How the radical Left turned America's cities into “slums” | Michael Shellenberger interview

can't walk around downtown san francisco or downtown los angeles without seeing people using drugs publicly defecating publicly hello and welcome to offscript my name is stephen edgington why are so many people leaving big cities some blame the pandemic but is there something deeper going on here to find out i'm joined by the american environmentalist michael schellenberger whose recent book san francisco explains why progressives ruined cities is there a phenomenon of people leaving big cities in the united states there is there's a there's definitely a phenomenon of people leaving big cities there's also been a phenomenon of people leaving california in particular however we haven't seen it translate into lower housing prices so to the extent to which people are leaving it's not clear that they're selling their homes so it may be a phenomenon where some people are leaving temporarily without selling but unfortunately that means that there hasn't been the sort of economic consequence for city governments to reform their policies in order to keep their residents happy why california in particular and where are these people going i mean people from california go to all sorts of states i mean the most famous is texas but people leave to nevada they've traditionally left to texas utah california i'm sorry uh colorado uh washington oregon i mean really all over the place california's actually had a net migration over the last several years and it accelerated under kovid but yeah i mean the problems that i described in san francisco which are mostly problems that had traditionally been on the progressive west coast are now being seen in other cities around the united states as we deal with our drug addiction and drug overdose crisis and is the pandemic accelerating these trends of people leaving big cities to other places i mean particularly in for example in london many people have decided that house prices are far too high they can work from home and suddenly they're buying properties in the countryside and in other places just outside of london yeah for sure i mean it's definitely happening we just haven't seen the decline in housing prices i mean that's part of the problem i think is that in california there's a sense among the policymakers the elected officials and sometimes they say it out loud which is basically where else are you gonna go california remains such a desirable location spectacular geography incredible climate people really want to live here i really want to live here and so those of us that are fighting to improve this place one disadvantage we have is that people that politicians will kind of have this attitude that hey you don't really you know if you want if you want to live here uh you don't really you can't really vote with your feet so that's been a big part of the problem i think the other issue is that there's something called the curly effect which was named after a boston mayor a terrible mayor who drove out many of the people that he was unpopular with and the result was that the people that left behind were the people that were more and more in his favor so you end up getting a kind of a self-reinforcing vicious cycle and i think to some extent that's occurred in california broadly and in san francisco in particular i want to talk about san francisco in a moment why are people leaving cities like san francisco generally can you give people a few reasons other than for example house prices or the pandemic it seems there's something else going on here i mean i think it's hard for people that are not from here or who haven't spent any time on youtube looking at videos to just understand how seriously chaotic and deteriorating the situation has become you've started to see some people in new york complain about scenes that have become very common and familiar in san francisco but also in los angeles seattle portland which is that you have what europeans actually call open drug scenes that americans have euphemistically referred to as homeless encampments which is really a misdescription of what is going on in these situations these are groups of drug users who have because of their addiction lost contact with friends and family they no longer work they live on the street because they're saving their money to support their addiction this is um people that are often sometimes are traumatized sometimes they just got addicted because of partying too hard but the addiction crisis in the united states has grown enormously i used to work for philanthropies supported by george soros the very well-known currency speculator and billionaire he's now a major philanthropist in the united states and has been for almost 30 years when i got done working on drug decriminalization issues or what we call harm reduction issues in the 1990s in the year 2000 17 thousand people were dying in the united states from illicit drugs this year a hundred thousand people died from illicit drugs uh drug overdose and drug poisoning is the number one cause of death for people 18 to 45. we you know you can put that 100 000 in perspective that's three times more people than die in car accidents that's five times more people that are killed by homicides so the drug crisis is really it should be like the number one issue in some ways or at least it should be a tier one issue but it's been like a tier three issue for reasons we can talk about but really what's at the heart of what we call our homeless problem but to some extent our crime problem is driven by drug addiction and drug abuse let's talk about san francisco this is the topic of your book the main case study that you use why did you choose that city well san francisco i mean it's where i live i mean i live in berkeley which is about a 20-minute drive it's across the bay from san francisco so it's a city i've uh i love it's a city i moved to 30 years ago i met my wife there have spent a lot of time in san francisco is widely considered the most beautiful city in the united states it's also it really punches above its weight in terms of cultural and political significance most of california's leaders over the last half century have come from san francisco i mean a wildly disproportionate number particularly when you consider it has just a fraction of the people as los angeles just about one-tenth of the people as los angeles depending on how you're counting