Welcome to Ten Blocks, the podcast of City Journal. This is Seth Barron, your host for today. I'm the associate

editor at City Journal. Joining me is Rafael Mengu. He's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute,

a contributing editor to City Journal, and he writes widely on criminology and the police.

Ralph, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me back.

So things have really been pretty crazy in New York City the last few weeks. The last month

has seen constant protests, violence associated with the George Floyd protests. But

independently of that, there's been a major uptick in

violent crime, particularly shootings and homicides. Do you have the numbers on those?

Well, so far as of June 28th, shootings or homicides in the city are up 23%.

Shootings are up, I think, a little more than that.

If I remember correctly, it's about 28%.

But of course, this is last, yesterday marked the end of the third straight week

in which New York City has seen double the number of shootings as compared to the

same week last year. So this is starting to look more and more like a trend with every day

that goes by. So yeah, I think Commissioner Shea had indicated that this might be sustained.

This is like a sustained increase. What's driving this?

Well, I think there are a lot of things that are driving this. I mean, New York City would be the

least ideal place to kind of do a natural experiment to pinpoint this on a particular

policy shift. So I think it's a combination.

We've had obviously a sort of endless march toward, you know, criminal justice reform,

almost for its own sake for the past few years now. I think a lot of those things from bail reform and discovery reform,

you know, the right to no act, reductions in, you know, pedestrian stops within the NYPD,

...