Listen Up with Host Al Neely
Hi, I'm Al Neely. I've spent most of my life asking, " Why do people behave a certain way? Why don't people understand that most everyone wants basically the same thing? Most everyone wants their fundamental need for peace of mind, nourishment, shelter and safety."
What I have learned is that because of an unwillingness to open one's mind to see that some of the people you come in contact with may have those same desires as you do. We prejudge, isolate ourselves, and can be hesitant to interact, and sometimes we can be belligerent towards one another. This is caused by learned behavior that may have repeated itself for generations in our families.
What I hope to do with this podcast is to introduce as many people with as many various cultures, backgrounds, and practices as possible. The thought is that I can help to bring different perspectives by discussing various views from my guests that are willing to talk about their personal experiences.
Hopefully we all will learn something new. We may even learn that most of us share the same desire for our fundamental needs. We may just simply try to obtain it differently.
Sit back, learn, and enjoy!
Listen Up with Host Al Neely
Bridging America's Two Justice Systems: The Fight Against Inequality in Law
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RamIn Fatehi, Commonwealth Attorney for the city of Norfolk in Virginia, shares his unique journey from a privileged upbringing as the son of Iranian-American parents to becoming a prosecutor dedicated to reforming a flawed system. His contrarian nature and experiences with prejudice from both sides led him to pursue a career where he could address the inequality he witnessed firsthand.
• Son of a neurosurgeon and nurse who emphasized service as a family value
• Left a high-paying civil law career to become a public defender because he felt he was "increasing human misery"
• Witnessed firsthand how wealth and connections create two different justice systems
• Openly acknowledges historical issues including slave patrol origins of policing and prosecutor misconduct
• Uses data rather than fear to drive prosecution decisions
• Reduced Norfolk homicides from 63 to 37 and cut jail population by nearly half
• Views successful criminal justice reform as addressing root causes through education, jobs, and neighborhood investment
• Concerns about potential crime increases if social investment decreases and mass incarceration returns
Vote in the primary election on June 17th, with early voting beginning on May 2nd. The work of progressive prosecution is too important to go backwards to the old ways.
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Introduction to Ramon Fadahi
Speaker 2Hello everyone . I'm Al Neely Welcome to Listen Up Podcast and today we have Ramon Fadahi . He is a Commonwealth attorney for the city of Norfolk . Say hello to everyone , ramon .
Speaker 3Hi everyone , Good to be here .
Speaker 2Yes , so we asked him to come in to talk with us and to educate us on the role of a Commonwealth attorney , and why , Norfolk . I know you're from this area , you're from the Hampton Roads area , so , uh , tell us first of all how you made the decision to become an attorney . What was your , your , your passion for that ? I and then yeah , go ahead .
Family Background and Iranian Heritage
Speaker 3I was one of those guys who was born blessed . I'm the son of a neurosurgeon and a nurse . My mom and dad are big believers in service , gotcha , and I just got fortunate with the parents I had . I you know , coming up my . It was a given in my family that a life of service is the sort of life that we want to lead Right , and I remember , even from when I was five , six , seven years old , my father taking me to the hospital with him when he would visit his patients after he'd operated on them , and to see the way that I could tell that people were appreciative of the way that my father had been able to help them .
Speaker 3But then also to see the way that my father was appreciative of the people who helped him , the way that my father was appreciative of the people who helped him , seeing him interact with his patients , people who could walk , not just the nurses , but with the orderlies , with the janitors , with the , with , you know , the guys turning a wrench when the , when the air conditioning system was going out , um , and learning from my dad that his he would never be able to do his job without the other people , no matter what job they were doing that . Every one of them was important . I thought about being a doctor and I wound up thinking well , the one downside of having a dad who's a neurosurgeon is my dad worked all the time . He worked all the time .
Speaker 3And he had to . I grew up part of my well , most of my childhood here in Virginia Beach and went to high school at Norfolk Academy , but I lived in Iran until I was seven . And my daddy had to walk away from his medical career there and start over at the age of 42 . Really , yeah , wow , well , my father , so my dad is from Iran and my mom is from New Jersey .
Speaker 3That's a big difference . Yeah well , it's your classic 70s doctor-nurse romance . They met when my mother was in graduate school and my dad was doing his neurosurgery residency .
Speaker 3And they just they got kind of unlucky because dad wrapped up his residency in DC in 1977 and turned down an academic appointment at the University of Chicago , turned down private practice , turned down the ability to stay in Washington to become the chair of neurosurgery at a new medical school that Harvard and the Iranian government were going to found in Tehran , and within a year of my mom and dad moving there and my mother preparing to become a nursing professor , the Iranian revolution happened and the whole world turned upside down and mom and dad stuck around . That's the late 70s .
