Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast.

This week's special episode will be hosted by Rafael Menguil, a senior fellow at the Manhattan

Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.

Ralph recently joined communication consultant Ja'ael Bar Tour, police chief Art Acevedo,

and Secret Service Communications Chief Anthony Guglolmi for a conversation about policing in the

information age. We hope you enjoy. Now, so I'm really excited about this conversation. So for those

of you listening who don't know, my name is Rafael Menguil. I'm a senior fellow at the Manhattan

Institute. I'm also headed research for our policing of public safety initiative. And in another

life, before I went to law

school, I did communication strategy for another policy organization where I was in charge of

managing our social media presences. So this is a really cool sort of clashing of two worlds of

mine. And I'm really excited for the conversation. So I'm going to set it up

really quick before I introduce our other speakers, and then we'll just kind of go right into

the discussion, which I hope you all will find fruitful. So, you know, we live very much at sort of

the height of the information age, but in a lot of ways, we also live at the height of the misinformation age. And social media, I think, has proven to be one of the most powerful tools for the dissemination of information. But it's, I think, also proven to be a real challenge for certain institutions to navigate, particularly because criticism of those institutions and the demonization of those institutions has been facilitated in a way that just, you know, never existed before. And so we live in a country of nearly 340 million people, almost, you know, half of whom are walking around with cell phone cameras every single day.

And so we're all really journalists in one way or another.

And what I think that's done is it's created the impression that really statistically rare things happen all the time, right?

If you are able to get one video of a negative police citizen interaction

for every day of the year, that's 365 incidents, which, you know, statistically is not a lot.

If you are taking into account the fact that, you know, we have more than 300 million people in

the country, you know, more than 600,000

police officers and working across 18,000 police departments, me making tens of millions of contacts

...