those two regions but san francisco is really the heart of american liberalism progressivism and really what we would call the radical left and i the subtitle of my book is why progressives ruin cities and the word progressive itself has a very interesting uh genealogy but the word today is sort of used synonymously for liberals it often but it really was also used by people on the radical left and it's a word that has sort of united liberal and radical left people and the result has been catastrophic and i say this as somebody that comes from the left that used to be part of the radical left i now consider myself liberal not progressive but basically san francisco is really the incubator for a lot of the really terrible ideas that have been implemented and resulted in the deterioration and the destruction of some of our finest cities including but not limited to san francisco can you take us through some of the statistics in recent years to display what's happened to cities like san francisco in terms of crime drug use homelessness that sort of thing sure well to give a sense of it just california wide california saw an increase in what we call homelessness by 30 percent even as the numbers declined in the rest of the united states by 18 the word homelessness is really a propaganda word it's not a very accurate word because the word ends up conflating very different groups of people it ends up conflating people that are schizophrenic and are off their meds and need to be under some kind of psychiatric care it combines those people with people that are suffering from heroin or fentanyl or meth addiction and have lost connection with family and friends and are no longer working because of their addiction and then it combines people that are just down on their luck so we do have a different word that we sometimes use called unsheltered homeless which is people that are not in shelters those folks overwhelmingly are suffering from addiction and mental illness or both so we've just seen massive increases and those numbers i even i mentioned are pretty out of date at this point it's probably more like a 50 increase in the homeless population in california but to give you a sense of it i mean you can't walk around downtown san francisco or downtown los angeles without seeing people using drugs publicly defecating publicly there are tense really everywhere downtown but even across much of the city for a long time this dysfunctional behavior was confined to a small number of poor mostly african-american neighborhoods in our cities as the drug addiction crisis grew worse and more people came from around the country but also from within these regions to live on the street and support their addiction those numbers grew so large that they were no longer contained by those neighborhoods and so that's why i mean that's why i have a book contract on it that's why it's a subject of national debate is because really it was no longer containable and it started to spread uh the problem started to spread throughout the whole city so you just see gigantic sums of money being spent on cleaning up feces we have porta potties all over the city but it doesn't really matter because people often don't use them and really open air drug dealing we have organized gangs that engage in turf wars there's homicides we've seen an overall increase of homicides by 30 percent between 2019 and 2020 we've seen an increase in all sorts of other crimes property crimes some of which are driven by addiction like robbing convenience stores and drug stores but we've also seen more organized crimes organized thefts and lootings of department stores we've seen a lot more carjackings car break-ins so really on the one hand you could say that we're all this is a drug and crime problem but really it's a governance issue where many of these cities have just stopped doing what cities had traditionally done to maintain law and order and they've stopped doing that in really and i argue out of a kind of ideological commitment to radical left politics to a kind of political correctness or what we might call victim ideology or woke ideology which is something i know that you've discussed a lot on this program but basically the idea that there are some people in the world who are victims and to them everything should be given and nothing and nothing uh required or requested in return when i was growing up every few years i would go to san francisco because i had family friends over there and i would find the city absolutely wondrous we'd visit alcatraz and all these fantastic museums and i thought it was absolutely brilliant if i was going to go to the city today how likely would i be to encounter the problems that you've mentioned and would you recommend visiting san francisco to people now well i recommend visiting san francisco you have a sense of adventure but your chances of encountering street addicts people living in tents on the street are a hundred percent i mean it's unavoidable you can in fact it's only gotten worse since the book came out which is sort of continues to be shocking to me even though i spent three years researching the book and two years writing it that the problem just kept getting worse and worse and that's sort of the nature of what happens when you don't treat addiction or mental illness and those are tricky mental you know those are tricky diseases to treat because the person who's suffering them doesn't want treatment often they just want to maintain their addictions but yeah i mean you see very large numbers of tents very large numbers of people pushing shopping carts with all their belongings in it you see a lot of public drug use a lot of public drug dealing part of what makes uh san francisco was always difficult to contain the drug dealing in part because it was in a downtown neighborhood called the tenderloin but even in los angeles you see in the skid row neighborhood which is also right next to the downtown you see incredibly large structures i mean i've been impressed by in a bad way how big the the tense structures have become you're now talking you know on the one hand a lot of them are just regular backpacking or camping tents but we're now seeing very large structures with wood with people using propane tanks for cooking barbecues whole sidewalks being blocked you're talking you know uh areas of a 10 block radius in places like uh los angeles which by far is the worst san francisco is so small so i