While D.C. fails to get its crime problem under control, the female chief of police publicly acknowledged that she doesn t even know what the term chain of command means. Meanwhile, the attorney general of the city has declared that you can t just solve violent crime by arresting and prosecuting violent criminals, and a CNN contributor announces that, rather than trying to make the city safe, we should instead rethink safety. Also, climate lockdowns have officially begun in Canada, and an American lawmaker has asked an important question: What is an American? We ll talk about all that and more today on the Matwell Show.
00:00:00.000Today on the Matwell Show, while D.C. fails to get its crime problem under control, the female chief of police publicly acknowledged that she doesn't even know what the term chain of command means, which is no surprise this woman was hired as their DEI officer before she was promoted to the head of the whole department.
00:00:14.100Meanwhile, the attorney general of the city has declared that you can't just solve violent crime by arresting and prosecuting violent criminals somehow.
00:00:21.120And a CNN contributor announces that rather than trying to make D.C. safe, we should instead rethink safety.
00:00:26.820Also, climate lockdowns have officially begun in Canada. And an American lawmaker has asked an important question.
00:00:32.300What is an American? Her answer could not possibly have been any worse. We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matwell Show.
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00:02:30.000Let's say there's been a mass shooting in Washington, D.C., which is not exactly a far-fetched hypothetical, and several shell casings and bullets were located at the crime scene.
00:02:40.500Then the police locate a car full of suspects, and every single one of them is carrying a handgun.
00:02:45.440But, of course, no one admits to firing the shots.
00:02:47.620So as part of their investigation, the police bring everyone to the station and seize their firearms for further investigation.
00:02:52.860Now, at that point, if the police want any chance of building a criminal case, they're going to have to rely on the crime lab.
00:02:58.900In every major city in the country, this is a pretty straightforward process.
00:03:02.140The crime lab runs a series of ballistics tests to determine which gun fired the shots.
00:03:07.380This is possible because every firearm will transfer unique individual characteristics to the cartridge case or bullet that comes out of it.
00:03:16.340Technicians will then, you know, come to one of three possible conclusions about any two pieces of ammunition evidence.
00:03:21.920The first conclusion is called identification.
00:03:24.600This means that they've confirmed the same firearm is responsible for two pieces of ammunition evidence.
00:03:30.360The second conclusion is called elimination.
00:03:32.540This means that the two pieces of ammunition evidence definitely come from different firearms.
00:03:36.780And the third conclusion is inconclusive, meaning the components are similar enough that they can't figure it out.
00:03:44.300Now, the benefit of this system is that among competent experts, you won't find wildly different assessments of the same evidence, usually.
00:03:52.080There's some amount of skill and perception involved in analyzing the evidence under a microscope and making the necessary comparisons.
00:03:58.340But at the same time, it's not exactly rocket science.
00:04:00.980Either the ammunition components have distinctive identifiable markings or they don't.
00:04:06.360Now, in Washington, D.C., though, this relatively uncomplicated analysis has proven to be an extraordinarily difficult task.
00:04:12.440In fact, a few years ago, they managed to botch it so flagrantly and so inexplicably that the entire crime lab was shut down for several years.
00:04:22.200To give you an idea of how bad things got, here's how the D.C. crime lab assessed ballistics evidence in one particular case.
00:04:30.800This is from a report prepared by SNA International, which is a consulting group that was called in to investigate the lab.
00:04:38.020And as you can see, in January of 2016, somebody named Daniel Barrett, a forensic scientist with the D.C. crime lab, did an initial examination on some ballistics evidence.
00:04:48.100And he found an identification, meaning that the two pieces of ammunition evidence came from the same firearm.
00:04:53.800A couple of days later, another forensic scientist named Luciano Morales checked Daniel's work, and he, too, found an identification.
00:05:01.260Then in August of 2017, a forensic scientist named Alicia Valario did a reexamination following Daniel Barrett's departure from the agency, and Alicia also found an identification.
00:05:11.720And that same day, a forensic scientist named Michael Mulderig checked Alicia's work, and he also confirmed an identification.
00:05:22.120Having checked and quadruple-checked their work, they compared the same pieces of evidence, item 45 and item 16, and agreed that the same firearm was responsible for both of them.
