I Proved The Police Don't Investigate Crime - Dr Lawrence Newport

24:16The supply networks become even more important. They become even more valuable. These organizations, they defend them even more. And eventually, every day, what people see and interact with every day is shops and their phones and their bikes and otherwise. And that's what they see as evidence of decay around them. And now all of us have to be more careful of our phones, be more careful of our bikes. A lot of people are just simply not buying expensive bicycles because what's the point? And I mean, if you're going to any shop in London now, pretty much nearly anywhere now, it's items are in plastic containers and they're behind glass and they're locked away.

24:56And this is it wasn't this case like three years ago. And so we all suffer a worse quality of life as a result of this. And yet, after we campaigned for a while on this, the Met suddenly undertook a specific action for a week in which they arrested 200 phone thieves in one week. So it turns out it's actually possible. They could do it. It just requires leadership and actually dedication to getting it done. And I think it's a very profound point you highlighted there, which is the demoralising effect that it has on society. As somebody who's a Londoner and has pretty much lived all my life in London, I find it deeply unsettling.

25:38I find it deeply upsetting when I walk around my city and I see criminals acting with impunity because they know nobody's going to step in. You go into the tube and now, actually, let's just be honest about this, whether you pay for the tube or not, it's just a question of morality. You don't have to. I was in Fensbury Park tube station the other day. They just opened the barriers so people could just walk in and out as they chose. And you just think to yourself, like, ordinary people are being punished for following the rules and criminals are being allowed to get away with it. And actually, they've been given the better end of the deal.

26:16Yeah, I mean, there's there's been like no focus on this, no attention on this. and because the police have done well elsewhere and because our system is so utterly broken, there hasn't been any actual focus on the stuff that we interact with every single day that is actually making our lives materially worse. It's obviously worse to raise children in a world where everything has to be locked away behind plastic containers and you have to explain to them, oh, that's because people might steal it. Like, they learn the world around them is unsafe, untrustworthy and nasty.

26:49Francis Foster:Well, at least they're prepared for the modern world, mate, the way it is now. But I'm joking, of course. But I think Francis makes a very important point because we saw Robert Jenner, the Conservative MP. He did a video from the tube where he effectively he confronted a few people who were not paying. and I did a tweet about it last year because I don't live in London I tend to don't tend to spend much time uh and I went on the tube for like the first time in like a year let's say or half a year how long it was and I was shocked genuinely because uh there were first of all I don't think in my life I ever remember people jumping over barriers in front of staff yeah and then I saw these same kids that have done that, like smashing the stop button on escalators, inconvenience and everybody else pushing each other into other passengers on the thing.

27:39Francis Foster:Like that is not a London that I ever remember. So it's changed very, very quickly. And I think part of the worry is, is that this, this general vibe of impunity can't help, I think, but not inspire more people to break the rules because like you even when you watch that Robert Generic video the people that are not paying are not just this might be my prejudicial way of thinking but they're not stereotypically who you might think is not paying for the tube well I think it's probably kids messing about people who really are like really poor and they have to somehow get in the tube and they can't afford it uh or some like hardcore criminals but it's just like people going to work just people on their way to work you know what, I'm not paying and I think the worry is not only that there is a general sense of more people are committing more crime more people are being the victims of crime but there's a sense of an overall the word you used is decay and I think that's absolutely right and it feels like it every day I really struggle with the fact that exactly as you say over the last, I've been in London like 10 years I was born on the south coast and coming to London 10 years ago it was very very different to how it is now and the ways it's different is a general feeling of lawlessness like there is a feeling that I'm an idiot if I get my phone out on the wrong street and if it's stolen it's almost like it's my fault because I should have known nothing here is safe I actually did a tweet the other week on shoplifting on some of the new figures, I turned into my local shop and it's a nice area, someone runs out of the Tesco with their arms filled with items and the staff just going, oh what can you do?

29:36They literally just shoplifted right now and I thought, well I could tweet about it but I thought no one would believe me, I literally just sent out another tweet on shoplifting and it's happening again right in front of me. It is obviously completely unsustainable and it's obviously something which with some targeted policing on a very small number of criminals. This is why, even though there's not much prison space, if you target the right people, you can actually dramatically reduce rates. So in the city of London, where they focused on a single bike theft gang, it was around seven people arrested, imprisoned them.

30:09Bike thefts dropped in the area by 90%. It's actually possible to make huge, huge, huge differences if you put away for some time the small number of people who are disproportionately responsible for the majority of crime in this country. And it's also a story. It's horrifying to me. It's a true story. It happened to my parents. My parents are old. My mother is disabled. My dad is a full time carer. He is also old and vulnerable. They went shopping. They came back. There was a gang in the house robbing, robbing, robbing the place. And my dad didn't know he walked in and he disturbed them. and they took my grandmother's jewellery, which is the only connection my mother had with her mum who's since passed away, and ran away.

30:54And you think, on the one hand, of course this is awful, this is distressing. But on the other hand, and I said this to my dad, I said, you're really lucky. Because imagine if they had got violent. And this is a man in his late 70s. That could have easily turned from a burglary to a murder. Yeah. And when we don't deal with these types of crimes, they can escalate. If you just allow bike robberies just to happen all day, every day, some people are going to fight back when they see their bike being stolen or their phone being stolen because people react to different ways when they're under pressure.

