Why California Street Takeovers Are Hard to Stop | Panel

Street takeovers are happening more and more often, and they're getting more violent. These street takeovers have caused death, looting, and they're happening everywhere in California. Today, we are gonna dig deep into this topic to find out if there's a cultural or a root cause that's causing these events in our streets. Today, we sit down with Heather MacDonald, who has spent years studying crime, policing, and public policy, and Dion Joseph, LAPD officer, who's spent many years on the ground looking at what's happening with crime in California and in LA. Together, they will give us two different perspectives on looking into this issue, and if there is a way for California to solve this problem. This is a problem of a certain group being told that we do not expect you to obey the law because you are victims of systemic racism. When they're on their phones and they say, hey, let's meet up here, they already know to meet en masse because A, law enforcement is severely understaffed. So they gather, they cause chaos, and then they leave quickly. So by the time law enforcement even gets there and gets mobilized, the damage has already been done. I'm Siamak Khorrami. Welcome to California Insider. Heather, Dion, it's great to have you on. Welcome. Thank you so much. It's great to be with you. We wanna talk to you about street takeovers in California and brawls in general, and the numbers is rising and we're seeing, Californians are seeing more and more of these street takeovers. What are we not seeing when we're looking at these events happening? Well, you're not seeing the root causes, which are not what the mainstream media will tell you, which is poverty, inequality, racism. What you're not seeing is the breakdown of the family, which results in, on average, a great failure of socialization. What you're seeing and not hearing or reading from the mainstream media is that, sadly, I'm gonna break a taboo here. These are overwhelmingly black, and the media just refers to them as teens, but I'm afraid you can't really understand it unless you acknowledge the racial element because race has distorted our criminal justice system for decades now by pulling back on just punishment for misbehavior, by telling black children that because they're the alleged victims of systemic racism, they can steal with impunity, they can assault with impunity. The juvenile justice system in California and elsewhere has been dismantled to avoid disparate impact, and that sets a tone that enables this type of very, very destructive antisocial behavior. Dion, do you agree? I agree, I agree, though the majority of it is African-American, unfortunately. It's a large swath, but what we're seeing, when we look on the news, when we're seeing what I saw in Long Beach, what we see in other places, yes, unfortunately, it's African-American, and she's right. It's not racist to tell the truth, and the truth is, due to a horrible breakdown in the black family, where you're talking about years ago, where it was 70% of African-American homes had a father in the home, and then that complete flip, where now it's like 20 to 25%, and also, she's right. The justice system, what they did was completely tie the hands of law enforcement due to the anti-police, the social justice, criminal justice reform movement, where short of killing somebody, you cannot put a juvenile in jail and keep them off the streets, where the community can feel the fruits of our labor, and now, the dangerous part is they know this now. They know this now, so when they're on their phones and they say, hey, let's meet up here, they already know to meet en masse because A, law enforcement is understaffed, severely understaffed, so they're already gonna be overwhelmed, and they also move very quickly, so they gather, they cause chaos, and then they leave quickly, so by the time law enforcement even gets there and gets mobilized, the damage has already been done, and now, we're leaving, we have people being injured. Now, as a result of the anti-police movement and the fact that the law enforcement officers' hands are being severely tied, now, a lot of these youth, they literally believe we're just high-paid security guards with guns, and we can do nothing to them. The police officers. The police officers, because there's no consequence, and that's why we're seeing now officers who are being hurt. There was somewhere in the United States where five officers run over with a car. There was another event recently where officers were literally targeted and attacked. You know, this is how much these kids know they can get away with it, so it's very dangerous. The environment they created right now, not just for the general public, but for law enforcement and for these kids, is very conducive to a lot of danger and destruction. The advocates have created an environment where they have told the public that just our mere presence is racism, and unfortunately, a lot of agencies bought into that, and they bow their head and basically throw their hands up. But the truth is, underman, understaffed, and we don't have the manpower to even dissuade it. We don't even have that manpower. My heart goes out for police officers because they went through such an emotional whiplash. After 9-11, all of a sudden, we forgot about the whole driving while black conceit, and officers were thanked. People were saying, let me buy you breakfast and lunch, and that lasted, I don't know, how many months. And then, as you say, we had the Michael Brown hands-up-don't-shoot fraud in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. And again, some of my Chicago sources said, we went