think it's partly it's harder to get away from but it's also just spread throughout los angeles so that the parks have many tents in them and so it's and then the cities become filthy so even when you clean them regularly if you're having a lot of people living on the street they're using the street as their bathroom so the smell the filth uh the uncleanliness lots of garbage get produced by uh homeless people you know not just because they don't have regular trash to use but there's also a kind of hoarding that goes on people openly deconstructing bikes and what we call chop shops basically stealing bikes and trying to sell them off for parts i think what's so striking though is that really the people on the street are very comfortable at this point knowing that there won't be any consequences for their behavior so i've you see extraordinary scenes i mean there's scenes where people will basically take up not just the whole sidewalk but large parts of the street itself with their belongings with their garbage i mean i have you know photos of people that really they they occupy very large amounts of space outside of businesses and the and the city government and the police are basically unwilling or unable to do anything in part because we have these very progressive left-wing district attorneys prosecutors who won't prosecute these crimes which they view as quality of life crimes that are less important than the than the so-called victims who are perpetrating them why do these people choose la and san francisco and cities like this to go and live there out on the streets is it because of the lack of consequences you talk about for the crimes that they could commit for example yeah i mean the main reason is that you know if you're suffering i mean there's all sorts of stories of it too but people that are addicted to hard drugs they know that there are certain cities they can go to where they can gain easy and inexpensive access to heroin fentanyl methamphetamine just to give you a sense of it you can maintain your fentanyl addiction and fentanyl of course is the opioid that has replaced heroin in san francisco not totally but has really substituted for heroin in san francisco and other cities it's 50 times more potent than heroin significantly more dangerous as part of the reason we have so many people dying um but part of the reason is that it's so cheap because it's so concentrated so you can maintain your your fentanyl addiction for as little as ten dollars a day in san francisco right now similarly you can maintain a meth addiction for ten dollars a day and it's it's increasingly common for there to be what we call poly drug use or people using both meth and fentanyl sometimes simultaneously but throughout the day and the result is mental illness and often brain damage we know that these drugs long term used in the ways that they're being used cause brain damage they cause serious mental illness including psychosis so it's really out of control there's definitely been there's definitely a role of climate i mean people point out that you know you can sleep year-round in places like san francisco and los angeles because the weather is so mild that's disproven though by the fact that in places like miami and other warm cities they have disallowed the public camping and the open air drug use they still have a problem but it's significantly curtailed they require people to stay in homeless shelters even if they don't want to a lot of addicts don't want to sleep in shelters and understandably so there's rules there you're not allowed usually to shoot drugs in the shelter you have to go outside to use your drugs there's more pressure put on you to reform your behavior so it's definitely a consequence of the political environment which really also stems from a libertarian cultural milieu i want to quote from an article that got me interested in this subject last year by oliver wiseman and it goes to the impact that the lack of consequences for doing basic and simple crimes has on people within these cities so he says in april sincere williams the baby of just nine months was declared dead in a san francisco emergency room with signs of trauma on his body in january newlyweds 26 year old sharia muscoya was killed on his morning jog when a drunk career criminal in a stolen 4x4 ran a red light and struck him a few weeks before in the middle of the day hanukko abe and elizabeth platt were killed in a hit and run by another criminal with a long rap sheet also driving a stolen car and high on crystal meth in each of these cases the perpetrator had been recently released by the police either on parole or because of a failure to bring charges police had already detained the man suspected of murdering williams twice this year after domestic violence incidents the man who killed abe and platt had also been arrested for 73 felonies and 32 misdemeanors in san francisco alone can you talk about the impact that these policies have on the residents of these cities yeah i mean what you just basically described is what we've seen there's a broader movement though it certainly started in san francisco and it's been going on in san francisco for several decades and some of it is positive but it's gone way too far which is that you know the united states we had we have very high levels of incarceration compared to the rest of the world we and i traced the history of this in san francisco but basically you know we probably over incarcerated in the 1980s and 1990s in response to significant amounts of violence including related to drugs but not exclusively related to drugs there was then a backlash against that which i was a part of in the 1990s to seek alternatives to incarceration many of which i think are really positive including psychiatry drug rehabilitation which requires drug testing electronic monitoring and forms of probation and parole that would allow criminal offenders to be reintegrated back into their families and communities and out of prison the problems that have occurred that have occurred have been that the pro the really the radical left prosecutors have just gone way too far and there was sort of i mean i personally feel misled on a couple of things here which is that there was supposed there was an understanding when i was working on this over 20 years ago which was that there would be some other forms of accountability and requirements on people to take responsibility for the crimes they had