00:05:33.280Now, the problem is that when the U.S. Attorney's Office got involved several years later and sent in some highly experienced forensic analysts,
00:05:40.260they found that identification was the exact opposite conclusion that these D.C. analysts should have drawn.
00:05:46.580The correct result for these two items was elimination.
00:05:49.120In other words, there were several very apparent differences between the two items, making it clear they did not come from the same firearm.
00:05:57.540Now, as you can imagine, this is a very big deal when you're trying to put somebody in prison for committing a crime with a gun,
00:06:06.180This is a failure that's actually pretty difficult to even comprehend.
00:06:11.160I mean, it'd be like four different mechanics telling you that your car is perfectly fine,
00:06:15.720and the fifth one tells you that actually your car won't even start, and the engine has exploded.
00:06:21.200So here's what the audit found specifically.
00:06:23.140The review of the materials determined clear class characteristic differences between the two cartridge cases,
00:06:28.660specifically the breech face impressions of the two cartridge cases,
00:06:32.020which are caused by the head of the cartridge case pressing against the breech face of the firearm during firing,
00:06:37.480were significantly and sufficiently different and support a conclusion of elimination.
00:06:41.160The incorrect conclusion of identification rendered by some D.C. examiners is so distinct from the correct conclusion of elimination
00:06:49.000that it represents a significant issue relating to the competence of those examiners.
00:06:53.280In other words, the identification criteria of the examiners were not sufficiently rigorous to distinguish between coincidental correspondence
00:07:00.240of striated marks produced by different firearms and correspondence due to being fired from or in the same firearm.
00:07:08.400So that's a lot of words, but basically means an entire team of forensic scientists in the D.C. crime lab managed to
00:07:15.140repeatedly come to the wrong conclusion about evidence in a criminal case.
00:07:21.900And it wasn't an especially close call, according to people who came in and actually knew what they were doing.
00:07:28.300But these people simply had no idea what they were doing.
00:07:31.320And it wasn't just the ballistics either.
00:07:33.020Over in the latent fingerprint unit, they were also just sort of winging things.
00:07:40.360Basically, in the latent fingerprints unit, their job is to figure out if a piece of evidence might contain prints that could be useful at a trial.
00:07:50.280And if one analyst finds no useful prints, then automatically another analyst has to verify their work.
00:07:56.300So it's supposed to be a pretty, you know, foolproof process.
00:07:59.560But the D.C. crime lab managed to botch it once again.
00:08:02.540Again, the audit found that the latent fingerprint unit had, quote, improperly evaluated the latent prints for suitability in 42 of the 45 cases that were independently tested.
00:08:14.480That's a failure rate, if you do the math, of more than 90 percent, which is worse than what a lab full of monkeys could accomplish by jumping up and down in the lab and randomly pressing buttons on the computer.
00:08:26.260Now, I could go through the whole audit, which revealed that the D.C. crime lab, quote, face serious issues, including deliberate concealment of information, violations of accreditation standards and fraudulent behavior.
00:09:19.860Meanwhile, major news in the effort to hold criminals accountable.
00:09:24.760D.C.'s crime lab has been partially accredited for forensic testing and biology and seized drugs.
00:09:31.680Daniel Hamburg joins us live in the newsroom with more.
00:09:34.300And Daniel, the District crime labs lost accreditation almost, what, three years ago.
00:09:39.180Yeah, Mark, in fiscal year 2020, 2022, a third of cases were not prosecuted.
00:09:46.600That has since increased due to partnerships with federal and local labs to get some of that testing done.
00:09:54.160But having an independent lab right here in D.C. is crucial to getting criminals off the streets.
00:10:00.140D.C.'s Department of Forensic Sciences hasn't been able to test drugs since April 2021.
00:10:05.380Its accreditation was revoked for a variety of issues, including errors, lack of expertise and engaging in fraudulent activities.
00:10:13.780Which meant that we lost the ability to charge almost all drug cases.
00:10:17.140That's a big reason only 33 percent of cases were charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office in 2022.
00:10:22.380That's since increased to about 58 percent, but only between July and September of this year, once outside lab testing was secured.
00:10:30.720So they tell you that the crime lab is partially accredited now, but they don't tell you what exactly is partial about it.
