Just a couple of years ago, when crime was still at historic lows in the District of Columbia,

there was a very unimportant kind of bipartisan effort, even led by local prosecutors,

to rewrite the DDC Criminal Code.

And one of the provisions in that was going to reduce the maximum penalty for what's called carjacking.

Carjacking, obviously, if you read my book, you'll understand it's a term that was just

sort of invented in Detroit in the 1990s as part of a wave of earlier crime panic that was

undertaken throughout the Clinton years. This penalty for carjacking didn't really matter at all

for a few reasons. Number one, nobody ever gets the maximum punishment for carjacking.

They were reducing the penalty of carjacking to something that was way higher than anyone ever gets.

So it would have no effect in practice whatsoever.

Also, what we know from decades of really rigorous scientific research is that the longer the prison sentence has no

effect at all on deterrence for crime. It doesn't actually have any impact on crime rates whatsoever.

So this is like a total non-issue. And there was this frenzy in the DEC media, led in many

ways by mainstream outlets, local TV news, and especially the Washington Post.

The Washington Post published a egregious editorial that I talk about in the book,

and then it was retweeted by one of their popular pundit personalities, Ashley Parker,

who started sharing her feelings about crime, talking about how crime was, quote, out of control.

Remember that phrase, we're going to get back to that with Trump.

She was publicly telling people at a time of historic lows in police reported crime, that crime in D.C. was out of control.

And this is crucial. Her and the Washington Post were promoting a narrative that the local democracy in D.C. could not be trusted to handle that crime.

And that the federal government, i.e. President Biden and Congress, needed to overturn this new very, very minor revisions in the DC Criminal Code with the penalties for car

jacking. So it's all based on a lie that crime is it meaningfully increasing. And a second lie

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