committed to get their lives back on order but the response from many prosecutors including san francisco has basically been just to let people off without any consequences without probation or parole we know that half of all people let out of jail before their trial go on to commit new offenses three quarters of people arrested for violent offenses that are offenses that are let out before trial go on to commit new offenses they so there's just been a complete kind of i think fairly radical experiment to not charge people even for very serious crimes to not require people to get the psychiatric or addiction care they need this problem is complicated by the fact that the united states doesn't have a proper functioning mental health or psychiatric care system we don't have universal health care like exists in most developed economies so that's a big part of the problem but the left didn't pursue creating you know the kind of psychiatric and addiction care services that was required they just basically in a kind of white guilt a liberal guilt over historic racism and over incarceration have just been letting people off the hook without any consequences and so you ask what the what the effect is on the residents the effect is fear many people do leave you know families with kids uh you know leave because it's not safe people are turning to private security companies which i consider an extremely ominous trend especially if you consider the need to have a functioning cities and a functioning civilization you need to have you need to have universal security so the consequence has been really to uh exacerbate existing trends of inequality and a fraying of social solidarity which is necessary to have a functioning civilization and functioning cities one of the most interesting things about this topic is that money doesn't seem to equal better results necessarily so you can throw money at the problem and homelessness might continue to increase can you describe to people what the progressive approach is to drugs to crime to homelessness uh and how that has worked out in these cities in america well that's right i mean we've seen our our spending on homelessness in in san francisco has increased almost tenfold over the last decade and yet during that time we saw a 30 increase in homelessness so to some extent there's something called a magnet effect whereby when you offer people free housing free services even free needles with which to shoot heroin you end up attracting addicts this is a very well known phenomenon um though i do think that in some ways just the fact that there's laws are not being enforced and that drugs are cheap and plentiful is the i ultimately conclude is the main driver of people coming here but i even spoke to a very well positioned high ranking homelessness official in san francisco and this person told me that the situation got much worse after their budgets increased and that actually there was a period where the budgets did not increase that they were able to get the situation under better control so the spending of money on this problem has made it significantly worse it doesn't have to be that way you know there are some parts of the psychiatric care system that are quite expensive particularly providing people with psychiatric care in hospitals but even rehab particularly if it's a proper 90-day rehabilitation which is what's needed plus another three months of probation or kind of halfway house those things are expensive they require money but the the you need to mandate them you can't if people break the law and it's because of their addiction or mental illness then the proper approach is to offer them rehab or psychiatric care as an alternative to prison not as optional but we've made it completely optional so there's been a bunch of money spent on voluntary services that has been basically money completely wasted i i was just on the street a couple weeks ago and there was a group of people five people that were literally in the street they had surrounded themselves with police barricades they were near a heating vent to stay warm but they literally occupying part of the street right across from city hall and it was you know there was feces around them lots of garbage there's a lot of used needles one of the men we said you know the the worker i was with said you guys got to get up and clean up and the guy said i can't my hip is broken i mean he's literally on the street his hip is broken he's clearly in the late stages of deep addiction a homeless outreach team drove by called the hot team we told him this person needs care well one week later that same person was still on the street and the reason is because san francisco the policy is that if somebody says well i don't want care if they want to refuse care even if they're breaking the law because of this obesity to victims supposed victims and also the idea that somehow they're representing their care accurately they just left him there so i mean that sort of thing is quite common and so you know just to give a sense of it we're so rich in san francisco in california i mean it's the levels of wealth here i think it's probably fair to say are greater than really any other city or region in human history unless you count maybe you know like oil-rich places like saudi arabia united arab emirates but we have a huge number of billionaires we spend more than any other state on mental health we spend more on homelessness than any other state and we have a 31 billion dollar surplus in california this year because of the tech boom so much of our taxes come from incomes you have to remember you know mark zuckerberg the ceo of facebook lives in san francisco the ceo of twitter lives in san francisco so our biggest tech billionaires not to mention just many venture capitalists and many others you've never heard of live and pay taxes in san francisco and california and yet it looks like a slum you know i mean it's really quite a remarkable situation where so much wealth uh produces so much human misery and poverty and the irony is that the entire purpose or alleged purpose behind their policies is compassion and yet this how can you think of anything that's more or less compassionate rather than the current situation that you're describing how policymakers removed the onus from the individual to improve their lives onto the state or onto society which they blame for these issues so they as you mentioned earlier might say that the