00:10:38.820And they act like it's a big win that instead of only being able to charge 30 percent of cases, prosecutors are up to 50 percent.
00:10:44.880So that's something. But the real story here is not that the crime lab is barely functional in Washington or the prosecutors can't even charge most cases because the crime lab is offline.
00:10:56.020That's very bad, of course. It's also a symptom of a much larger problem, which is that in pretty much every aspect of society, from air travel to restaurants and on and on and on.
00:11:06.200Basic services are becoming unreliable. Incompetence is now the norm.
00:11:12.900This is what inevitably happens when the government forces hundreds of thousands of competent workers out of the workforce in the name of public health and then imports millions of fake asylum seekers from the third world to replace them,
00:11:23.900while also elevating unqualified Americans on the basis of irrelevant characteristics like skin color or gender.
00:11:30.040What you end up with is universal mediocrity or worse.
00:11:36.540The machinery that's necessary for a functioning society starts breaking down piece by piece until nothing works and no one can be held responsible.
00:11:44.780Really, the reason Washington, D.C. is in the news this week isn't because of anything Donald Trump did.
00:11:51.400It's because D.C., more than any other city in the country, is a monument to the sustained managed decline of the United States.
00:12:01.500As our capital, the district is an unmistakable symbol of a pervasive mediocrity at every level.
00:12:11.140Yes, the crime lab amounts to a group of morons throwing darts at the wall to see what conclusion they should draw,
00:12:16.360but every other aspect of the city from top to bottom operates in exactly the same way.
00:12:22.260So go over to the police department, for example.
00:12:25.140By now you've maybe seen the viral clip of the police chief, a woman named Pamela Smith, at a press conference with the mayor the other day.
00:12:33.560And in this footage, she appears perplexed by the term chain of command,
00:12:38.800as if she's never even heard those words before in her entire life.
00:12:44.240Now, a lot of people mock that clip, and rightfully so.
00:12:46.800A police chief who doesn't understand the concept of chain of command is a bit like a cook who's never heard of the word kitchen.
00:12:53.500It's the kind of jaw-dropping moment that doesn't seem like it could possibly be real.
00:13:00.140And as bad as that clip was, the entire answer that Pamela Smith gave is even worse.
00:13:07.140The more context you provide for the clip, the more excruciating it becomes.
00:13:11.180But this is important to talk about, so we'll play the full context.
00:13:15.460So I want you to watch as a reporter tries for more than a minute to ask Pamela Smith about the extent of the federal government's control of the D.C. Police Department.
00:13:26.200For all practical purposes, as we know, the White House has assumed command of the D.C. police for the next 30 days,
00:13:31.080pursuant to their legal authority over the district.
00:13:34.300But Smith seems to struggle with this concept.
00:13:36.380She implies repeatedly that the D.C. police are going to be working alongside the federal government as partners,
00:13:40.940without giving any indication of who's actually in charge.
00:13:44.060And then when the reporter finally asks the question, as directly as he can,
00:13:48.140the police chief gives her now infamous answer.
00:14:45.720We would allocate and look at the locations around our city where we believe there are areas, pockets of crime that we would like to address.
00:14:54.520We also know that there are opportunities for us to build upon our community engagement with our federal partners who work with us every day, and this is the time for us to do.
00:15:02.440I won't go into the details and the depths of our organization, but we will see Metropolitan Communications Department working side-by-side with our federal partners in order to enforce the efforts that we need around the city.
00:15:14.500Can you tell us what the chain of command is now?
00:15:18.080Well, is it Kim Bondi speaking to the mayor, speaking to you, or how does this work?
00:15:21.340So, as the executive order is clear, the president has requested NPD services, and our home rule charter outlines the process.
00:15:33.340You know, the way that Mayor Bowser swoops in at precisely that moment is probably the most revealing part of that clip.
00:15:40.100She knows how incompetent her police chief is, so she takes over before things get any worse.
00:15:44.400Presumably, Bowser didn't want the police chief to expound on all of the other words and phrases she doesn't understand.
00:15:51.900After all, when your crime lab isn't even accredited and your murder rate is higher than Baghdad's, there's only so many more hits to morale that the city can really take.