31:28That's the moment a knife gets drawn because we're not tackling knife crime the way we do it, we're meant to be doing. We're not doing stop and search. And all of a sudden the kid gets stabbed, the kid loses their life or a person, whoever it may be. it just seems that what we're doing is we're allowing a cancer to grow and then flourish. Yeah, I mean, we can see it in knife crime because actually knife crime is also on the rise as well. Like there is going to be a buildup of this because there is more and more organised crime. There is more and more money in this. There is more and more just general decay, general distrust.

32:01I mean, we even see it in the case of police not investigating things. as you see in burglaries. Burglaries are so serious because they can for exactly what it is. I mean, it's both like horrific just to have stuff taken from you, but also someone in your home breaking in. It's incredibly like invasive and very unsettling. That's one area you're meant to be completely safe. And they can become violent, both because people want to defend their property totally reasonably and because people in those environments realize I'm tracked and want to fight back and will do many, many things to get out of that situation, including up to killing people, which we obviously have seen cases of that.

32:35But there was a case just recently. It was a barrister. He had his house broken into, his home broken into, and the actual criminal left behind a bail notice with their name on it. Did police investigate? No.

32:51Francis Foster:It's like something out of True Romance. He leaves his driver's license in the dead guy's hand. And they didn't do anything about it. Right. Just left. So, what are we going to do about this? So, I mean, there's a variety of things that can actually be done at a very baseline level. The first is that rather than the government's current approach, which is actually to let even more career criminals back out onto the streets, they have to instead designate emergency prisons. That is possible. I mean, so you commandeer buildings that aren't currently prisons, you make them into makeshift prisons and you put prisoners in there.

33:31Yes, exactly. They also need longer term to look at the procurement rules and otherwise on prisons, because the fact that at the moment it's estimated that the new prison spaces, if you look at the amount they've put aside and the number of spaces, it's going to cost about£335 ,000 a place to build these. It's completely, that's mad. It's more than like the average house cost in the UK. Like, what is going on here? What is actually happening? But that's longer term for immediacy as in designate emergency prisons. There's a course we've got because of the backlog as well. If we actually opened up our courts for longer, if we open them up in the evenings at weekends, which happens in some American cities, we don't do it here.

34:12But most of the time, there's several courts across the country who just simply aren't opening Monday to Friday. They take a random day out or so on. Any given day, up to a third of our courts might be shut. whilst there's a massive backlog. Given that, if they actually open them and we actually have people and judges sitting for longer, we have a bunch of people on remand who are awaiting trial in our prisons. You can get through thousands of people. And of course, you've then got prisoners, foreign national offenders who are still in our prisons who obviously should be deported. There's one thing the government does seem to be looking at actually doing now.

34:49We're talking about nearly 10 ,000 people, which obviously would make a lot of room when you've got about 80 ,000 prison spaces. Do you know why those people haven't been deported? I mean, that system is also completely broken. Every aspect of this thing is broken. There's whole problems there with various interpretations of parts of British legislation by judges over the years have become more and more generous. There's been wider and wider readings, I think, of the Human Rights Act and otherwise. I don't think actually the Human Rights Act does actually support some of these judgments, but it's been used in that way.

35:20It's not just that, but it's also just like simple things like not. I know in some immigration cases, for instance, just not sending home officials, not sending lawyers. This was reported a few years ago by The Telegraph and just not sending lawyers to these cases. They're not defending them. They're not basic failures, basic failures across the board. And so you have a complete again, another area which has completely failed to operate. And as a result, we all now live in a situation where, unlike Nordic countries, for instance, that do deport prisoners incredibly quickly. You've broken the rules in the country.

35:54You don't need to be here. Thank you very much. Someone else or other people who've actually moved here follow the rules. It's pretty basic not to commit crime, certainly not to commit crime to the level you get sent to prison in Britain, which is quite hard to do. You know, if you're in that situation, we should be sending you home. Yeah, it's I mean, when you look at particularly the one that is absolutely horrifying to me is when you see sex offenders. It's a very serious crime. It destroys people's lives. Yeah. And they're going to prison sometimes for a matter of months. Yeah. You actually wonder what the hell is going on here?

36:31Yeah. I mean, we've got some awful cases. There was someone who because it's not even just sex offenders case, which are also awful. It's also just like almost murders. So there was one case in which a guy beats up his ex-girlfriend so badly that she writes his name in her blood on the wall because she thinks she's going to die. He had 20 previous offences and he was sentenced to under three years. What are we doing here? He's quite clearly showing the character he is. This is a domestic violence case where she almost kills a woman and the result is he gets under three years. he'll be out in probably just about two.

37:11That's obviously not acceptable. No one looks at that and thinks that's what a society demands. Like, these people need to be away from the public and the public should expect much longer periods where they're away and they're not a threat. It's mad that that isn't the case. Look, starting a business is exciting, but it isn't easy. It's not just logos, merch and big ideas. It's late nights, awkward first sales, and wondering if your bank balance is going to survive until Friday. That's why having the right tools from day one makes all the difference. Enter Shopify. Shopify powers millions of businesses around the world, from big names like Mattel and Gymshock, to people just getting started on their kitchen table.

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38:44Francis Foster:Is this primarily a practical issue based on the things that you've talked about, or is there an ideological dimension to this as well, whereby I'm just speculating, I don't know, you correct me please if I'm wrong but you know there is a wave of thinking that you know criminals are criminals because of poverty and because they've been badly treated and and there's a lot of truth to all these things by the way you know but essentially crime is the product of victimization of the people who then become criminals and we've got to be kind and nice and you know whatever whatever is there some of that happening too yeah definitely I mean there's like an ideological trend to this, but it's also like kind of by the by in the sense that when you're dealing with career criminals, you know, 15 or more offenses committing the majority of crime in this country, some of which are extremely violent, the first duty is actually just to protect the public.