from being heroes, we're saying like, whoa, this is unusual, to then, I've said I've never wiped so much spit off my windshield as after we went then full force into the anti-police movement. And it's extraordinarily demoralizing. And people that come from long-time cop families would ordinarily have told their sons and grandsons, go into the job, and now they're saying, do anything but. It's partly salary differentials in big cities, but it's also the fact that society has stopped understanding that the prerequisite for functioning at all as a society is law and order. And when families break down, that would be the best, the best solution is not law enforcement. The best solution is not prisons. Prisons are not an end in itself. Incarceration is not in itself. The best solution is fathers and mothers at home being the gatekeeper, as Officer Joseph says. If you let your teen run the streets at 2 a.m. with other gangbangers, who knows what's gonna happen? You know, he just might get shot, which is something they saw in Chicago. But when that breaks down, and you do have a catastrophic level of disintegration of the basic family unit in inner city areas, when that breaks down, your only line of defense is the police, and when they step back, then you get this type of anarchy that is terrifying, it's dangerous to the participants, it's dangerous to the bystanders, and it's certainly dangerous to the police. Are you guys kind of backing down? Because there was like 600, over 600 street takeovers in L.A., almost two a day. And there was like 200-something arrests total last year. How do you see that? Is it hard to engage with these street takeovers? There's no arrests, or what are your thoughts on that? There's two types of takeovers, and so I'm not sure if you're asking, there's the vehicular takeovers. There's both. Right, where cars commandeer an intersection and do donuts and all sorts of crazy stuff. And sometimes they go and they actually. They loot, I mean, they're frequently accompanied by rampages through a 9-11 store, and that phenomenon began in Oakland, but then there's the pedestrian takeovers, and so where you just have thousands of teens running through streets, sidewalks, walking on top of cars. So anyway, I just want to. With bikes, too. There's a lot of different kinds, yeah. I'm not sure what, if what your data refers to the vehicular, the car takeovers, or to the pedestrian. I think it's all of it in general. It's all of it. Yeah, it's all of it. It's all of it that we're struggling with. Here's how it works. Like I said, social media is a monster. It's like the greatest thing ever created, but also the most destructive thing ever created, and these kids are able to get on Snapchat and say, hey, let's meet up at the spot here, and they already know the program. Let's get there quickly. Get there quickly. Now, you gotta understand, depending on the agency, like mine, oftentimes certain parts of our city is already Dante's Inferno. We got officers with four or five high-priority calls, so it's really difficult to get officers mobilized, and let's say even if, let's say we have a great social media team that's able to monitor these things, there's not enough officers to pool together to actually get ahead of it, and even if they do get ahead of it, the kids who come down outweigh the officers 400 to one, you know, and once again, they already know this, so the goal is, once again, get in, create the chaos, leave quickly, because they know how difficult it is for officers to even be able to run. I witnessed this. I was in Long Beach a couple of years ago, and my wife was doing her business. She's a vendor, and just out of nowhere, I just saw a mob of kids. I was like, this is not gonna be good. Out of nowhere, a flash of about 500 kids just showed up, and I think Long Beach, they knew about it because they had officers there, but I only saw like 10 officers. What's 10 officers gonna do with 500 raging kids? See, here's the thing about the events. These kids, because they're kids, right, they're excited about the risk and the reward. The risk is exciting to them because they're young, you know, but then there's this reward of, when you see it on the six o'clock news or you look at a social media and you see, you can say, I was a part of that, and that's because of no parental guidance or a lack of parental guidance, and basically, their cell phones, they're being raised by their cell phones, you know, and they're already emotional, and once again, you throw in a few groups of people who just love creating the chaos, it's the recipe for disaster every single time. I think that's absolutely right, that the violence is performative to a certain extent. You know, you are performing for the camera in order to get a viral video. I'm going to, again, bring up a very taboo topic, which is, I think, another element of this, not for everybody, but I think it is there, that is the result of the oppositional culture that came in in the 1960s, where blacks who, until then, had been doing their best, it breaks one's heart to see the efforts to be accepted by bourgeois society, by white society, by graduating, you know, joining fraternities and insurance companies and going to church, and still getting shut out, despite efforts to be law-abiding bourgeois Americans. That ended, sadly, in the 1960s, when you had the celebration of black power and oppositional culture, with Malcolm X saying, we're not gonna even try to assimilate into white society any longer, we hate whitey, we're gonna, you know, diss their norms, and I think some of this is also driven by the fact that this is a way to rake revenge on whitey and show that we are