00:16:01.980Now, after this footage aired, a lot of people pointed out that Pamela Smith was not hired based on merit, unsurprisingly.
00:16:08.360Instead, a couple of years ago, she was hired as the chief equity officer in the D.C. police department.
00:16:17.600Now, so that means she was a DEI hire in every sense.
00:16:22.320And then very quickly, she goes from this meaningless job of equity officer to becoming the chief of police.
00:16:30.600I mean, it would be like elevating a DEI consultant to be the CEO of, say, Microsoft.
00:16:36.100I mean, it's a decision that makes no sense whatsoever if you actually care about the organization running well and efficiently, which they don't.
00:16:45.460At the time when Pamela got the job, local media in D.C. were not interested in asking her about anything substantive.
00:16:51.780Instead, of course, they highlighted her skin color and her gender, as well as her life story.
00:16:57.580And if approved by the city council, Pamela Smith, who you see here, will be the next person to fill that position.
00:17:05.520And the chief, let's go ahead and call it the chief, joins us in studio to talk more about this historic nomination and her plans for the department.
00:17:35.800You know, when I was the chief of police of the U.S. Park Police, I was the first African-American chief of police in the agency's 230-year history at that time.
00:17:44.980And to be able to do this, have this amazing opportunity extended to me by Mayor Muriel Bowser is very humbling.
00:17:53.840And although it's not lost on me, what I hope is that I'm not the last.
00:17:59.660I think this is an opportunity for young men and young women to really see how they can aspire to be anything that they choose to be.
00:18:09.840But what I did was I used those moments of adversity and turned them into something positive.
00:18:15.820I utilized some of the resources, like the Summer Youth Employment Program that was available to me in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
00:18:20.940And meeting a pastor and his wife who thought enough of, I'll say, the little old girl from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to really groom me into the young woman that I am today.
00:18:32.460Now, Washington, D.C. is a district that, if it became a state, would have the highest murder rate in the entire country.
00:18:39.660It's so dangerous that members of Congress are being carjacked and beaten in their apartments.
00:18:44.460The security detail for a Supreme Court justice was nearly carjacked before they shot the attackers.
00:18:50.940The only relevant question when you're picking a police chief for a place like that is what exactly the police chief is going to do about the carnage that's unfolding every day in the city.
00:19:02.820Instead, we're told that she's a nice lady.
00:19:09.260Those were her qualifications for this job.
00:19:12.500It's not an exaggeration to say the local media did precisely zero vetting of this woman, nor did anyone in the D.C. government, apparently.
00:19:19.260At most, she was asked superficial questions with no follow-ups.
00:19:24.280In a separate interview, for example, the local ABC affiliate asked Pamela Smith what she was going to do about all the murdering that was going on in Washington, D.C.
00:19:33.600Finally, what are you going to do about these homicides?
00:19:38.120This is one of the things that really upsets folks a lot.
00:19:41.900We're going to come up with a plan that is going to be collaborative and impactful across the District of Columbia, and we're going to do exactly everything we need to do to drive down crime.
00:19:51.420And you think you'll have the support?
00:20:29.460Their plan is to have, well, they don't have a, their plan is they're going to come up with a plan to develop a plan for a plan to bring the murder rate down.
00:20:40.860Well, that was good enough for the local ABC affiliate.
00:20:43.100They asked no follow-ups, but in retrospect, it seems like we all know what the plan was.
00:20:48.240As we discussed yesterday, it looks a lot like the plan in D.C. was to fabricate crime statistics.
00:20:53.680Instead of taking a report for a carjacking or a stabbing or a shooting, officers would classify the incident as taking an injured person to the hospital or a theft or a felony assault.
00:21:05.280Apparently, according to the police union, when an incident is classified as a felony assault, it doesn't get counted in the D.C. Police Department's daily crime stats.
00:21:14.240Or the FBI's uniform crime reporting system.
00:21:17.360And this is a loophole that we can only assume is being used by many, many, many other police departments.
00:21:24.280Also, in many cases, D.C. police would simply refuse to respond to crimes, including robberies and assaults, which is another way to cook the books, as we all know.
00:21:33.360And for the DEI lady running the police department, apparently that's good enough.