39:41Second duty can be things like, how do you rehabilitate them once they're behind bars? How do you deal with them once they're behind? All these questions. But the very first duty of the state should be you are clearly a danger to the public we should remove you from the public sphere and put you away somewhere and then we can talk about what we need to do in terms of rehabilitation or otherwise like i was talking earlier with drugs and other like there are social factors there are a huge bunch of complexities here but the baseline has to be uh well if you don't do this in fact the baseline is that all of us now suffer a much worse quality of life.

40:14If you have people with 300 offences going straight out again, some of them for instance have been banned from every shop in their local area literally one of them, she has over 400 offences, is banned from every shop in the north east of England but is still back out on the streets again and shopkeepers are continuously asking please put her away for longer because everybody in the area has to suffer now whenever she's around it's completely unsustainable and again is a result of just like not thinking down the longer term and not thinking about what this means compounded over time. But it is an ideological point as well.

40:49I think this is what happened repeatedly in both judgments, giving people lax and laxer sentences, and in the sentencing council, offering laxer sentences, encouraging laxer sentences, and from legislators who kind of view prison as a bit of an awkward Victorian institution and don't look at it as a necessity to protect the public. And how much of this as well is down to the Conservatives' cost-cutting with the police? I think they took out of action 20 ,000 police officers. I speak to a lot of coppers who watch the show. and when it comes to Theresa May, they go a particularly vibrant shade of fuchsia and they put a lot of the blame at her door, particularly when she was Home Secretary.

41:40Yeah, I mean, I think that's definitely part of the story. Of course, the story with that is also that we've had terrible economic, I was going to say growth, we haven't really had growth. We've had stagnation decline for about 20 years or more in our economy. And as a result, pay is very bad. Pay is bad across both private and public sectors. Policing numbers are now climbing back up. They're nearly to what they were in 2010. Of course, per capita, it hasn't quite matched because the population has grown so much more in that time period as well. But there are more officers. The problem is they're not paid very well.

42:18The job has gotten worse over time. The systems have gotten more and more additive and more and more complex because every single marginal case that causes a scandal now has new paperwork added. So where it used to take 15 minutes to book someone in, it now takes three hours when you arrest them. So all parts of the system are trying to beat you down. So many, many good officers leave. And right now they're finding a difference to recruit. So they're opening up the standards or rather lowering the standards to get more people in as officers. and then you end up in this cycle where your best people leave more and more and more and you have to keep opening up for a week and week of candidates and accepting them in.

42:57And then many of them leave, so you end up with a big churn. So I do think it is in part pay, which is a result of our bad economy and bad choices in government. But it's also now a situation where the government actually needs to do significant investment, but also choosing actual parts about what do we focus, what is our actual goal for policing in this country, what is our actual goal of the prisons in this country, rather than at the moment, which has been partly an ideological and partly just passivity and inaction, leading to just repeated class across the board. They don't know what they want police to do.

43:32They don't really know what they want prison. They don't really know why we have prisons. They haven't had a very upfront discussion about, well, duty number one of prisons is to protect the public. That's why we have them. We should put people in those that are a danger to the public. That's a very simple thing that has not been communicated politically in so long. The conservatives could get away with building only 500 net prison places. It's in 14 years while increasing the population by several million. It's just complete failure, complete failure.

44:02Francis Foster:Well, I mean, one of the things with that is I think, having spoken to a lot of people in that sort of mindset is they think of prison as punishment and they feel guilty about punishment. and punishment is not necessarily the most effective strategy in whatever context. So for them, it's like, well, we're not going to put people in prison because it doesn't work, quote unquote, because the objective they're trying to get to is rehabilitation because they live in this kind of utopian world where someone who steals hundreds of phones a day needs to be miraculously turned into a good upstanding citizen as a result of prison, which can happen for some people, but not for everybody.

44:43Francis Foster:So the protection of the public thing gets lost by the wayside, I think. But the other thing is, I think, something that bothers a lot of people who watch our show and quite a lot of people in general in the country at this point is, you know, in a country in which we have, I think in the last year, 12 ,000 arrests for people's speech, for things they said on social media, etc. There is a reason that two-tier thing is sticking, I think. Do you have any sense of that aspect of it? Yeah, like, I mean, I find it particularly frustrating when you see lots of talk about how they cannot prioritize actual thefts.

45:19I mean, even on my bike video, so many of the quote tweets from officer accounts, many of them were supportive, but there was a significant number that were also not supportive. And it was, I'm doing too many important things to look out for your bike mate, was basically the reaction. But well, okay, but scale that up and you've got a huge scandal. I think it's very, very difficult to take that view and say, where you're doing much more important things when you're going after particularly non-crime hay incidents. This seems completely bizarre. And what's particularly bizarre about this whole thing is the disconnect between the sentencing we're seeing in some of those incidents, like Lucy Conley's tweet, which is a stupid tweet.

46:00I think she deletes it after some time. Dumb thing to say in the middle of riots, heated atmosphere in general. two and a half years in prison? I mean, I just mentioned someone earlier who nearly beat his girlfriend to death who just got only a few months more than that. That's like, and we have some people who actually committed violence in the rights themselves, actually committed violence getting less. Now, that's obviously completely out of kilter. The sentencing makes no real sense. But also the police time spent on it, the effort kind of spent on it as well, and the fact that we end up with a very bizarre set of priorities for policing.

