Welcome back to the Ten Blocks Podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is Charles Fang Lehman, who has written several incisive

city journal pieces this year, and I'm happy to say, is now a new adjunct fellow at the Manhattan

Institute. Charles will be writing more for CJ and working with the Institute's new

policing and public safety initiative.

And he's a staff writer with the Washington Free Beacon, where he covers a broad range of domestic policy issues.

You can follow him on Twitter at Charles F. Lehman, L-E-H-M-A-N.

Charles, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me on, Brian.

Your latest piece for City Journal focuses on a growing crisis that you've been writing about for a while now, and that's this fact that across America police officers seem to be quitting

their departments in record numbers. That article, which we call police departments on the brink,

explains what's happening with these forces in a number of big cities

and even small towns across the country.

Could you go into some of the details of what you've found when you looked into this?

Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, I think it really is the case that this is a comprehensive phenomenon. On the one hand, I looked at the 50 biggest cities in the United States, and I found that in roughly half of them,

either police chiefs or officers had resigned or retired in the past year. On the other hand, it's also localized to very small towns. So the city council in Norman, Oklahoma, voted to defund their police department and 14 officers retired. A majority of the forces out in Knightstown, Indiana. These are tiny, tiny places. So really, it is from the biggest

cities in the United States to the smallest little towns. Cops are finding themselves under

enormous unprecedented pressure. And the really necessary consequence of that change in

dynamic is that the average cop is more likely to quit their job

and therefore more cops are leaving their jobs they're retiring they're taking sick leave

they're resigning altogether they're departing for other more hospitable environments so it's really

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