, and the police chief and city officials would come out and they would do a press conference with us, and they would say. It doesn't look at the totality of all of the factors, and blah blah blah blah blah, right, trying to tell us that we can't rank the cities, that it's not fair to rank the cities based on the violent crime per capita. That's not it doesn't take into account all of the various factors involved. Okay, of course it can't. It's just telling you the crime data. And when you have all of the crime data for all the different cities and states and you have it broken down on a per capita basis, then yes, it is entirely appropriate to rank them. Here is the city with the highest crime per capita, and here's the city with the lowest. Here's the state with the highest and the state with the lowest, and they break down the data in various ways, and this is per one hundred thousand inhabitants. Okay. The United States total for violent crime three hundred and fifty nine violent crimes per one hundred thousand people, three point fifty nine per hundred thousand. Okay. When you look at what's called the metropolitan statistical area, which is usually larger than just the city, you know, you've got like, well, let me see here, we've got I've got Charlotte's here. Yeah, so Charlotte's MSA includes Charlotte, Concord, and Gastonia. Used to have rock Hill in there, but I think they kicked rock Hill out and they moved Concord in or maybe Gastonia, I forget, but twenty five years ago it used to be rock Hill. So for the metropolitan statistical area, the rate is actually higher. It's not three point fifty nine per one hundred thousand, it's three seventy six, three hundred seventy six. All right. Now, if you look at cities that are outside a metro area, it's actually much lower. You're down at now three thirty eight, three hundred thirty eight crimes instead of again US total three point fifty nine msas or cities three seventy six. Cities that are outside the MSA three thirty eight. So that's what hmm like, fifty fewer crimes per hundred thousand violent crimes per one hundred thousand people simply by being outside of a city. And this is again based on the same per capita account, So it's one hundred thousand people, which means you are safer, in other words, less likely to be the victim of a violent crime if you live outside of a city. All things being equal, that's what the data shows in the non metro counties per hundred thousand people, it's not at three thirty eight, it's not at three seventy six as it is in the cities. It's one hundred and ninety five one ninety five. You are far less likely to be the victim of a violent crime if you live in a non metro county in America. Okay, so again, let's take a look at the UH state numbers again. US total three point fifty nine, three hundred and fifty nine violent crimes per hundred thousand North Carolina, not three fifty nine, three seventy six. That's what North Carolina is, three seventy six per one hundred thousand. South Carolina four hundred thirty seven per one hundred thousand. I don't know what's happening in South Carolina. Obviously a lot of island crime. I know that's Look, that's the data per one hundred thousand, four hundred thirty seven per hundred thousand. Now I will say that North Carolina is lower than the Oh no, I take it back. We were lower, yeah, not really for the last that was look at twenty twenty three. So the crime has dropped from twenty three to twenty four, but we are still above the regional per capita number by like fifteen violent crimes per one hundred thousand. So North Carolina is by and large a pretty dangerous state based on the FBI crime stats. Now, how about Charlotte. I'm glad you asked. I have that as well, Charlotte, Concord, Gastonia, MSA. This includes Anson, Cabaris, Chester, Gaston, Ayerdell, Lancaster, Lincoln, Mecklenburg, Rowan, Union and York counties as well as Charlotte Mecklenburg. Our number four hundred and twenty seven violent crimes per one hundred thousand, four twenty seven. So that's higher than the state averag it's almost to the South Carolina state average, and it is way above the US average. Okay, that's the comparison. So when you hear the local officials say, oh, well, the crime has dropped in the last year, and although we did have like four homicides this weekend, we are still more dangerous. We are more dangerous in the cities than in the counties. We are more dangerous than the US per capita number on average. That's what the data is. Back to the write up at Global statistics dot com, violent incidents involving white offenders was lower than the share of white persons in the population. Their representation in violent crime is proportionally lower than their population percentage, suggesting different victim is a and defending patterns across racial groups. African Americans are the primary group arrested for murders, robberies, and weapons violations. That's the primary group, despite representing only thirteen percent of the total US population. The share of violent incidents involving black offenders was greater than the population percentage of black persons, highlighting disproportionate representation in violent crime statistics. Why see, that's the rub right Why and what the left has told us for the last fifteen years is systemic racism. It's somehow another, not the the attacker's fault, it's not the criminal's fault or something. It's the system, it's the society, it's everything else. And that prompted the types of programs and trainings that the MacArthur Foundation has embedded throughout the country, including here in Charlotte Mecklimber, which is how you end up with a catch and release judicial system. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Asheville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together for a big old reunion, Cabins of Asheville has the ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that truly matter. 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They sit in the prep stack for a very long time, Like for example, I have a Google document and I put links into this Google document, and if I don't get to it, it just keeps kind of getting pushed down the list, you know, and sometimes I'll group them together by topic or something. But I had to archive one Google document because it became eighty paid long of just links to stories. And so now on my second Google document and I saw this morning. I was up to thirty pages. So anyway, that's how I end up with this story connected to the crime stats. And this story is from August twenty twenty three. Okay, but it's connected. Florida State University criminology professor Eric Stewart was a guru of the claim that systemic racism infests America's police and American society, and then they found out that his data was crap and he was out of a job. The academic was fired after almost twenty years of his data were found to be in question. Okay, he had figures that were used in an explosive study which aimed the legacy of lynchings in America made white people perceive black people as criminals and that this problem was worse among conservatives. College authority said he was being fired for incompetence and false results. Among the studies he has had to retract were claims that whites wanted longer sentences for blacks and latinos. To date, six of Stuart's articles published in major academic journals like Criminology and Law and Society Review. Between two thousand and three and twenty nineteen. Six of his major published articles have been fully retracted after allegations that his data was fake or so badly flawed it should never have been published. The professor's termination came four years after his former graduate student, Justinicket, blew the whistle on his research. Think about that. It's the only reason why this guy got canned. All these studies that were supposedly peer reviewed in these respectable publications, very science and data right. No, it took a grad student to blow the whistle on his fabricated data. Pickett said they had worked together in twenty eleven researching whether the public was demanding longer sentences for black and Hispanic criminals as those minority populations grew, and the paper that they put together claimed they did claimed the public was demanding longer sentences as the minority populations got larger, but Stuart had fiddled the sample size to deliver that result when the real research did not. When the investigation into Stuart began in twenty twenty, he claimed, you want to think a guest, Yeah, he was the victim. He claimed to be the victim, and that his grad student that worked with him, Justin Pickett quote. This is his quote. Eric Stewart's quote. That Pickett quote essentially lynched me and my academic character. You know, Justin Pickett didn't do that to you. After sixteen years as a professor of criminology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Provost James Clark formally notified him that he was being terminated that summer. This guy, Eric Stewart. According to Google scholar, he and his work were cited almost nine thousand times by other researchers. This is the same scandal, like the same thing that James Lindsay, Peter Burgosi, and Helen Pluckrose did with the Grievance Studies affair, where they put fake papers into publications in order to prove that they're not peer reviewing anything and they're just looking for the headline. They want some research to confirm their prior opinions and biases. That's what this guy did, no difference. 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 thepetecallanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.