problem isn't um isn't drug addiction but it is that they live we live in a society which is dominated by white supremacy or by racial injustice whatever and that's the issue that we need to tackle not um the problems that individuals face yeah that's you have it exactly right i i think there's three important thinkers here on the radical left the most important and most recent is michel foucault the french historian foucault's work really demonized the institutions of civilization he demonized medical care he demonized psychiatric care he was part of a number of radical thinkers in the 60s that basically said that that mental illness is a myth that psychiatry is just a way to control people and to marginalize deviance as a way to establish what is rational and normal for everybody else real disservice to people with serious mental illness there's also of course marks the idea being that we live in a really unjust uh system called capitalism and that there's a much more there's a much better uh system that we can create that's radically different from the ones that we have that would have much better outcomes and it really goes back to jean jacques rousseau and the idea that society is to blame for inequality suffering oppression and that the system has to be radically altered and i think part of that so the idea is that individuals are innocent and free of responsibility for their own outcomes that all of us that are our life outcomes are entirely determined by society and so there is a kind of fatalism here which is really interesting because on the one hand it seems like because i think conservatism traditionally has been more fatalistic but there's a fatalism here which basically says as long as we have a capitalist system and they would go further and say racist and patriarchal and all the rest all the other woke um parts of the book religion as long as that system is in place then you can expect the suffering so to some extent you see a really twisted uh enabling and uh production of victims out of an ideology which says that the system must create victims because the system is is evil capitalist and all the rest can we track these problems that you're describing throughout this interview and in your book to the popularization of the ideas that you just described yeah for sure i mean so when you interview and i did and so san francisco is really filled with interviews with the people that are responsible for the current situation they all agreed um really almost all of them agreed to talk with me it includes the so-called homelessness advocates who are in fact uh defenders of open drug scenes open drug use defenders of addiction of allowing addiction to proliferate i mean it's quite amazing when you consider that addiction is a mental illness it's a disease these are people that are basically demanding that the disease not be treated and it's in part because the disease is very different from other diseases and that most people with diabetes don't say no no i want to maintain my diabetes but that is the case with addiction people say no no i'd rather just stay here living in my filth on the street than get rehab and quit drugs it's hard to imagine if you've never you know suffered from one of those problems but basically we do have a set of people that are recovering addicts who talk about how they were mentally ill and they needed to be arrested they needed there to be interventions to deal with their addictions so yes i mean you can see the from foucault marx and rousseau the idea that the system is responsible for everything it's it's really um [Music] it's an a priori assumption that if you see something bad in the world if you see some misery in the world that's the fault of the system of the racist capital sexist system and so that's why you see progressives basically trying to dismantle every important institution necessary for a functioning civilization or society i'm working on a piece now about how progressives are basically attacking three important institutions one is meritocracy the idea that standardized tests and other forms of measuring ability are immoral because the consequences of meritocratic uh testing is racial inequality in schools we also see progressives attacking policing the broader criminal justice system but even the idea that police there's a one of the things that is claimed and is obvious is maybe not obviously but is false is that police don't prevent crimes and so there's been an effort to defund the police that contributed significantly to the rise in homicides in the united states and then um in an effort to get rid of reliable energy and reliable electricity and the ir the interesting thing on that one is that europeans have suffered the most from the consequence of attempting to power civilization entirely on weather dependent renewables and we saw a significant divestment of funding into reliable sources of power whether it be oil and gas or nuclear and so what i what i'm seeing is really a concerted effort to when they and they say progressives the radical left will say we want to dismantle these institutions they're very serious about it and in some cases these are institutions that need some reform policing psychiatry even the provision of electricity these are all things that do merit some amount of reform but that's not what's being pursued what's being pursued is really the destruction of those institutions without any viable alternative being created in their place and all of that can be traced back to the ideologies that were constructed by foucault marx and rousseau who basically just had a view of just tear it down and there's a kind of you know you could call it socialism but the problem is is that it's really quite anti-statist and so what i conclude in san francisco is that this is really much more like a left libertarianism or an anarchism because it basically is out to destroy broader systems of governance that are required for a functioning nation state or a functioning city if their policies have failed so miserably as you've said why do they keep winning elections in these cities well that's a very important question it's where the the book ends up kind of going there i mean i i look at why do the book is the subtitle is why progressives ruin cities but the final uh reason that i give or that i explore is because conservatives and moderates let them and that there's you know in san francisco there is no conservative party there's