Ben Shapiro Comments on the Growing Distrust of Police

Now what do you do in this environment when you look at the way people distrust the police now in particular? I mean, I mean, I've been reading stories about cops going to Five Guys Burgers and they can't get served because people won't serve cops. And this idea that all cops are bad. And this is a really, really disturbing perspective to me because you're seeing what's happening right now in Chicago. You're seeing what's happening right now in New York where you have this massive uptick in violent crime because it's perceived that the police presence has been diminished greatly. So how do you reaffirm the trust in law enforcement and what do you do to reform law enforcement? Because clearly there are some people that are cops that should not be cops. Yes, there are a few things that you can do right off the bat and that people right, left and center have sort of talked about. And one of them is that you can abridge qualified immunity in certain areas. So qualified immunity is the idea that you're not liable to civil suit if you don't do something bad that has specifically had a precedent in law. So you could do something bad, but as long as nobody else has done the same exact bad thing before, you're not subjected to civil liability. You could, you could, it's a little complicated. So qualified immunity generally means that if I do something bad, then as a police officer, if I act within the scope of my general reasonable authority, you can't sue me for it. The actual way that you do something bad, what if you shoot somebody while you're operating? Like, right. So the reason that qualified immunity as currently understood under Supreme Court doctrine is too broad is because the standard used to be you would have to act as a reasonable police officer. If you acted as a reasonable police officer and you took a reasonable action, right, somebody went for their waistband. They had an object in there. You didn't know if it was a gun. You shot them, right? You wouldn't presumably be suitable because that's still reasonable. You track a guy down, you shoot him in the back, you know, and then you plant the gun on him, that presumably would be suitable, right? He'd be personally liable. So the way that Supreme Court has done this is they broaden qualified immunity to such an extent that you can still, bottom line, you can still get away with some bad stuff and not be sued for it. So that needs to be curbed. That's one thing. Second, police union contracts need to be utterly redone across the country. Police union contracts right now protect a lot of bad cops, right, because the police unions are designed to protect the members of the union, just like any other union. And so what that means is that police unions, I'm not a fan of public sector unions generally, but police unions need to be abridged in their ability to protect cops who do something wrong. Third, you need to have a national registry of cops who are disciplined for violation of procedure so that they can't just leave LAPD and then go work for a Ferguson PD or somebody. Those are some easy things that you could do right off the bat. But the biggest thing right now, the biggest factor in terms of lack of faith between police and citizens really is the media, because there's been a lot of talk about the racial constituency of police forces. The majority of the LAPD is minority. The majority of the Baltimore PD is minority. I believe that a huge percentage of the Chicago PD is minority. So it really is not about, you know, lots of white cops in black neighborhoods. In Baltimore, it's a lot of black cops in black neighborhoods. And that has not solved the problem of people mistrusting the police on an endemic level. Well, it's an inherently difficult job. It's a rotten job, man. I have nothing but for good cops, they're heroes. And the vast majority of cops are good cops and they're heroes. Yeah, I read a meme the other day that's very accurate. It said, if you have 130 good cops and 12 cops that are bad, you have 12 bad cops. If you have 130 good cops and 12 bad cops, but the 130 won't do anything about the 12 bad cops, you've got 142 bad cops. Yeah. And I think that that's right. I think that it is also true that our standard of what constitutes a bad cop has in some ways become much more stringent. So for example, there are cases that have become national stories in which a cop was labeled a bad cop and he wasn't a bad cop. Right. But there are bad cops. For sure. Look, here's a great example. The cops that pushed down that old ban in, where was it? Buffalo, New York? Is that what it was? Yep. That's fucking crazy. I mean, and that's white on white crime, right? I mean, is a white guy pushes this old man down and the most bonkers part about that was the way the president reacted. Like the way he felt seemed funny. Maybe he was Antifa. Maybe he was undercover. Like there was literally the worst possible reaction to watching an elderly senior citizen get pushed down by a young, strong man. You mean President Trump had the worst possible reaction to a thing? It was the worst possible reaction. I can't believe it. Yeah. I mean, unknown. President Trump having bad reactions to that. I'm a big supporter of law enforcement. I have a lot of friends that are cops. I know a lot of people from martial arts that are cops from the UFC. I know a lot of cops from Jiu Jitsu. I knew a lot of cops growing up from all the different martial arts disciplines that I engaged in. A lot of cops get involved in that. There's a lot of good cops. There's a lot of good people out there, but it is a fucking insane job. And so many of them have PTSD. For sure. But I will say that one of the great myths is that the big threat to the black