more powerful than that. In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech at the American Psychological Association to try to explain the looting and the mass riots that were going on in the 60s, and King himself said, you know, most times they necessarily don't even want what they're stealing, but they understand that white people value property rights. Well, I don't think that's a racial thing, I think most law-abiding people do value property rights, but this is a way of sort of hitting whitey where it really hurts, and you see this as well with some of the flash mobs, the really brutal violence that these kids are wreaking on innocent white bystanders. I think that cannot be discounted. So, well, I wanna state something, because whenever we have these conversations, and I agree with a lot of what you said, there tends to be a unintentional broad brush painting. What the public's gonna hear is all blacks. I wanna make this very, very clear. The vast majority of African-Americans in this country are law-abiding, decent, hardworking people. We have to stop generalizing, but the fact is there is a negative exception, unfortunately, in our community that does an extreme amount of damage. If there's 40 million African-Americans, most of them law-abiding, most of them decent people, there's gotta be about maybe 100,000 or maybe something who are the negative exception, and because of some of the things that Heather mentioned, the sense of victimhood and entitlement, they can be and do more damage than others, but I wanna put that out there, because whenever we have the conversation about African-Americans, I'm a proud black man, and I'm proud of the friends and families and loved ones. We're not out there doing that, and it frustrates us as well, because it ends up painting us all with a broad brush, but I had to put that out there. But the fact is, but we do have to be honest and real with the reality that, unfortunately, do too, and it's not just about whitey. I say Lyndon Baines Johnson, that's me, in late 1960s, when they created a program, welfare, and the stipulations for families receiving that money was a man couldn't be in the home. See, we've survived, quote-unquote, whitey. We survived that, and still, we're maintaining, we still were thriving, we still were doing our thing. But as soon as we got that free money and were told that a man can't be in your home, they literally sent social workers to your home to make sure that there was no father or no man in the home or you wouldn't get your money. And over time, it went from the father having to hide or the male figure having to hide to, as young kids watch this over and over again, they learn that, I don't have to be there, I'm not important, young boys, I'm not important to the family, and they just left on their own over time with some families. And that's what caused a lack of leadership in our community. The father was the wall. In my house, my dad was the wall. The buck stopped with my dad. He laid down the law. If we cross mom's rules, he was there. In my household, it's the same way. I have three beautiful black sons, and they are some of the best young men because I was there. And it's not all single mothers. I don't wanna put that. I know some single mothers who are fantastic, but I do have to face the reality due to the breakdown in the black family. There was a lack of discipline, a lack of value, a lack of self-worth, where they not only do not value their own lives, they don't value other people's property or the lives of others. And that's a very dangerous trend, but that's a negative exception. But I admit that they're doing a lot of damage. Yeah, I mean, obviously, one is speaking about averages, and I am not claiming... Oh, absolutely, I get it. That the majority of blacks are that way. But, and I would also add, in addition to the perverse incentives of the great society in the way it structured its welfare programs, another culprit here is feminism that got very strong in the 1960s. And it basically marginalized males. And you had ideas that a strong woman can do it all. And we've celebrated Murphy Brown and single mothers. And as Officer Joseph says, of course there are single mothers who are beating the odds, but the odds are against them. Barack Obama, when he was running for presidency the first time around in 2008, he gave a Father's Day speech in Chicago that called on males, black males, sorry, it's the reality, to take responsibility. And he gave the statistics about what happens on average to children raised by single mothers. Again, we're not saying all single mothers, but on average, the trends are indisputable. You know, four or five times greater chance of becoming a juvenile delinquent and then becoming a felon, dropping out of school, being truant, having children oneself out of wedlock. These are realities. Feminism said fathers are expendable. The state said government can substitute for fathers. A check is fine. And we have, now we can see constantly the instinct of government is to supplant the family, whether it's Head Start programs that don't work or free breakfast. I mean, I'm sorry, anybody can feed a child a breakfast for pennies if you think ahead, plan, and cook low on the food chain. But the effort again and again is to say, parents, you know, bring us your kids and then we'll take over. And we see this with obviously the trans indoctrination that's going on. Parents don't get to know what's going on in the classroom. Are they being, are their children saying, oh yeah, I've got a different pronoun? You're not allowed to tell the parents that? So this is a very, very large cultural shift. And I'm glad you brought