Kurt Schlichter joins me to wrap up a crazy week. Criminologist Dr. Adam Dobrin and I discuss how California, going weak on criminals in 2014, is contributing to a rise in crime. And fellow rebel, the Hollywood conservative Amanda Head, is with me to discuss the backlash Hollywood and professional sports have for conservatives.
00:03:02.660He's the guy who actually comes through.
00:03:06.400I mean, you look at the normal Republicans and they're just this – they're just not talking to or about or taking the side of normal folks.
00:05:33.080I mean, I was out, you know, whether it's at the gym, which, yes, I do go to, or it is, you know, a suburban party like I was at, you know, a kid's graduation party yesterday.
00:05:44.340And I'm with a bunch of suburban moms and dads.
00:05:55.300This is a Washington, D.C. firestorm and all the cowardly Republicans who have, you know, infested Washington and who think Washington has its fingers on the pulse of America, when in reality Washington has its fingers on the pulse of Washington.
00:06:14.400And out here, we're like, you know, people are, to the extent they're thinking about it all, and they're not really talking about it, but they're like, OK, well, yeah, if I were arrested for a crime, I'd be separated from my kids, too.
00:06:33.420You know, Kurt, last week I had a meeting in Miami, a dinner meeting with some old friends of mine, and we were in an area of Miami, Brickell.
00:07:36.020Your wife, you know your wife is Cuban.
00:07:37.620Well, look, the in-laws were here a couple weeks ago, and they were not big Trump guys because they're very religious and they're very decent people.
00:09:22.960You know, if you send your kid to his room for, I don't know, throwing a ball through the window, are you separating children from their families?
00:11:34.080Because if they say you have to catch and release, well, then Trump goes to Congress and says, the court is telling me I have to catch and release.
00:21:10.880You know, I often talk on the show about the broken windows policing strategy, things we
00:21:17.160did back when I was a cop in New York in the 1990s and how attacking the little things led
00:21:22.600to the bigger crimes being reduced, being mitigated.
00:21:25.100Well, it's unfortunately, I should say it unfortunately seems to be the case that liberals around the country, the left, are starting to reverse that policy.
00:21:33.380Now, an associated, associated press story, death's rise after California reduces criminal penalties.
00:21:41.660Here to unpack this with me is our good friend, Dr. Adam Dobrin, a criminology professor and all-around knowledgeable guy on these issues.
00:21:52.660It's associated press story out of Sacramento, California.
00:21:53.660It says California voters decision to reduce penalties for drug and property crimes in 2014 contributed to a jump in car burglaries, stoplifting, and other death.
00:22:05.940Another researcher said larcenies increased about 9% by 2016 for about 135 more deaths per 100,000 residents than when the tougher penalties had been around.
00:22:19.820This, to me, I mean, you're the scientist, you're the data scientist, but this, to me, sure seems like correlation, is it not?
00:22:27.020Seems like it to me, and I often warn people when you have, I mostly look at homicide data, when you have a small increase, you're going to have a huge percentage increase.
00:22:38.080That rate increase is huge, but the percentage is, seems like a pretty, when you hear, oh, 9%, that's not much, but 135 for 100,000, that's a huge increase.
00:22:46.560That means they just have a pretty high baseline to start with.
00:22:49.820Yeah, I mean, here's a number that, it says San Francisco alone recorded more than 30,000 auto burglaries last year.
00:23:11.120So, this says Proposition 47 lowered criminal sentences for drug possession, theft, stoplifting, identity theft,
00:23:18.760receiving stolen property, writing bad checks, and check forgery from felonies that can bring prison time to misdemeanors that often bring minimal, if any, jail time.
00:23:29.900While researchers linked the measure more to theft, they found that it did not lend or lead to the state's increase in violent crime.
00:23:37.780But violent crime spiked 13% after Prop 47 passed.
00:23:43.960But researchers, again, said the trend started earlier and was mainly because of unrelated changes in crime reporting by the FBI and the LAPD.