46:38Again, as a result, that what is the purpose of police is not really a question that the government is seriously looking at and thinking, well, what do we actually want police to do? Protect the public. Okay, what does that mean? And what does it mean in practice? And what do we actually have to look out for? Rather than kind of this smorgasbord of random things that they are kind of obsessed with right now, which one of them is regulating speech. I mean, I will say, I have also had the other side of this too. like during the Bully XL campaign that I ran. After that, I spent like several months with like large amounts of death threats.

47:10And that I reported to the police. Well, the owners of Bully XL would send you death threats.

47:14Francis Foster:There's a shocker. I imagine they're such nice people. He's lovely. Well, no, I'm a fly, mate. Why is he just ripped out a child's throat? Well, it's not a fly. Sorry. I mean, it was certainly, well, weirdly, joining the campaign itself, not very much, but the moment the government actually did something, then suddenly it was horrendous. And so it went from nearly nothing to massive. And I couldn't deal with all the material. It was so awful to look at, but I had someone go through, a friend of mine, and detail it all, and there was like 90 pages of material. I sent it to the police and they did nothing.

47:55It was completely useless. So, which was actually very frustrating. They thought, well, you know, if you're actually threatening to kill somebody and you're trying to find out about their child and their life, you're trying to find out where their place of work is and what office they've got. That's like pretty bad. Like, could you do something? Can you know? Nothing happened. So there are limits to this stuff. I think there really is actual limits.

48:16Francis Foster:Well, no, no one in their right mind would say that free speech is about the ability to send people death threats. That's not free speech. And look, even the Lucy Connolly thing. Look, I think the sentence that she got is outrageous. There's no other way to put it. That's bad. Now, her tweet, taken in the context in which it was going on, can be perceived by some people as an incitement to violence in the middle of riots. That might be quite dangerous. I think the problem we've got is partly technological, which is 20 years ago, if there were riots happening and you were sitting in the pub with your mates go, I wish to burn down a f***ing hotel.

48:57Francis Foster:No one would take that seriously. And it's then a matter of personal opinion, whether you think someone venting on social media has probably had a few drinks or whatever, whether that's to be taken seriously. But now it's almost like everyone has a microphone and everyone is therefore treated as a broadcaster. And so Lucy Conley is effectively treated as a journalist who went on TV and said, burn down the hotels, right? Which I don't think is what happened. But even if you think to some extent that is what happened, the contrast you make, I think, is very fair, which is there are people who actually committed acts of violence who got a similar or smaller or slightly bigger sentence, which I just think is insane.

49:38Francis Foster:And what I think the reason people bring up her case, but more broadly, the restrictions around speech, is that it shows that there are police forces in the country that do seem to have the resources to send six guys to arrest and take a former police officer to a police station because he tweeted something about anti-Israel protests. and then he had some Douglas Murray books on his bookshelf which would judge to be very Brexity or whatever the quote was. And I think you just go, if the police were just struggling across the board, people would go, look, the economy, as you say, is not doing very well.

50:17Francis Foster:The police are struggling. We know officers are working very hard individually, a lot of them. But the country is where it is. But when you see instances where that happens, that's when you go, okay, well, this clearly is not just about the resources. It's also about priorities. Yeah, I think that's the frustrating part of it is exactly as you were saying, and like I was saying with Ms Connolly, you've got both the fact that apparently our prisons are completely full, so we can't do anything, but also we're going to give this person an incredibly long sentence whilst giving domestic abusers who almost beat their girlfriend to death only a couple of months more.

50:49That's just like, that is not, I think, how the British public would prioritise their sentencing. And it's very difficult to see what the actual thoughts are behind that. And then you've got the actual policing side, where why are they spending time on this when they are not going, we're not checking CCTV. This is something which is clearly very, very basic expectation. Especially, you know, directly outside of the Met's headquarters. Even there, right, they're not going to check your CCTV. If your car's stolen, I've heard repeated cases where they are not checking CCTV. This is, you've got GPS trackers.

51:22You can point to where it is in the street right now. They're not going to go after it. But if someone's tweeted something, they will send, like I've seen those videos, like six officers to your front door. oh, this is obviously not a good use of resources. Now, I'm sure there's like complexities, there's edge cases, there's mud, but in general.

51:38Francis Foster:Well, that guy just got paid 20 grand in compensation thanks to the free speech union, who should get a shout out because they're doing great work to protect people against this stuff. But, you know, one thing I also wanted to ask you as well, Lawrence, is one of the things I saw in response to both your video and Robert Jenner's video, is that when you point out that certain types of crime have effectively been decriminalised. People have a go at you. Yeah, very, very often. That I really don't get. Did you get a lot of that? Yeah, I got a lot of pushback on saying that basically theft is legal in Britain.

52:15I don't really understand quite the pushback. I guess it's like technically it's not illegal because it's on the statute book somewhere. That's a relief. Yeah, I mean, you can write down whatever you want. But I mean, I actually went to, there was a talk in Parliament given by Met officers on phone theft. And several of the MPs in the room raised their hands and said, I have had my phone stolen or my constituents have had their phone stolen. And they say, you guys don't check CCTV or cash these guys. What's going on? and they literally said to them well it is, I'm telling you now it's very sad that some of you have experienced you know, not to the standard we expect but I'm telling you right now it is our absolute guaranteed procedure that we will follow up on every lead for every crime and we check all CCTV it's obviously not true like you're telling, I'm sure it's true in terms of the policies written down somewhere it's obviously not practically true at all and yet they just come out and state it in that way I think that's the kind of thing that people are thinking about when they say, well, no, technically it's actually illegal.