really no republicans to speak of so but you still have a left-right uh conflict between progressives on the left and moderates on the right and moderates neither moderates in san francisco nor republicans in california or republicans nationally have had much to say about these issues there's been a demand for law and order but there hasn't been for example a conservative proposal for universal psychiatric care for drug rehabilitation i've interviewed a lot of different conservatives and republicans and there's some you know there's a an american think tank based out of new york called manhattan institute which was uh which advised rudolph giuliani the republican mayor of new york and also other has advised other republican but also more moderate democratic mayors and they have uh they are now on board with some kind of universal psychiatric care but universal health care has not been something that republicans have been in favor of traditionally they viewed it as a unacceptable increase of the state i think that's made conservatives unable to offer a realistic alternative to progressive rule in california and i think to some extent that's due to opposition to universal health care but to some extent i think there's been discomfort on the right with with psychiatry and psychology in general i think the traditional conservatives had viewed that you know therapy for example as something that was that was best done within the family or done with the church and not something that required uh you know public taxpayer investment we've had a you know we so you know we have a much more libertarian right in the united states than than the right tends to be in other countries around the world so i think that the the so-called right or the moderate or the conservative opposition has not offered a serious plan to these questions and still is not you know there's still it's still a very rule the other thing is that republicans in the united states tend to be a very rural party they tend to dominate more rural states they tend to be more country people in general i mean that's true of the right internationally as well but it's i think it's even more true here and so you know what i end up where i am going in my book in in san francisco is i end up holding up as a model the netherlands because in part because i i thought san franciscans would appreciate having a more liberal city as their model and the netherlands does a really good job in terms of treating addiction and mental illness but i've also point out that the governing party in the netherlands right now is a center-right party that came to power in part to deal with open-air drug scenes and open-air drug addiction in amsterdam in the late 1980s and early 1990s that was very similar to what we have in san francisco and other liberal cities and i point out that really it's a center-left party that's you know fine with decriminalized marijuana decriminalized sex work completely comfortable with gays and lesbians uh being married so it's a more progressive center right in the netherlands and i think a more progressive center right like that would do very well in in cities like san francisco and in in states like california let's talk briefly about new york recently we've seen crime statistics crime has dramatically increased in the last few years in new york city are these progressive ideas sweeping across america and to other large cities around the world they are for sure um although i think we're now starting to see a backlash against them you know i mentioned before i worked for george soros's foundation in the late 1990s uh his work continued over the last 20 years and incredibly effective not just in sort of uh changing the the conversation but really also in electing progressive district attorneys who have basically started acting like defense attorneys in terms of not prosecuting crimes and also leading to the contributing to the demoralization of police since police become very frustrated if if they make arrests and there's no consequence for the people they arrested and then those efforts have also spread around the world you know scotland actually has one of the worst drug epidemics in the world it's a much smaller country obviously much smaller uh region but um is suffering very serious levels of drug overdose also because of being enamored with harm reduction similarly we've seen so-called harm reduction efforts in canada have disastrous consequences even though canada has universal health care so obviously universal psychiatric and health care is not sufficient if you have extremely left-wing liberal policies on drug use like in canada and certainly in new york in the last eight years under mayor bill de blasio it deteriorated significantly significantly more unsheltered addicts and mentally ill people living on the streets living on the sidewalks with no consequences it was just in new york and i saw people i saw somebody sleeping on a mattress on the sidewalk on i think seventh avenue and there was like two police officers right there who did nothing and it's because they know there's no consequence if they do arrest somebody or tell them to move along i do think we've seen a bit of a backlash against that with the election of of eric adams who's a former police officer as the mayor of new york elected as a moderate democrat but it's it's not obvious that what he'll be able to change because they also have a very progressive district attorney and so i think we're in a very dynamic moment right now i think there's a lot of possibilities for there to be i think there is a significant backlash against these uh left-wing policies around drugs and crime in american cities but the progressive movement is very powerful it's very strong it basically has almost total you know uniformity and conformity on the part of the journalists who at the mainstream news media in the united states are incredibly one-sided in their coverage of this i found in my interactions with some of the journalists that many of them either don't know or they pretend not to understand the difference between arresting somebody and incarcerating them many addicts need to be arrested and people with mental illness need to be arrested when they break the law that doesn't mean they need to go to prison for 20 years but when you explain that in places like portugal and netherlands which are held up as models for places like san francisco and and other progressive cities