Welcome back to City Journal's 10 Blocks podcast.

This is Rafael Menguall, a contributing editor of City Journal and a senior fellow here at the Manhattan Institute.

I'm also the author of the new book Criminal Injustice.

And I am joined today by Professor Peter Moscos, who's a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

He's a national expert on policing and crime. He's the director of

John Jay's NYPD Executive Master's Program, graduate of Princeton and Harvard, where he was trained as a

sociologist. He's also a former Baltimore City police officer who happens to be working on another book.

Peter, thank you so much for joining. It's an honor. Thanks for inviting me on. It's good to see you.

Likewise. Likewise. It's always great to talk to you. So let's get right into it. Here at

City Journal, my colleagues and I, we've very extensively covered the post-2020 crime spike,

something that you've commented on quite a bit. And that spike followed a renewed push to place new

restrictions on police discretion and in some cases to defund departments altogether. Some of us here

have suggested that there may be a connection between that push and the elevated crime levels that

cities like New York and Chicago and Philadelphia have been experiencing over the last couple of years.

Now, these suggestions are often met with earnest declarations that police don't actually prevent crime.

We're told that they merely respond to crime after the fact.

Now, some of the people making these sorts of claims, I think, know better, but others, I have a

suspicion sincerely believe this to be true. How do you respond to this line of argument?

What should our listeners say when they hear the same thing at their dinner tables?

I think it's important to distinguish between good faith and bad faith criticism of policing. There's a lot of

reform I've supported, reform that actually makes things better. Now, you may not know that

after the fact, mind you, but at some point you have to judge the consequences of actions,

...