53:24And sometimes we catch people. But the number is, you know, when you're talking less than 1 % of identifying someone as a suspect, I don't think anyone would look at that and say that's an effective system and that's clearly working as intended. And we actually have, you know, most of the time, 99.9 % or whatever, they'll get away with it. far.

53:44Francis Foster:No, I totally understand that point, but I'm getting at something else, which is that I think this seems to be inexplicably to me. I don't understand even what the motivation for it is exactly, because it's not even party political. Like, okay, the Labour government are currently in charge. So if you make a point about crime today, this very day today, that might be seen as an anti-L Labour point. But I think almost everybody would acknowledge that it was as bad under the Conservatives for 14 years as well. And yet there seems to be a large constituency of people in the country. And I'm not just talking about random people on the internet.

54:17Francis Foster:I'm talking about journalists. I'm talking about broadcasters. I'm talking about politicians even. Who when somebody points out that crime is not pursued, they attack the person who is highlighting this. Do you have any thoughts on why that constituency seems to exist? I think it is partly the ideological kind of concerns we were talking about earlier. It is actually quite inconvenient if you really, really believe that prison is a Victorian institution that should be over with now and that actually it doesn't matter how much you push police onto people, etc., that you don't need all this kind of like, you don't need to have investigations in this way, that actually what will happen over time is that with the right, you know, the right kind of social, networks, people won't turn to crime, you know, and, you know, community centres is often the kind of like the talking point, you know.

55:14If you think of it in those terms alone, it's very inconvenient to see, well, the less that we have focused on these areas of crime, the more they have ticked up, that these are largely economic crimes that people are doing because they can pay you quite well. You can do them at scale and you can start setting up and running these supply chains and you can all get some good money into the door and they're quite easy. It's all very inconvenient. And when you look at the actual facts of if you, like in the Netherlands, when they put in the 10 strikes rule for theft, burglary offences, they dropped by 25 percent because it ended up being you just locked people away for longer who committed those offences.

55:56We see it in Italy when they let more people out of prison earlier, crime shot up. Wow. Shocking. You know, those are all incredibly inconvenient realities. And as a result, you don't really want to deal with what's happening. So instead, you just try to shove it under the rug repeatedly again and say, well, actually, like if you look at overall crime because of things like murders and otherwise, which actually police do spend significant time on, crime is going down. Well, all these aspects are exploding to the highest ever on record. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. But let's talk about those. cozy season is ahead and you'll be spending way more time inside is your home ready don't worry with wayfair you can upgrade your space without breaking the bank score up to 70 off during their labor day clearance on furniture area rugs mattresses and more plus surprise flash deals you can't miss whether it's one room or the whole house wayfair has pieces for every style and budget shop wayfair's labor day clearance now through september 7th at wayfair.com

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57:38If you're interested in health, energy, or just curious what Chuck Norris swears by at 80 +, this is worth your time. Watch the video now at chuckdefense.com slash trigger. That's chuckdefense.com slash trigger. And we put the link in the description below to make it easy. You know, there's one part that we haven't discussed, which is we obviously need a police force. But we also need a social contract between the public and the police force, which allows the police to be able to police effectively. If that social contract is broken, which is what is happening now. I mean, we're going to end up in a pretty dark place, aren't we?

58:23where the police aren't trusted. Yeah, yeah. I think we're already there. I think it's getting worse and worse every year. I think officers themselves feel demoralised. I think that the public doesn't trust the police to solve things. There's no one I've talked to who said, oh, yeah, you know, I expected when I called the police for them to do a great investigation. I mean, even I did expect them to check CCTV, right? And I didn't have them. But it's something which I think the public has lost trust in institutions in general, lost trust in the courts. I mean, when it takes you four years, someone's being raped.

59:01It takes four years to get to trial. Now, there's cases already soon to be put to trial where they will be not on trial until after the next election. And what's the response of the system? Well, we used to get the breakdown of cases in terms of how many are in the backlog monthly. We now only get them quarterly. I wonder why that is. You know, it's very embarrassing when you see every single month that figure tick up. It's been ticking up since like 2017. It's very clear failure. Nobody wants to actually look at this in detail and ask, okay, how do we force the courts open? It's going to be awkward.

59:39How do we force the Met to do it? Who is it who gets fired when it goes wrong? All these questions. And that requires like bravery and leadership and everything else. otherwise trusted institutions just continues to decline. And it's also as well, you know, post-George Floyd, this, you know, constantly hyper-fixated on race. I mean, we saw with the Chris Cabber case. I mean, this was a guy who is under investigation for attempted murder, for shooting someone allegedly in a nightclub. He then got in a car, refused to stop when the police demanded that he should. He then was ramming police cars.

1:00:17he got shot and then there's this minority of people who then who've got their arms up in the air and go oh he was a good guy you know he didn't deserve to get shot and you and then the police officer who shot him is then put on trial and you you're thinking this is a world where nothing makes sense anymore how can police possibly be allowed to do their jobs when if you're a firearms officer. The moment you discharge your weapon, even in a case like Chris Cabber, where you have, that was the correct course of action to take, you are at risk of going to prison, losing your job, or just at the very best being involved in a court case, which is going to be profoundly stressful for nigh on two, if not three years.