community in the United States is law enforcement. It's just nonsense. It's not only nonsense. It's counterproductive nonsense. And you're seeing it. But it is a threat. It is a threat oftentimes. It is on a data level an extraordinarily small threat. Law enforcement as a threat to black life on a generalized level is extraordinarily small. The Washington Post database last year showed a grand total of 15 black Americans shot unarmed across the United States in a country of 42 million black people. The problem is when it happens, it doesn't matter what the statistics are. People see that video and that video gets shared 200 million times. It looks like there's 200 million white cops killing a black guy. And this is why I say that the media's treatment of this stuff is just horrific. It's not just the media. It's social media. Social media has blown this stuff up. And it's gotten to the point where if you say that's a horrible situation, that's also an anecdotal situation, here's some data. If you present the data, it's like, well, are you ignoring people's lived experiences? That's racist. How can you present the data? Because the data doesn't take into account the full story. Nobody takes into account an awful lot of the story, which is why it's called data. Right? Like I just don't. Anecdotal evidence is evidence of an anecdote. It is not evidence of a broad national trend, nor is it evidence that taking a broad national policy like cutting back funding to the police in a time of rising crime is a good idea because you saw a video on YouTube. Well, I'm sorry. No, that's a terrible idea. But when you look at these videos, the positive side, if there is any positive side, is that it's they're accountable now. And this has been going on forever. If you talk to people that are black that grew up in poverty-stricken areas, they will tell you horrific stories about being abused by cops. And I think the number is like 25% more likely. A black person or brown person getting any sort of interaction with a cop is 25% more likely to become physical or for them to be abused. That's real. But when you look at the statistics of them being killed, white people get killed more by cops than black people. But there's way more white people. No, no. Even on a percentage basis, you have to use the control group of crime. You can't use the control group of raw population. So you have to look at people who are in situations where a deadly interaction is likely. There have been multiple studies that show that black people are not in more danger of being shot by cops than white people. But it is true that low level uses of force between cops and black people are worse than low level uses of force between cops and white people. That's the Roland Fryer study. There are a few confounds that have yet to be sort of worked out. I think probably white people are less likely to believe that the cop is going to kill them, whereas black people are probably convinced the cop is going to kill them. That might play a factor in why there's more white people being killed by cops than black people. I mean that may very well be true. It may also be that low level uses of force is maybe – of force may be disparate. If you think that the cop is likely to be a racist, then you might be more likely to resist the cop and then you might be more likely to rough you up. So it's very difficult to rub out the confounds there. The one thing that we know for sure is that the greatest threat to black life, just like the greatest threat to white life, is members of your own race killing you. Like if you're talking about actual murders, white people are killed by white people. Black people are killed by black people. It's conflict by people you know mostly. Right. It's intra-racial, right? There's very little interracial crime like black on white or white on black in the United States. There's a lot of intra-racial crimes, a lot of white people victimizing white people and black people victimizing black people. And the question is, how do you stop that? This is why – I don't know if you saw this interview. It was kind of an amazing interview. Terry Crews, the actor, he was on with – he was on Don Lemon. Don Lemon. Right. And Don Lemon is doing the Black Lives Matter slogan. And Terry Crews says, well, all lives matter. And Don Lemon says, but no, black lives matter doesn't mean all black lives matter. Right. Terry Crews said all black lives matter. And he said, no, no, not all black lives matter. Only black lives matter. We're only talking about police brutality right now. And Terry Crews was like, well, why aren't we talking about all black lives matter? Because if black lives matter means you withdraw cops and withdrawing cops means more dead black people, then why wouldn't those lives matter too? And this is where the slogan nearing gets in the way of actual progress. Right. It's where ideology hits facts. Right. Exactly. It gets very weird. And Terry Crews was called some terrible names for that. But then a video surfaced of Don Lemon from 2013 chastising black people. Sounds like me on that. Right. He sounds like me talking about – He sounds exactly like you. It's hilarious. Pull your pants up. Get your shit together. You know, like – He's literally saying things like, don't have babies out of wedlock. Right. Stay in school. Which, by the way, again, all of this is commonsensical and true for all races. It is not just black people. Young white people in Appalachia need to get their shit together. Everybody needs to get their shit together. But again, young white people in Appalachia are dealing with the same thing. What's around them all the time is crime. People taking pills. Everyone having babies out of wedlock. People impoverished. No hope. No potential for escape.