Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast. I am your host, Raphael Mangual. I am so thrilled to be joined by one of my favorite colleagues, Heather McDonald.

Thank you, Raphael.

Today's episode is going to be a fun one.

It's part of a new series called Who We Are, where we're going to take a deep dive into one of the kind of core pillars of MI's work over the years.

And as you may have guessed, this episode is going to focus on policing and public safety.

And so who better to take us through that than the

great Heather McDonald, who has done just incredible work over the years, which I have been reading

since I was in college, believe it or not. And, you know, really helped me. But I was like in the

old age home, but yes. Well, it really helped me see through so much of the nonsense that I was being

force-fed when I was in my first-year sociology class, for example, which is what prompted me

to go down the rabbit hole and actually found, that's how I found the work of the Manhattan

Institute. But I feel like a good place to start because so many people are just now engaging with

MI and our work at City Journal and don't really realize that we have very long history,

particularly with this issue, particularly as it relates to New York.

And so I wonder if you can just talk to us a little bit about where City Journal and the Manhattan

Institute were in the broader debates about policing and public safety when you first came to

the Institute and started writing for City Journal, I think, in the mid-1990s.

Well, it was a great time. It was a time of urban renaissance when the ideas that one of the Manhattan Institute fellows,

George Kelling, had put into the public sphere, which was that city governments, police,

and other aspects of government should pay attention to public order.

That that's a core function of cities. Without that, if you have crime, if you have,

you know, teen mobs rampaging, if you have litter, if you have graffiti, you're falling down on

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