00:23:53.300Are these researchers far left state researchers or does that claim hold water?
00:23:57.420Did Proposition 47, which reduced the penalties on misdemeanor, larceny, theft-type crimes, have no direct effect on violent crime, or did it?
00:24:07.600It's hard to say, you know, I don't want to put my reputation as a criminologist on the line here and say that's exactly what happened.
00:24:13.380But, you know, any kind of measurement change, if the FBI is measuring things differently in California or if LAPD is reporting things differently, that's going to have a change.
00:24:21.800But city after city, history has shown clearly that when you don't enforce these minor quality-of-life crimes, eventually you're going to have an increase in other-type crimes either, too.
00:24:33.100So if the violent crime that went up was not a direct correlation or response to these crimes going up because of the reduced penalties, it's going to happen.
00:24:43.320So let's just be patient, and it's going to go up.
00:24:46.940I mean, when you look at cities like San Francisco and just the epidemic of just overt drug use and vagrancy and just filth in the street, that eventually is going to create violent crimes.
00:25:05.400They say the FBI broadened its definition of sexual crimes in 2014 while the LAPD improved its crime reporting after previously underreporting violent crimes.
00:25:16.900If it weren't for those changes, researchers found California's violent crime rate would have increased 4.7 percent from 2014 to 2016.
00:25:28.220So what are they saying, that the increase in violent crime would have been less had the FBI and the LAPD not modified its reporting mechanisms?
00:25:37.700Well, those were significant changes, the change in the sex crimes.
00:25:40.800But how many of the increase of that percentage of violent crimes was all sex crime?
00:26:01.480It basically said in a sex crime, only males could be offenders and only females could be victims.
00:26:07.180That was sort of the biggest change that they had.
00:26:09.740And then there were some more specific activities that were included, that were excluded.
00:26:14.560But now they include a male can be a victim, which is a huge change.
00:26:21.460Until 2014, by FBI definition, males could not be the victim of rape, which is just silly.
00:26:28.380And they said only males could be the offenders of rape, which is also silly.
00:26:32.460But what they also included was some measure of consent that it includes now people who are incapable of giving consent, people with less developed mental capacities, and also based on intoxication, that consent is a key part of this definition.
00:26:51.380So it's a modernized, real definition.
00:26:54.500The previous definition basically came out of medieval England, so it's undercounting all the crimes that were out, all the sex crimes.
00:27:02.660So that expanded definition of what, for example, a sex crime was on the part of the FBI is partially why we're seeing, what is this, an 8.3% increase over what would have been a 4.7%.
00:27:48.160But there have been some changes over time, but not, that was the biggest one recently.
00:27:54.700Particularly, you can exclude, in hate crime, they've changed, expanded the definition, but that's not relevant here either.
00:28:00.800Okay, so this then might, might indicate, I don't want to put your reputation as a criminologist on the line, but this might indicate something troubling, that there's another reason for the rise in crime.
00:28:10.420It's not expanded definitions by the FBI.
00:28:14.920But, another caveat, crime has been historically low for just 10, 15 years, and so it's going to naturally, it has to go up.
00:28:24.900But I've been saying that now for 10 or 15 years, crime has to go up, it has to go up, it has to go up, and then it hasn't been going up.
00:28:30.760So, this is, this is the early part of the reversal.
00:28:34.780Now, when we see crime going up now in America, it's primarily hitting a handful of cities.
00:28:41.820It's not the whole country that we're having as inverts.
00:28:44.720And so there are, you know, a half a dozen cities where violent crime, and again, what we're seeing in these California cities isn't violent crime.
00:28:52.880The huge change, it's, you know, it's these quality of life, the drugs, the vandalism, things like that, the California change.
00:29:01.020Now, the big problem, and I think that article that you're quoting alludes to, is this is going to have a longer-term effect, that the politicians think they're being nice to the criminals by being less severe, by changing felonies to misdemeanors.
