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

Joining me on today's show is

Ralph Manguel, a city journal contributing editor and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

You can find him on Twitter at Rafa underscore Manguel. Ralph started at MI as a project manager

for a legal policy, but he has since become an important voice

on public order and criminal justice issues, which will be the subject of his forthcoming book,

which will be out next year. In City Journal, Ralph has written about the consequences of various

reform initiatives from a laxed bail measures and prison closures to the progressive prosecutor movement

and new constraints that police are facing on the streets today. Ralph, as always, you've been on

the show before. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. It's always great to be on

with you, Brian. Ralph, I'd like to start with a piece you've just published for

City Journal this past Friday. The various police reforms that were enacted recently by the New York

City Council, what's in this specific legislation that has you troubled, and what effects will it

have on police going forward?

Yeah, so, you know, there are a lot of things in the legislation. I won't go into every aspect of

every bill in the package, but I will pick out a few. First, I mean, there's a kind of qualified

immunity workaround that's in here.

Now, qualified immunity is this weird, formally obscure legal debate that's been going on for quite a while,

but it really came to the fore in the wake of the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis,

where you had a lot of people

sort of writing these pieces, implying that Mr. Floyd's family might have trouble recovering

damages from the government of Minneapolis because of this qualified immunity doctrine,

...