00:21:37.740But once again, this is not about one person.
00:21:47.940But really, she's part of a larger problem.
00:21:50.840And pretty much everyone can see that.
00:21:52.080In the past year, due to various incidents, prison escapes, terrorist attacks, wildfires, several prominent government officials in major cities all across the country have been, many, many times these are law enforcement, top law enforcement officials, that have been thrust into the national spotlight.
00:22:09.020And we'll put some of them up on the screen.
00:22:11.540After a jihadi mowed down more than a dozen people in New Orleans, the elderly female police chief informed the world that she had no idea, no idea whatsoever, that the city had purchased pedestrian barriers that could have prevented that attack.
00:22:29.780Then after the mob of festival goers, as they're being called in Cincinnati, brutally attacked white people at a music festival, which has long been a state-sanctioned hotbed of anti-white racism, the female police chief scolded the people who recorded the violence.
00:22:45.080Earlier in the year in Los Angeles, as wildfires destroyed entire neighborhoods while firefighters ran out of water, it emerged that the fire chief was a strong, independent lesbian who was committed to advancing the LGBTQIA plus agenda.
00:22:58.480Meanwhile, the deputy fire chief, another fiercely independent girl boss, shot a video in which she downplayed the idea that female firefighters might not be able to rescue a man trapped in a fire by saying, if you remember, and I quote,
00:23:11.740he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of the fire.
00:23:16.880In other words, it's the victim's fault.
00:23:19.320As he's burning alive, that woman, you know, can't meet the physical standards necessary to be a firefighter, and he's going to burn alive.
00:23:25.480But it's his fault. You shouldn't have put yourself in a position where you could burn to death.
00:23:31.260Now, and this is just a quick snapshot of these kinds of things, and just from a statistical perspective, there's an obvious problem here.
00:23:41.000I mean, we all know that in the private sector, women aren't typically leading major companies.
00:23:46.060That's true in spite of the fact that every Fortune 500 corporation goes out of its way to advance women as part of their DEI agenda.
00:23:53.040But still, it doesn't typically work out that way.
00:23:55.240That's because women often choose to raise families instead of climbing the corporate ladder.
00:23:59.120In many cases, they find that they're either unwilling or unable to work 80 hours a week,
00:24:04.300wasting away their entire life in an office building in exchange for promotion.
00:24:07.180Also, men and women are different, and men are often just more suited for those kinds of jobs.
00:24:14.200And women certainly don't choose to become police officers or firefighters in large numbers for obvious reasons.
00:24:19.080And yet, it seems like whenever there's a big news story in the past year,
00:24:22.680we discover that women are somehow running the local police or the fire department.
00:24:28.980Now, the only way to explain what's going on is that these departments are hiring women who are unqualified for the job solely because they're women.
00:24:37.180I mean, that's not a partisan point. It's just, it's basic math.
00:24:41.440And that's why these women immediately faceplant on the national stage the moment that they have to respond to any kind of crisis.
00:24:48.540See, the thing about incompetence is that very often it's not particularly well hidden.
00:24:53.440I mean, we're not talking about criminal masterminds here.
00:24:55.160These people only get away with it because in pretty much every case, no one checks on what they're doing.
00:25:01.080But increasingly, it's becoming impossible to ignore what's happening.
00:25:03.640I mean, the degree of incompetence is simply too great.
00:25:07.180By taking control of Washington, D.C., if only for, you know, 30 days or so,
00:25:12.680the Trump administration has the opportunity to highlight this incompetence even further.
00:25:16.780The administration can provide a clear contrast between Pamela Smith and Mayor Bowser on the one hand
00:25:23.920and competent leadership on the other.
00:25:27.720They can make sure that every relevant piece of evidence is shipped to a functioning crime lab.
00:25:31.960They can unseal the D.C. Police Department's fraudulent investigation into January 6th, including the shooting of Ashley Babbitt.
00:25:39.320They can use basic terms like chain of command without freezing like a deer in the headlights.
00:25:43.760And in the end, they can expose the extent to which American decline is a choice.
00:25:51.100We can shut it down just as quickly as the crime lab was shut down.
00:25:55.860And before any more people are forced to suffer in the nation's capital or any other major city,