00:29:13.440In the long run, this is going to backfire, because if these people were charged and convicted of felonies, that means they generally go to prison, and they would get treatment for their drug problem.
00:29:24.640Now that they're getting misdemeanors that aren't being charged, aren't being prosecuted, they're not getting treatment.
00:29:30.160And so this is going to exacerbate the drug problem that's sort of the underlying root of all of this.
00:29:36.420Okay, so let me, let's dig into this a little bit more.
00:29:38.960They're saying that the ballot measure led to the lowest arrest rate in state history in 2015, in California state history, as experts said police frequently ignored crimes that brought minimal punishment.
00:29:51.900So does that mean that the police were saying, well, if the political powers that be aren't going to send these people to jail, then we're not even going to waste our time arresting for these crimes?
00:30:00.520Absolutely, and given the political climate in that era, that you see a couple of high-profile events where police were going after misdemeanor offenders that blew up, and then the police got in a tremendous amount of negative press, and actually life-threatening situations, then what's the point?
00:30:19.140Why put your career or even your life at risk to enforce a crime that the system isn't going to follow through on?
00:30:26.920I'm going to go through this pretty much paragraph by paragraph, line by line, because it's very interesting.
00:30:31.540Jail bookings in 12 sample counties, I assume California counties, dropped about 8%, driven by a reduction in bookings for Proposition 47 crimes.
00:30:44.380If you're an idealistic, somewhat naive, hopeful person, you're going to think, well, this person's not going to be over-involved by the system.
00:31:12.080The system's not going to create this label of criminal, so they're not going to self-identify as criminal, so then they're going to become less criminal.
00:31:19.460That's how you justify it to yourself.
00:31:21.600Well, they kind of say this here, okay, in the next line.
00:31:23.960Offenders convicted of those crimes, Prop 47 crimes, were about 3% less likely to be convicted of a new crime within two years.
00:31:31.800But the researchers said it's not clear if that was because they didn't actually re-offend, commit new crimes, or because they were less likely to be arrested and prosecuted because of the lower penalties, thereby keeping authorities in the dark about whether or not they were committing new crimes.
00:31:49.220I added the end to that, but that's essentially the summary.
00:31:52.780Yeah, if police aren't catching and prosecuting, then that's going to lower recidivism right there.
00:31:59.220Well, because there's no reporting up to the FBI, up to the state, so you don't know it.
00:32:03.760And again, like I said earlier, the public is aware of this as well, so they're not going to be calling the police.
00:32:09.580If you get your car window broken and stuff stolen out of your front seat of your automobile, what's the point in calling the police?
00:32:17.800They're going to tell you to call your insurance company.
00:32:19.420And let's face it, hell, even in places where they don't do this, the cops aren't out there looking for the guy that broke into a car.
00:32:24.820No, but you couple that with sort of the mentality of the left right now, the cops aren't the good guys.
00:32:31.120And the less interaction you have with the police, the better.
00:32:33.820It's like a perfect storm of fomenting more and more petty crime because the public's not going to call the police, but the criminals know that even if they are caught, which is a low probability event anyway, even in the cities that do prosecute, let's all be aware of this.
00:32:51.100When crimes are committed, the actual probability of getting caught by the police is very, very, very low, that the arrest statistics, and I'm going to combine them, I'm not going to just real simple, for the index offenses, murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, larceny, burglary, and arson, it's around 10% to 15% of the arrest.
00:33:12.140Of perpetrators that are apprehended after the fact?
00:33:15.280No, no, of crimes that are reported to the police.
00:33:17.380Those index offenses, hold on, go back.
00:33:21.880Those index offenses are, is that number you gave me, the 10% to 15% of people caught for those index offenses?
00:34:06.040We all knew we were generating that report as a matter of crime stats.
00:34:09.500The person was going to go to their insurance company, they're going to get the window fixed, and everybody was going to go on their merry way.