up the school system as well. Like I said, these parents, like I said, some of them single, hardworking mothers, and then some, let's admit, they checked out. They're stressed out, they have their own issues and own demons, so they check out. And even in the school system, you know, the kids are not being educated, they're being indoctrinated. The school system used to be an extension of the parents, years ago, years ago. You know, it's almost like the parents set the boundaries and the teachers also was an extension of that. Have some discipline, have follow through. That gets lost. As soon as you're a parent, you drop your kids off at school, you don't know what they're teaching your kids. And I'm a living witness to this because I was called to mentor some kids in a school in a Rampart division. And these kids, it was a history class, and all of these kids were failing and, you know, they heard I had a mentor program called Just Like You. So I went over there and I started talking to these kids and I just noticed they were just hyped up and, you know, and I said, I was talking about drugs. I said, how many of you guys know somebody that smokes weed? And all the kids raised their hands. And then they went like this. They pointed to the teacher who hid his head in his desk laughing. Wait, these kids are supposed to be learning about history, not about your weed habits. And the whole host of other things. So the teacher was speaking about- Basically, yeah. Why do these kids know more about weed than history? Well, I just found the problem. And also I found out over time the kids were becoming more anti-police, more anti-authority because some of the teachers were teaching them this. They were teaching them resistance. Instead of teaching the kids tort law and civics, not only their rights, right, when it comes to police contacts, also teach them what our rights are. So it mitigates this conflict when we see each other in the street. No, it's almost like they were egging it on. So that on top of the lack of father figure or two-parent home, it just continues to fuel this. And I just feel like every decade there's a degradation in society in the values and hearts and mind of our young folks. And it really concerns me, especially today when I'm watching these street takeovers and seeing police officers just getting randomly assaulted like they're security officers. It doesn't make sense, but it does make sense. Everything we're talking about has culminated into this. So the schools have- I would wish that the media would give a platform to people like Dion Joseph, because as far as I'm concerned, the change has to come from within at this point. The black community has to say enough, take responsibility. The reality is every single day, dozens of blacks are killed in homicide. Every single day in this country, that's more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined. And the media never looks at this. It's out of sight, out of mind. They're not reported much. It's just, it's like they don't care. They know it's true. They just don't want to report it because it goes against the narrative. Right. And they don't care. They don't care. Look, it's frustrating for me. Recently, we all talked about the knowledge. Everybody's talking about Nolan Wells, you know. Our lives shouldn't be considered valuable depending on the suspected color of the person or profession of the person that kills them. But that's where we are today. We had Nolan Wells. Now we don't even have evidence that he was murdered. It's still being investigated. But it's national news. Everybody's talking about it. They're making it racial. We had a poor young man in Compton, a star football player. His future is very bright. William LaParte. I'm going to say his name. He goes to visit his girlfriend in a part of the city and he's wearing a Houston Astros hat. And someone thought that was justification to take that young man's life. And I have to search on social media to find articles about that young man who lost his life. Okay. And that bothers me that, and where I will agree is if our community came with the same passion, okay, that they do with Nolan Wells for the William LaPartes, we probably wouldn't need the police in our communities. I always say that's where we're bleeding the most. It's like, you have a sink, right? And you are uber fascinated with that drip. You want to fix that drip, but you ignore that you're standing in three feet of water because your main line just broke. That's where we are. And that breaks my heart. When I don't hear groups like Black Lives Matter speak out against that. And then they call people like me and Uncle Tom because I care. I care about it all. I care about it, whether it's a white person killing a black person, which is an anomaly, you know, or whether it's something that's happening daily because I see it every day as a law enforcement officer. I'm the one. I'm the one who has to call the coroners. You know, I'm the one who had to hold a 13 year old who was shot in the arm in front of his family. And when I asked the community who saw it, everybody put their head in the sand. I see this. We have the gift of making everything cool. Setting trends in fashion. Why can't we make, why can't we talk to the negative exception in our community and talk to the, I call them the wolves within our community who are causing so much damage and make it not cool to kill somebody that looks just like you, you know, who probably comes from the same struggle. Probably doesn't have a mother or doesn't have a father in their home just like you. There should be some unity. It should be some commonality and it shouldn't be racist or