when i point out that in fact drug users who use drugs publicly are arrested in amsterdam and lisbon the response i've gotten from any journalists has been well but uh that's not true they don't send uh drug addicts to prison so there's a sort of some deliberate i think misunderstanding or misinformation on the part of the journalists many democrats and progressives really don't have a very subtle view of this they don't actually understand that there's that you can mandate drug rehab and that it works there's a lot of mythologies that have been promoted including you know i i think vice the media company has been a major purveyor of misinformation on a lot of these questions so you have a lot of really you're very you have traditionally a very polarized environment where people think that their only two choices are to send people to prison for 20 years or to do nothing and part of what i've tried to do with san francisco and with our writings and our advocacy has been to sort of show that actually there's many other things that can be done including coercive measures that are not the same as just you know putting people in prison and throwing away the key and as you rightly mentioned earlier any attempt to be tougher on crime for example is simply painted as part of a white supremacist or racist system which disproportionately impacts uh african americans the other thing i want to talk about was is this defund the police movement how effective has that been in cities like new york and other places well it's very interesting i've been writing a lot about how in some ways the progressive criminal justice agenda is falling apart and really the thing that it fell apart on is defund the police so you know this to to remind everybody you know we had a spectacular killing of an african-american man george floyd that was caught on video by a police officer in minneapolis last year it led immediately to massive black lives matter protests many of those protests were demanding defunding the police which meant in practical terms uh diverting money from police departments to other social services there were certainly some people that also went even further and argued for police abolition and really the abolition of of jails and prisons but the defund the police agenda was actually very popular in liberal and progressive cities so we saw many cities san francisco los angeles austin new york taking oakland taking measures to defund the police including announcements by mayors announcements by city councils however those same city governments quickly reversed themselves after homicides spiked in part was in part in response to really two things uh the first is sort of the withdrawal of police officers from traditional policing functions including ones that are proven to reduce violence and homicide which is often just a lot of engagement with community members a lot of interaction with potential criminals you know it's important to remember that good police officers and good policing they know the people that are at high risk of committing crimes including homicides and being in their face having a a positive relationship with them and their families just walking around being engaged those things really do matter there's a lot of evidence that shows that they matter even though that's often denied by the radical left we know that policing matters but we also there's also good evidence that the mentality of would-be criminals changes during anti-police protests and in response to viral videos that show police brutality and we think that that influences the decisions that that criminals made make in particular around homicides homicides are a very emotional crime they're not people that are committing them are usually not thinking about the but there is some sense in which we see an increase in homicides and crimes by people who don't believe in the system or who think the system is broken or corrupt or inherently racist or being administered in racist ways and so this is a real problem if you are as a progressive or a liberal out there communicating that the whole system is racist and broken and unfair you're basically providing a justification for people to commit crimes now as soon as you say this the response is well what about real problems is this is the idea then that we shouldn't raise concerns about real problems in policing and of course the answer is of course not we should always try to improve policing but it's worth pointing out that police violence including police killing of civilians has declined significantly i believe it's declined over 30 percent um over the last 30 years so we've made significant improvements of course that's not reason to stop we need to make continue to make improvements but the but contingent requirement of improving policing is to have more police not less so if you're concerned about police violence you should want to refund the police you should want to increase funding for police a new study came out that actually showed that the united states is relatively under policed compared to european countries that may sound surprising because i think we see there's a sense in which american police are very present particularly in high crime neighborhoods but it's not the case on a per capita basis and there's other things that that progressives said well we want to see social workers and therapists and psychologists respond to mental health calls you know somebody calls the cops and says there's a crazy guy screaming and smashing car windows with a crowbar or threatening somebody or somebody on the street instead of psychosis ninety percent of those calls um can be violent and so when you interview social workers that that respond to those calls many of them will tell you that they want to be with a police officer because those are dangerous calls to be in so you know one of the things that's been going on over the last few weeks is that progressives have been gaslighting the public and others and saying uh that defund the police never happened well they're they're right in the sense that cities decided not to defund the police after crime and homicides increased in 2020 but it's really misleading because the demands for defunding the police were met with a response from policy makers in many cities to defund the police that were then later reversed but that those efforts to defund the police the anti-police protests and the decisions to cut police budgets did result in