1:01:03Yeah, I mean, I find it such an interesting, in all senses of the word kind of situation that we've ended up with. I'm deeply concerned about, I don't know the idea of authorities misusing their power. We have to be able to hold police to account. We have to be able to check that they're actually doing their jobs. The problem is that there is also so many cases now of officers doing their duty and either something going wrong for various reasons and suddenly finding that they're not now just facing even just internal disciplinary action, but criminal and otherwise, you add all that on top of the fact that job pay is not great to start with.

1:01:43And the fact of all the stuff I was talking about earlier, you discourage people from entering the police force. Why would you? It's a complete minefield. And so I think we've ended up, we're ending up in another bad situation here. Not to kind of pile on these, but this is unfortunate reality. as a result you get less people less talented people going to the police they have the lower standards more and more as a result you probably need to check on them more and more because now they're probably doing a bunch of stuff they shouldn't be doing and that just keeps that cycle going the problem is at the moment it is extremely bad like for officers now there are so many things that if you get wrong or even if you don't get wrong you just get a massive spotlight a national spotlight on you it is incredibly stressful I cannot imagine doing that job and thinking if I arrest this person and it's found to be an incorrect arrest like one of them were recently, someone who actually was accused of evading an affair and an officer did intervene this a couple of years ago now.

1:02:40One of the reasons why apparently officers did this much less now, they intervened and this person had not evaded an affair, evaded affair, but the officer arrested them. There were some harsh words exchanged, and the officer was placed under investigation, including for assault, not because they punched him or anything like that, but just for the arrest itself and holding the person down because they were resisting arrest. That's an awful situation to be in now, and it suddenly becomes something which could easily explode into a national story. That is not a nice position to be in, and I can see why so many officers are incredibly stressed and incredibly worried because, bluntly, they had good reason to be.

1:03:20And that's not a position to be in. It's also the power of the internet where you can record an officer making an arrest and then you can cut it and make it look in a particular way, like it's almost police brutality. You can go, oh, why did the officer arrest him in such a rough manner? But you've cut out the bit where the officer got punched in the head three times.

1:03:40Francis Foster:Well, I mean, the Manchester airport situation last year, There's a very good example of this where a clip was maliciously edited effectively to cut out why the police officer was using as much. I think they've been cleared from what I've read. And these people were treated as racist, violent. It was crazy. So it's a very difficult job. This is one thing I hope people take away from this. I don't think any of the three of us are criticizing police officers. but as a system there are a lot of problems yeah and and like good officers as i say are like in a very very bad and difficult position and the fact that that isn't at the forefront of the government's thinking right now in the policing bill right now with the sentencing review they're not focusing on how do we get and keep the best talent in policing that we possibly can and how do we build a service that makes people feel safe instead we're getting this very weird patchy system where we're going to release criminals earlier than ever, send fewer of them to jail than ever before, even though we're already doing that.

1:04:51And instead, we're going to keep officers in this position where we can't recruit the numbers. We point blame around to various different people. We don't build the prisons, don't designate emergency prisons, don't open the courts for longer. And we keep looking at it going, wow, why is this getting worse?

1:05:08Francis Foster:And I'm curious, Well, the question I was about to ask has an assumption built into it. What I was going to say is, why have we not seen much expression of these concerns, which I know lots of people share, in the political system? I don't hear any party, really, talking about dealing with this kind of crime. Do you? Am I wrong about this? I mean, that's why I started up Crush Crime. I was absolutely stunned nobody was talking about this thing. that was clearly being experienced by everyone all over the place. Obviously, Jenrick is taking up our point on career criminals, and he's now started talking about fair evaders and other such crimes like this, tall theft he was talking about as well.

1:05:54Labour have looked, flirted closely, maybe once or twice, with maybe we're going to open some more prisons. Now they're committed to building more prisons. frankly, you know, to give them their due on this, more than the tourists did in 14 years of government, but still nowhere near enough because the whole is so bad. But it is very strange to me that there is not a concerted effort. For example, you don't have to go back too far. Like, New Labour was incredibly focused on this. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. Yeah, and they did a, I mean, they built over 20 ,000 prison places. They actually brought in, of course, the ASBO system, other systems to deal with low-level crime and to get it, because one of the parts that is missing from this is that you have these career criminals and it's very difficult then to rehabilitate.

1:06:39It's unclear. It all gets quite messy. It's quite complex because of all those factors that go into it. But one of the things we do know is that if you get people on their first or second offence very quickly and you send them to court very quickly and they get a quick feedback loop, it doesn't even have to be a prison time, just something, something to show them we are watching you. You aren't getting away with this. Yeah. We then see many fewer of them become crippled than otherwise would have been. So fast action, actually good policing mixed with quick action in the courts, where you can just like ankle tag or whatever, does stop people, many of them, before they get to the point where they are now like in this for the long term.

1:07:21And it becomes much, much harder to rehabilitate then. That is the kind of focus that they should be taking and asking, what is the purpose of our police? Well, make the streets safer. Purpose of our courts, make the streets safer. We need to target much more sensibly than we currently are. And it will pay off.

1:07:37Francis Foster:Not first year, give it two or three years and you'll start to see the payoff and people will see a massive improvement in their lives. The one thing that I found quite interesting about this as we talk is I go, well, if the law isn't being applied, it's not being upheld. At what point does the general public start to uphold the law? you guys are British you're not going to do anything about it it's not your culture it's not the amazing thing about Britain is everyone is allowed to get on with it the downside of that is British people will literally turn away when they see a crime being committed I think it is a generally really great thing about Britain that people really do respect the rules and they find it very upsetting when people don't which is why I think also this is such an effect on the national psyche.