talking down to talk about this is something that I feel like we should have talked about 40 years ago because we've lost thousands, tens of thousands. Playing the race card is extremely lucrative. It gets you attention. I remember at like the one or two year anniversary of the George Floyd killing, Benjamin Crump and Al Sharpton showed up in Minneapolis to attend the commemorations. Got a lot of media attention and at that moment in a North Minneapolis hospital were three children who were on life support because they'd been shot in these insane drive-by shootings. Their lives did not matter to Crump and Sharpton. We saw, you know, there was a lot of investigative reporting eventually about where's the corporate billions, the corporations just poured billions into these Black Lives Matter fronts after the George Floyd killing. And it all just went to, you know, by the state in Bel Air and it gets you the media attention. It's what the media wanna hear. So there's this unholy alliance between the racism grifters, the media academia, which also is pumping out the false narrative about systemic police racism, which is not borne out by the data at all. We've got the democratic politicians, Joe Biden and Barack Obama used to take every opportunity to say that Black parents were right to fear that their children will be killed every time they step outdoors. What they were referring to is killed by a police officer or by a white person. It's just a sheer lie. That's not who's killing Blacks. What that did was it created what I like to call the triggers in people. You know, when somebody like Barack Obama, who is well-loved, I voted for him twice, you know, says something like that, that can stick into the heart and minds of people. And now a simple seven minute traffic stop where I probably was just gonna warn you now turns into, nope, I'm not rolling my window down, you're gonna kill me. Nope, where's your supervisor? I wanna let the world know something about police officers right now because I'm so sick of the narrative. I work with police officers from all walks of life. Police officers are nothing more than a microcosm of society. What do I mean by that? Out of all the people, 330 million people in the United States of America, whether they're white, Black, gay, straight, trans, whatever, out of all those people, I guarantee you that probably 90% of everybody from all walks of life are decent people. I think we all can agree with that. But I think we also can agree that there's probably a small percentage of all of those walks of life that are causing all the drama. Where do law enforcement agencies select their people from? The American public. And I can assure the American public that the vast majority of individuals that sign up to be police officers did not sign up to be police officers to become racist. They didn't. Are there some that get in and when they rear their ugly head, unfortunately, they do things that disappoint me and all of us. But the answer shouldn't be, let's throw the baby out with the bathwater, let's just defund the police, let's tie the police hands. That's not the answer because at the end of the day, what did Black Lives Matter accomplish? Nothing. Things got exponentially worse. Relations got exponentially worse. Crime got higher. Police hands were tied. And now, the black community, we're saying, where are the police? And we wanna be there. I'm there. You know, I've worked a black community my entire 30-year career. But it's just very hard when you have, sometimes even your own elected officials putting their finger in the air. They're not leaders. They're followers in leadership positions. And they put their finger in the air and say, hey, which way the wind's blowing? Oh, that Black Lives Matter wind is pretty strong. Let's ride that wave. And next thing you know, you've completely destroyed your police department. You've destroyed their morale. You've taken away their tools. Based on something that happened in Minneapolis, I don't work in Minneapolis. I work in LA County. I don't condone what happened there. So why am I getting the brunt of it? Why is this seven-minute traffic stop now 20 minutes? Why is every time I talk to a young African-American male or a woman, now it's an argument. Now it's, where's your supervisor? Now it's biased because you stopped me from robbing this bank. No, I stopped you because you robbed the bank. And that's where we are as a society. And we've lost it. We've lost it. But I'm telling the American public right now, I've worked with people from all walks of life, white, black, Hispanics. Most of them don't wake up in the morning and say, how many black people's lives can I make hard today? That's not how it works. Look, oh, well, why are you guys in our area so much? Look, I work in an area called Skid Row. Typically 70% of that population, 65% is African-American. I love them. I love serving them. I work in a division that's 4.5 miles of territory. It has five different areas, but there's one area in the center that if you look at the crime map, there's so many crimes that you can't see the whites of the map when we're looking at it week to week. When you look at the other maps, white, completely white, where there's Chinatown, where there's the Arch District, completely white, virtually no crime. But right here, 60% of most of the crime that happened, where do you think our resources are gonna be? We have to put them where they're bleeding the most. That's not racist, that's data. And now we're at a point to where they're making data sound racist if it doesn't bode well for a certain group. That's not the way we should be looking at things because if we look at it like