00:34:13.420The likelihood of that detectives weren't stopping what they were doing, dusting these windows for fingerprints to hunt down the dial broke the window.
00:34:20.620And the reality is a lot, we see this after city after city after city in the past 15 years or so, is a lot of cities are overtly doctoring those crime statistics so that they don't look like they're high crime cities.
00:34:32.260Well, we see that everywhere where they sort of cook their crime books, right, by discouraging residents from taking a minor thing a little bit too far, especially the quality of life crimes.
00:34:44.620And so I think you couple that with everything that's going on in these California cities, when they say crime went up, whatever, 9% or 12%, it's most likely more than that.
00:34:54.640That's just based on very limited data.
00:34:57.500Okay, so let's go back to something you spoke about a little while ago from this AP piece.
00:35:01.960And this piece is only from about, from last week.
00:35:05.640Reduced penalties mean fewer drug addicts now seem to be getting treatment than are stealing to support their habit.
00:35:12.920And they put that in quotes, are stealing to support their habit.
00:35:16.180That St. Louis County, St. Louis Obispo County Chief Probation Officer, Jim Salio, President of the Chief Probation Officers of California.
00:35:27.320Well, I think it's pretty straightforward.
00:35:28.960It's that when you have drug addicts who are committing these crimes to get money to support their drug habits, then unless they get some form of treatment, they're just going to continue on this self-destructive path.
00:35:42.060And it's going to get worse and worse and worse.
00:35:43.260And last year, according to the CDC, we had almost 69,000 drug overdose deaths in this country.
00:35:49.700And one of the things that does seem to work, and, you know, rehab programs aren't the greatest things in the world, but some of these drug treatment programs in correctional facilities do have a pretty good track record.
00:36:00.300And so by being nice to these people, by not arresting them, from dropping it to a felony, to a misdemeanor status, that even if they are arrested, they're not going to be in a facility that has treatment.
00:36:11.360You're encouraging the addict to go steal more to support their habit.
00:36:45.840It's better than having them on the street, being able to rip people off for drug money.
00:36:48.900And even the eight months or so they're in jail, that's eight months that they're not doing drugs and they're getting clean and they're not overdosing.
00:36:57.060So you just save their lives for at least eight months by incarcerating them.
00:37:02.160People don't like it when you put it that way, that they're safer in prison than they're on the street.
00:37:06.740They are safer in prison than on the street.
00:37:09.540But the absence of treatment, this is – the whole – the people who promote the idea of reducing the drug.
00:37:15.820Reducing these crimes from felonies to misdemeanors and then not even enforcing those misdemeanors are the same people who are strong into treatment and rehabilitation programs.
00:37:24.280So what they're doing is they're killing their clientele in an in-stream.
00:40:22.460They basically don't want us to buy tickets to their movies.
00:40:24.800They don't want us to patronize what they produce.
00:40:26.900And now pro sports is creeping in as former NBA legend, Boston Celtics legend, Kevin McHale, was seen at the Trump rally in Duluth, Minnesota, a couple of nights ago.
00:40:36.520There are people actually calling for McHale to be ostracized from basketball the way Pete Rose was from baseball for gambling on the game.
00:40:45.180Here to discuss it all with me is our very own, the Hollywood conservative, Amanda Head.
00:40:59.880He's at the Tony Award, arguably the most left-wing room on the planet outside of the Chinese Communist Politburo, whatever they call it, or Kim Jong-un's inner circle.
00:41:12.240Then we have Peter Fonda calling for violence against children.
00:41:16.460And now the NBA, or I should say sportscasters, right, calling for McHale to be Kevin McHale, formerly of the Boston Celtics, to be basically ostracized from baseball.
00:41:33.180Quote, if Kevin McHale actually showed up to Trump's rally in Duluth today, with everything that is happening now, and with Trump's done and stands for, yeah, he's canceled, wrote Sports Talk radio host Henry Lake.