1:08:29It's like, because you can't, you can't, that's not a forever thing. That's a thing that took a lot of time to build, a lot of history to build. That's a very good point. And now we've kind of mistreated it for the last 20, 30 years. And as a result of that, that will go. Like that's not, that's very hard fought and very easy to lose. It's like anything, right? It takes a long time to build something, not much time at all to destroy it. And we are now, so many areas of British life, we are really taking an axe to and kicking repeatedly because we've inherited a whole bunch of kind of background beliefs that took a long time to build and so we've taken them for granted.

1:09:05That will collapse, that will change. And I do think, for example, when my sister-in-law's phone got stolen, only a few weeks after I launched, as I said, I had several DMs from people saying, you say you know where the address is, tell me. That was like a real shock for me in that moment. They didn't know me, but they were thinking, screw it. I have an opportunity now, finally, to do something about this. You know, people feel very powerless. They feel very, very angry and extremely powerless. And that is because politicians aren't listening. The police aren't doing their jobs. The courts aren't doing their jobs.

1:09:40That makes you feel powerless. At a certain point, you're right in that Brits don't naturally want to do this by any standard. But at a certain point, I think it does become dangerous. And I really want things now to take that energy and put it into constructive things that build things, make things and change things for the better before they get worse and before we lose something that's incredibly hard fought. And it also makes us a laughingstock internationally. Like when I'm gigging in comedy clubs in America, the thing that Americans always ask me is when I say I'm from London, one of the first things they talk about is the crime.

1:10:14They talk about crime. They talk about, and there's quite a few of them who go, yeah, you know, I'm doing a show in London, but I'm a bit nervous because of the crime. How bad is it? This is really affecting our economy. We make a lot of money in this country, deservedly so, because it's wonderful, from tourism. People should want to come to this country and experience the beauty of the countryside, the amazing city that is London, all the rest of it. But if people think that they're going to come here and they're going to get robbed, mugged, you know, pickpocketed, why would you? Yeah, yeah, it's really, really sad.

1:10:49And that's something which we have allowed to happen. And our politicians have completely actively allowed, sometimes even sponsored by very bad ideas and viewpoints. And still, the path right now is that we're still facing that same path. If there's one thing that we can say, yes, Labour building these prisons, not enough, nowhere near enough on time, by the time they finish here, it'll be the same where we are now. But what are the Conservatives saying? Have they come out and said, we are sorry, we completely failed on prisons. We actually completely failed because the concern is how do you start to trust any politicians going forward until they can actually state, yes, this was a failure.

1:11:27We are going to fix it. And that's just not what I'm seeing at all.

1:11:30Francis Foster:It does seem a bit of an open goal, if I'm honest, even if you're a lesbian, honest, not all politicians are entirely principled and honest all of the time. but uncontroversial statement i think uh if you were you know a let's say either a a kind of blue labor you were trying to appeal to the working man so to speak or if you're a center right politician whether it's even more natural to talk about toughness on crime and things like that that it's a bit of an open goal to say you know this is happening you are feeling less safe we are about cracking down on crime we're going to make and i don't i don't even hear reform making that argument oddly enough do you i mean i might be not paying attention but no there's there's very very very little discussion on crime in general why do you think that is that's weird yeah i think i do think it's in part ideological i think it's also in part british politics the thing that i've really learned about this over the last few years like coming in kind of out from like the side in yeah it's like it is highly social so it's not very seemly to speak at dinners and so forth about crime it comes across as like a bit you know a bit i don't know polite impolite i guess yeah like it's not very fun conversation um and it's kind of like working class tabloidy you know to discuss it so it's like low status i think that's a big thing in politics like it's seen as like not very intellectual about crime if they want to keep that up, they're going to find out it gets pretty high status pretty quickly.

1:13:04Francis Foster:Yeah. Which is exactly why I wanted to bring, because obviously, like, actual people do deal with this every single day. And in London now, it's happening to everyone. No matter what your social class is, it's happening all the time. It's happening around you all the time. And yet, politicians still view it very much as a, well, that's kind of a more tabloidy thing. It's a bit, you know, actually, you know, it's not very educated to speak in that way. They wouldn't actually say those words, right? They wouldn't say that. But you know, you get that sense. That's it, yes. Do you think it's also the attitude, and here comes a chip on the shoulder, is that, let's be honest, crime affects mainly poorer and working class people.

1:13:40The richer you are, the higher up you are on the social order, the less likely you are to be affected by crime. Therefore, it's not going to be as an immediate and pressing concern to you than if you live in a council estate in Rotherham. Yeah, I mean, it's like I've tried to make this argument to people several times, including journalists who were some of which were extremely critical about exactly as you said, like saying swathes of crime is legal in this country well, you can very easily point to a graph that says well overall it's getting better for you in multiple areas across the country it is getting worse, like knife crime in some areas has increased quite dramatically what do you say to those areas?

1:14:18Well, at the moment the kind of established view is to say to them well don't worry about it because if you look at this graph here you can see that actually your area might be worse but overall we're doing quite well it's not great for those people and when you start focusing on different areas of crime you say well this is the worst it's literally ever been well yes but zoom out a bit be a bit more educated about it and then you'll realise it's okay when your phone's stolen and you say thank god it's just that that's obviously not how people actually interact with their day to day lives and it's obviously extremely, extremely poor.

1:14:55And yet I think that is reflective of their views.