that, you're actually putting more black people, more Hispanic, more people of color in danger, in danger. And that's just how I look at it. I've heard so many police officers say, I work for the community. Again, they don't care what the race is. I'm here for the good people of the community that they didn't go into policing. There may be some, you know, we hear about the authoritarian personality. Right, yeah, it's ridiculous. In my experience, I've written, gone to police academies. It is out of a sense of service and wanting to protect the vulnerable. But to get, again, at sort of what it, what we're putting on our police officers, they see a reality every day that they're not allowed to talk about and that the rest of the world denies. Street crime, the drive-by shootings, the robberies are way disproportionately minority. And that's, again, because of the things we've talked about, the incentivizing of grievance, the failure for society at large to stand up for the absolute necessity of fathers, absent tragedies, you know, there's always tragedies of somebody who's a widow, orphan, whatever. And they're the ones who know how bad things are, but they can't talk about it. And if they ever like blow off steam and say some things that are untoward, again, then there's this huge uproar. If we're the racist, then the people who call us are the racists. Yeah. And guess what the race of other people who call me in my area, Black, Hispanic, those are the people calling and say, hey, there's a male right here with a knife. There's a man with a gun. There's a drive-by shooting at a park. These are, so are they racist too? Once again, I'm responding to the community. It's frustrating to me, and I'm sure many law enforcement officers experience this when you're at a city council meeting or you're talking and they're talking around you. Well, we don't wanna hear from the police officer because it might offend anybody, but literally I'm the one bringing the concerns of the community, the Black community, the Hispanic community, that they're concerned about because they're afraid. They're afraid to come forward and say, hey, the gangsters over here are doing this or they're selling a drug. They're afraid because there's a figurative and literal gun to their head telling that silent majority, you cannot go to the police. So guess what they do? They go to the officer they trust, me and thousands of officers across the country, and they say, hey, we need help here, but they can't say it out loud. Well, what happens is those advocates we talk about, they take over city council meetings. They take over police commission meetings. They won't allow those people to speak. They won't allow those people to tell their truth, and they look just like me. They take over, and also they have jobs. They have kids to meet. These activists, that's their job. They literally have no other function but to go and protest everything. These guys get paid for this stuff. So the real voices of the community, the black and brown people who actually call us against these criminals, they don't get heard. That's the reality. So are they racist too? They're not. Not all these takeovers. There's a number of, all sorts of races are involved. Like I've seen some in LA that are Latinos leading them, and then there's, what are your thoughts on that? Do you think it's a culture for younger people that they want to make trouble now, and they're not facing any consequences? They might as well just go, and then things get out of hand. They go and loot a gas station. It's fun, but they don't face any real penalties. Yeah, that's true. I mean, for sure there's a sense of youth anarchy and adolescents rebelling against authority, and they're getting messages from mainstream society that we live in an unjust society, and capitalism is evil, and you get, it's just amazing to me every time some politician says, oh yeah, there's a right to steal if you're hungry. Number one, nobody is stealing out of hunger. They're not looting 7-Eleven because they can't eat. They're doing it because of the sheer thrill of destruction, and that's a psychological trait that human beings have. It's fun to break things. If you're allowed to get away with it, that sort of power over other people is inebriating. There's a cultural embracing of criminality that's been embraced by many groups, and now it's not just black kids, Hispanics, and even white kids now. You've been listening to hip hop, and it glorifies death, and murder, and sexualization of women, and sexual assault. That was the underlying spirit, and then you have laws that get weakened that gives this group the permission to rise up and basically go out and wreak havoc, and so yeah, it is a complete breakdown of our society. It's what we glorify, it's what we embrace, and many cultures embrace it. Yeah, it used to be just a black culture, Hispanic culture thing, but now I'm seeing even kids of all races embracing it, calling each other racial slurs. I'm seeing white guys calling each other, hey, N-word, and it's like, what are you doing? Do you know the history of that word? I don't even say it, and I'm black, I hate it, but there's just this culture of immorality that is just, it's fertile right now, and all it takes is another law to be passed to tie our hands, more legislation that actually enables the activity, and I don't see it getting better. This is becoming now, we're seeing this ideology with the Democratic Socialists of America where not infrequently you've got somebody there that is excusing theft. It is never okay. You can get food in this country. They're not stealing warm socks and blankets because they're so penurious. They're