Welcome, everyone.

I'm Hannah Myers, Director of Policing and Public Safety for the Manhattan Institute.

This lecture series is named for late Manhattan Institute scholar George Kelling,

and we honor in particular his commitment to grounding scholarship in honest observations of reality.

Everyone here knows that this can be genuinely uncomfortable in criminal justice

because the realities of crime and punishment and victimization Everyone here knows that this can be genuinely uncomfortable in criminal justice

because the realities of crime and punishment and victimization

are often not what we wish they were.

And they reveal things about human behavior and community dynamics

that are tense enough to inspire a never-ending supply of crime novels and TV procedurals.

But dangerously, in recent years, the study of crime and criminal behavior,

like many academic fields, has given into this discomfort and drifted away from rigorous science

rooted in evidenced reality. Instead, it has embraced ideological narratives,

in particular about race, identity,

and the expendability of the criminal justice system itself.

This bias has crept into university departments,

think tanks, and even groups like the American Society

of Criminology.

And it doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Policymakers pass laws based on research that doesn't accurately capture reality.

And police, prosecutors, judges, correctional officers must operate under these un-evidenced policies.

This creates agencies and strategies that are less efficient, or resource, innovative,

...