1:14:58Francis Foster:Well, if there are any criminals listening, we would like to request that you target more middle-class journalists. That way they might get the message. Yeah, yeah. And I'm not middle-class. Don't target me. Right? Well, look, I think it's really valuable because I think the thing that you're highlighting is something that lots and lots of people are just naturally aware of. I think people increasingly feel less safe. And that can manifest in different ways, but particularly in the cities in this country. And I think it's really great that you're pointing the spotlight on that. I hope you keep it up.

1:15:39Francis Foster:And I hope the politicians and people in the world of politics who are listening start paying attention to this stuff. Because if they don't, then those forces will manifest in one way or another. I agree. And it just seems like an open goal. It really does. So I'm glad you're doing it. And thanks for bringing it to people's attention in a more powerful way. You know, we have to push it as hard as possible because, as you say, the default is they are not going to listen. Politicians are not going to listen. They're not going to do things even when it's very blatantly obvious and that you should just imprison the 10 % of people who are committing the majority of all crimes.

1:16:15This is a very clear, very obvious thing. They don't do it by default. we have to make a lot of noise and that's what Cross Crime is here to do.

1:16:23Francis Foster:Well, really appreciate coming on. Before we head to our sub stack and ask a bunch of questions from our supporters, what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we should be? I think one thing which really is not given really much time at all is actually the position of the young in this country. So separately to Cross Crime, I also run Looking for Growth, which is a political movement to advocate for policies on economic growth to actually rescue this country from decline, which is kind of the root cause of so many of our problems. The engagement we get there is like 18 to 35-year-olds who actually really, really care about politics.

1:17:05They could not care less about what party does it. They literally could not care less. We've had politicians from all kinds of different backgrounds at our events to talk to our audience. What they want to hear is, you have a plan. The plan is actually credible, and we are on the way out of this thing. It's going to happen fast. It often means radical action in various ways, but it's cheaply that it's going to happen fast. Younger people here in Britain and really kind of across the West have had a pretty bad deal over the last really like 10 years and continue to do so. And yet there's very, very little political attention, very, very little national attention on things like they are far less optimistic.

1:17:43They are both about their personal lives and the country. Their politics is much more diverse than it has been any other time. There's much higher support for reform amongst 18 to 25-year-olds than certainly for the Conservatives and otherwise. I think like second to Labour amongst their groups. We're not talking about what it means for young people in this country to one, start to be actively involved in politics, and two, how much of a raw deal they actually have got here. To flesh that out, what's the raw deal? So they've, I mean, if you imagine kind of coming of age during a period in which, you know, COVID, they were literally had to lock themselves inside for a long period of like their youth.

1:18:25And, you know, we can agree, disagree about aspects of lockdown or whatever it might be. But just factually speaking, they were actually locked away for large periods of a very key social point of their life, sometimes interrupting their university, you know, big experiences, big social experiences. They come out to a job market that is extremely uncertain to the point where even stuff that you might have gotten great advice on, you want to do a law degree, you want to do... There aren't as many jobs in that because already artificial intelligence is moving in a very clear direction. That's what advice you give to those people, that anyone now at 18 about what is actually going to be a good career in 5, 10 years.

1:19:02Coding was the career everyone was going for. That is not the thing you want to do now for longer term. Stay away from podcasting. Hey, Pakistan's, you know, we'll see, we'll see. But like, you know, at the same time, you have triple lock pensions. You have a vast amount of movement into this country from people outside of this country. A lot of jobs and other countries actually attracting our own youth outside. It's very uncertain what salaries look like. It's very uncertain what the state of the country is. as a result a lot of them are feeling like we actually ran a poll very recently asking britain has had 0.1 growth over the last year do you think this is acceptable or not every age group basically says unacceptable apart from 18 to 25 who says acceptable right because they're used they're just used to decline wow they're used to it we even asked someone like so we have chapters across the country for LFG.

1:20:03We have chapters in multiple cities. I went to one, or rather some of our co-founders went to one, my co-founders went to one where someone said in attendance, I'm 25 years old and all I've ever known is decline. What can I do? That's the feeling. And they're used to it. They're used to the system. And as a result, optimistic people are leaving. And we really are facing, again, something which takes a long time to build great institutions, great universities, great places for people to live. And it's very, very easy to start losing that. And if you start seeing all of your talent leave the country, because what has it got to offer them?

1:20:43That's a question we need to really start asking very, very quickly before we lose the next generation, which have been through a lot, have done a lot. And actually, we're talking about political anger and angst. They've taken it all very well. and now they're leaving with their feet and those who aren't are feeling depressed, dejected and otherwise completely ignored. And I think that's something which we need to start talking about.

1:21:09Francis Foster:Well, one thing people always say when, the old people always say when young people complain about the state, well, look at them, they're spending money on lattes and they've got these iPhones. And now their iPhones are getting nicked as well.

1:21:24Francis Foster:Listen, man, the thing is with all of these things, The hope is that by raising awareness of them, they eventually become political issues that politicians grab onto. And eventually you see change through that system. I think growth is obviously going to be a huge part of solving many of these problems. But I also think that picking up some of these issues and running with them is the right thing to do for smart politicians. Because it's where the country is at. They're not artificial issues. They are where the country is at. So we will see how it evolves over time. And we'll keep an eye out for your good work.

1:21:55Francis Foster:Head on over to Substack where we ask Lawrence your questions. How do we incentivize the policing of genuine crime rather than low-hanging fruit like meme tweets in a climate where the police have been going through a softer rebranding and the college of policing appears to be steering in this direction?

1:22:54We'll be right back. Every style and budget. Shop Wayfair's Labor Day clearance now through September 7th at Wayfair.com.

1:23:01Francis Foster:Wayfair, every style, every home.