stealing for the thrill of stealing and for dissing a hated bourgeois society. So what's the fix, Dionne? You know, we've tried so many fixes. Community policing has helped me, but nationwide it's hard. The Ferguson effect, that's a real thing. That's a thing that actually exists that prevents communities from actually sitting down and talking to the police. We've done, where I work, trust talks. There's been days of dialogues. Those things help, but every time we just get that two steps closer, there's some incident in some part of the country that the activists highlight and exploit and amplify and make it seem like it's all of us. And then that whole communication is gone. Perfect example was 2020. We were at a point to where we had a really solid working relationship with our community. It was really good. It was a perfect no. You know, were there still advocates running around trying to stir the pot? Absolutely, that's never gonna go away. But I'll never forget coming to work during COVID, during the lockdowns, and people sticking their head out the window when we drove by and clapping for us. Thank you for being out there. And soon as March 25th hit, the day after, people that were in our community police advisory board, people who were at our citizens' academies were out there throwing rocks and bottles at us the next day over something that happened. In some other city. In some other state. On the other side of the country. And I'm looking, I'm like, I was waiting for one elected official where I work to say, hey, I understand you're upset, but that wasn't our cops. Like literally some of the eight things that they wanted us to do, we were already doing it. But that all gets erased based on some part, other part of the country. And that's frustrating. So now I'm at the point to where I don't know what to do. I'm gonna keep loving. I'm gonna keep serving. I'm gonna keep protecting and giving my best to this community. But I don't know how we're gonna be able to repair it when there's so much. We have the media against us. Not all. I don't wanna demonize all media. We have the media who's been against us. You know, we have advocates. And unfortunately we have, you know, elected officials, you know, who wanna keep their job so they're not gonna go against the narrative. And I don't know how we're gonna fix it at this point. I had hope two years ago. But like I said, for every two steps forward, we get set back another. And I don't know what to do now. Heather, do you think if we're tougher, are we gonna solve this? I am absolutely in favor of law enforcement and more enforcement. You have to have courageous politicians who say, I am not allowing this disorder. I don't care. You can call me whatever name you want. My duty as a government official is to protect the law abiding, to protect property. So we need politicians who have the courage to say, you can't scare me by calling me a racist. And so we've got to end this charade that this is all driven by racism. So yes, you enforce the law, it works. We saw it in New York City under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Commissioner Bratton. We saw it in Skid Row from 2005 to 2011. Enforcing the law, enforcement, enhancement, and outreach actually does work. And when any one of those arms get broken, it's lost. Any crack in one of those dams, it's over. And we have to maintain that and stand on that. I miss the days where we had city council members and things like that from wherever you are, who, even though they were socially conscious about issues like homelessness, they were also socially responsible. They wouldn't just say, okay, no, the homeless cannot just sit on the side. We're gonna create programs, we're gonna do it. But no, the homeless can't sit here and die on the sidewalk. They're not living on the sidewalk, they're dying on the sidewalk. As far as the street takeovers, like I said, I think what's needed is, once again, it's everything she said. Our elected officials need to, quote unquote, grow a pair and say, enough's enough. We've tried it this way. We have to start, and I hate to say this because I know a lot of parents are struggling and I was never a believer in penalizing the parents. But if your child is out there causing so much havoc and destruction, maybe it's time for you to be held civilly liable and also criminally liable if you're not taking control of your kids. Maybe that's another way to send a message. And also, yes, going after these organizers who are generating all these things and put the fear of God in them as well so we can tap down on this because it's gonna get to a point to where, because these kids are gonna have kids, let's put it like that. So you already have a group of kids who are unsupervised. And they're gonna grow up and they're probably already having kids right now. What's the next generation gonna do if we don't rein this in and we don't have political leaders who stop being followers in leadership positions and say, enough's enough. Enough is enough. We have to do what's right. We have to do what's lawful. And that's it. Hopefully, politicians need to take a stance. They really need to set the right tone. Right. Heather, it was great to have you. Deion, it was excellent to have you back. Thank you so much for being with us. It was a lot to learn today. Thank you so much. Thank you, thanks for having me. Thank you. Tell us what you think about this topic. Do you think we need to have further discussions on this topic? Make sure to tell us in the comments or email us at siamakacaliforniasutter.com. We read all of your emails and comments. I'm Siamak Karami. This is California Sutter. We'll see you next time.