00:41:47.540One of my childhood idols, Kevin McHale, just kicked six-year-old me right in the guts.
00:41:52.980And I felt it 32 years later, with interest, wrote a fan in a widely shared tweet, adding, F-U, Kevin.
00:42:01.860I mean, this is unhinged behavior, isn't it?
00:42:05.620But, you know, I mean, we've actually seen instances of this very recently.
00:42:10.360We saw it on social media with Jack Dorsey tweeting that he went to Chick-fil-A and he was forced to apologize.
00:42:18.980We are at a point where if you are not violently opposed to the Trump administration, and I talked about this in a video this week.
00:42:27.880You know, we blurred the lines between so much stuff, and we've gone so far to appease people, and especially with, like, identity politics and such.
00:42:38.080We've gone so far that if you don't violently oppose this administration, then you are far right, and you should be doxed on the Internet, removed from the job, and your life should be destroyed.
00:42:48.960And by the way, Amanda, we don't even know if this was Kevin McHale at the rally or a guy who looks like him.
00:43:06.600They're comparing ICE agents to Nazi SS and the Gestapo.
00:43:11.560They're comparing the Department of Homeland Security's headquarters to the Nazi HQ and holding facilities for people that came here illegally to concentration camps where people were exterminated.
00:43:38.360Everything we do is something within the Nazi regime.
00:43:41.580It's something Goebbels or Hitler would have done.
00:43:44.180But the ironic thing is, is it's like, you know, pick up a history book.
00:43:48.400If you think that it was Nazi policy to detain illegal non-citizens, detain their children in a facility where they get three meals a day, a roof over their head, video games, health care, eye care, education, if you think that's Nazi policy—
00:44:04.180By the way, Amanda, a right to counsel that the U.S. government pays for.
00:44:13.720And you've got people like Nancy Pelosi out there saying, after Trump gave them what they wanted, he signed an executive order reuniting the families, that a deal was cut with the devil.
00:44:24.240Nancy Pelosi said a deal was made or cut with the devil.
00:44:30.460But I really want to talk about this movement in Hollywood to hate conservatives.
00:44:37.120I mean, De Niro at the Tony Awards got a standing ovation.
00:44:40.740People in the sportscasting game are coming out, celebrating those, calling for Kevin McHale to be essentially kicked out of basketball, as if he was working with bookies to rig games.
00:44:54.060And then you've got Peter Fonda calling for children to be terrorized and the son of the president to be raped by a pedophile.
00:45:03.660Peter Fonda didn't even lose his verification on Twitter.
00:45:05.880Nope. Look, Peter Fonda and Jane Fonda, brother and sister, the whole Fonda family, let this serve as a stern warning to anyone who thinks that their cousin is cute.
00:46:41.840Yeah, but what I was saying is, you know, you look at the way that the left treats someone, you know, one of their own, who maybe slips out of line.
00:46:50.780They step out of the box a little bit.
00:46:53.160They step away from the propaganda and they eat Chick-fil-A or they go to a Trump rally or they hold a normal interview with the president of the United States before he took office.
00:47:03.840Can you imagine if people on the right started attacking you and I, John, if we went to Starbucks or if they started attacking us for having an iPhone?
00:48:21.100I think the only way it ends, and I don't foresee this happening because I live in Hollywood, and unfortunately, I witness the cowardice of people within the entertainment industry and how much they so tightly cling to their fame.
00:48:35.360You know, you have a lot of celebrities out there who spout off this hate and this leftist propaganda, but you have a lot of celebrities who also keep quiet.
00:48:44.620Those are the ones, surprisingly enough, who look at these far-left hippie celebrities and they're thinking, you people are maniacs, but they don't have the guts to say anything because they know that they will completely lose their hats within the industry.
00:48:57.120This will end when some of those people start growing balls.
00:48:59.820Well, that's exactly what it is, right?