significant police resignations withdrawals demoralization and that had a big impact according to most criminologists and anybody who's got a sense of common sense here had a big impact on what police officers have been doing over the last couple of years how have progressives reacted to your book if they have reacted at all and are they simply sort of doubling down on their policies at the moment or is there any shift in places like san francisco well it's been a very interesting response to the book as you might imagine um and this is the second book i've had in two years my first book last year on the environment which was also a critique of the left was basically just ignored well it was attacked but then it was it was not reviewed in the new york times which is our most influential newspaper san francisco was reviewed in the new york times it was viciously attacked claiming i didn't interview any homeless people which is absurd interviewed hundreds and told their stories but then the times at the end of the year came out and made it an editor's choice i gave it an editor's choice uh designation which suggested somebody there maybe thought that the review was unfair i've received emails from progressives and liberals who told me that at first they didn't want to read the book or they were reading the book to basically just attack me and then they realized that the book is really not it's not a conservative book i mean it's a it's a liberal book in the sense that i argue for you know universal psychiatric care for example and i argue for a very compassionate approach even though i also recognize the need for law enforcement so it's people have been coming around but the biggest shift by far has been the san francisco mayor um book by the way san francisco was has not been reviewed by the local newspaper it's been reviewed uh by uh the economist your paper the telegraph reviewed it it's been reviewed by the second largest spanish newspaper um the one of the biggest danish newspapers reviewed by the new york times but the local san francisco paper has not uh reviewed it or really discussed it or profiled me even though i've been a subject of the newspaper of the san francisco chronicles coverage for over 20 years but the mayor of san francisco two weeks ago came out and announced a big crackdown on open-air drug use on drug dealing on so-called homelessness that i think that my book contributed significantly to creating the environment in which she felt the need to respond and to to issue and to really demand a role for law enforcement and so we're in an extremely dynamic moment i mean i'm working on a piece now um about what we can do to save san francisco you know part of the problem is that the traditional leaders of of dynamic cities like san francisco are though are you know are what we would call the bourgeoisie or the new industrial class of capitalists and entrepreneurs well that's the high-tech sector and you know unlike the carnegies or the rockefellers you know of the last uh centuries these are folks that are highly mobile you know there's a sociological term that's you know we say there's somewhere people and anywhere people somewhere people are stuck with where they live they they have to do their work in a particular place anywhere people can have a laptop and work anywhere in the world and so i think part of the problem is that there's not a lot of loyalty to san francisco on the part of the san franciscan elites so you would expect to see like the tech class the capitalist class really step up to the plate run candidates for election fund the think tanks and media initiatives to really push back against the dogmatism and that really hasn't happened i mean it's happening to some extent but it's not really happening at the level of which you would hope to see it happen and that's a real problem because i think this is a broader problem that we see which is sort of this idea that you know there's like not very much loyalty either to city or state or country you can kind of live anywhere you have cryptocurrency which makes you even less loyal to your nation and so there's a sense i think by a lot of wealthy people that are in a position to turn the situation around san francisco of kind of why bother you know my life is fine i can put my kids in private schools i can live in some other part of the world i can move to austin texas or wherever so i think this declining strands of solidarity which i think that the nationalist right has been responding to have been a real obstacle to getting the kind of changes we want to see you know that being said san francisco i think the other issue is just that it's become a national embarrassment it's been become the punchline of jokes it's become a kind of symbol of democratic party failures of governance so i was just watching you know a fox news segment last night that i thought was going to be about homelessness in san francisco but it was just used as a kind of prop as a symbol of how terrible democrats are at governing so i do think that there's uh there's a response to what's going on from within the democratic party from some of the elder strategists and leaders of the party who think that that the representation of american progressivism and american liberalism by san francisco is really undermining the democratic party brand and that something has to be done about it but it's an extremely you know dynamic situation um you know they just there's just not a consensus yet in san francisco for the mayor to do the kind of things that she and i think people around her know that she needs to do in order to get the situation under control thank you michael for joining us that was really interesting and a lot to think about there i think for other cities around the world not only in america thanks steven it's great to be with you

Channel: The Telegraph

Views: 721,542

Keywords: Telegraph, News, michael shellenberger, michael shellenberger san francisco, jordan peterson, steven pinker, san francisco, homelessness, michael shellenberger interview, san fransicko, san fransicko book, homeless, san francisco homeless, michael shellenberger debate, why progressives ruin cities, san francisco drug epidemic, san francisco housing problem, san francisco homless problem, san franciaco affordable housing, addiction, drug scenes, homeless shelters

Id: WlH3S-uLTIw

Length: 56min 19sec (3379 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 14 2022