Speaker 2Yes .
Speaker 3Okay , that was 1978 and 79 , and I was born in 1978 . And mom and dad stayed through the first years of the war with Iraq and I did my first grade in Iran .
Speaker 3And there were no private schools . The public schools were all indoctrinating people . The Iranian people are very pro-American , but kids are mean With a lot of grief about having an American mom . Now the adults ? No , the children . Children are children and mom and dad decided that the sort of life that my dad had and the sort of educational opportunities my dad had weren't going to be available for my little brother and me , and they decided that they were going to move back to the States and that was 1985 .
Speaker 3And , as I said , dad was 42 . And he had to start all over again . You know , took out a loan from my , from his in-laws , from my grandparents , who , they , didn't have a lot of money . You know , my mother was the first in her family to go to college . Were they still in Iran ? They well , my mom's parents were here . That's what brought us to Hampton Roads .
Speaker 2Okay gotcha .
Speaker 3They had retired from New Jersey to Suffolk
Path to Becoming a Prosecutor
Speaker 3and I was actually born at Obesee Hospital . But mom and dad decided to move here in part to be closer to my grandparents , and then my father's parents followed about a year later and I grew up .
Speaker 2I was very fortunate to grow up in a house with my grandparents that is a blessing .
Speaker 3it was a blessing . But you know , another part of why I became a lawyer was , you know , I remember being judged for having an american mom and , and you know , I remember , you know it was devastating to leave the only home I knew when I was seven and come to a totally different country . But I felt some relief because I thought , well , at least people are going to like ease up because I'm an American , I'm coming to the United States . And then I had to put up with a whole bunch of grief about my Iranian dad . So all of a sudden it's like wait a minute .
Speaker 3Like I started out in one place , I'm getting grief about my mom . Now I'm here I'm getting grief about my dad . Like can I win here ? And the example of service from my mother and father and perseverance and hard work . And then my appreciation of the fact that way too many people operate on assumptions . Way too many people judge us for who they think we are instead of who we actually are . And you know I'm going to stereotype my own people for a second . Like Iranians , we're contrarians , right ?
Speaker 2That's why I asked you here by the way , because people have a judgment about Commonwealth attorneys too , so hopefully we'll straighten all that out by the end of the day .
Speaker 3Well , I appreciate that I like zigging when other people zag and that's definitely part of the Iranian national character that I got from my daddy . But that's people zag , and that's that's definitely part of the iranian national character that I got from my daddy right but but that's why , that's why law and that's why public service , because I I mean , I've done other stuff .
Speaker 3I made money in washington as a civil lawyer , but you know , I didn't feel . I felt as if I was helping rich people argue over a big bag of money or help rich people jam poor people .
Speaker 2Right . So that's another one of the questions . The people , a lot of people I know start out working in the Commonwealth office and they leave and they become defense attorneys for more money . You've been in that . You've been in that . You've been the Commonwealth's attorney for how long now ?
Speaker 3As the Commonwealth's attorney . It's three years and a little bit . In the office . In the office it's now almost 13 years and as a prosecutor , 18 years .
Speaker 2Okay .
Speaker 3And before that I was a public defender .
Speaker 2You were a public , okay , so those are choices that you make because you care about people , right , Cause you could probably make a lot more money doing something else , like you said , right , so let's talk about that . So what caused you to have that passion for helping people ? The fact that your parents were in the medical field ? Yes , I'm just being funny . Just go ahead .
Speaker 3No , you're absolutely right . I had a lot to do with it and it's funny that it actually drives my dad kind of crazy , because he I came out of my again . I was born blessed . My parents paid for private school for me all the way through . They paid for me to get two Ivy League degrees . I went to Yale and I went to Columbia Law School . And .
Speaker 3I graduated debt-free because I got born right and I clerked for a Virginia Supreme Court justice , and then I took a job at a very prestigious law firm in Washington and within a year I walked away and my father thought I had lost my mind . He said you've got to be kidding me . This is what you're doing . And I said , yeah , I'm going to go be a public defender in Richmond .
Speaker 3And it
Understanding Structural Inequality
Speaker 3was a moral decision . I didn't feel as if I was serving people or as if I was adding to . I felt as if I was increasing human misery instead of decreasing it . In the work that I was doing , I mean salaries . A lot of it is simple economics . It's supply and demand , demand and jobs . You know , not every job that pays a lot of money , you know , either has scarce labor or is unusually difficult . But the reason those big law firms pay what they pay is they've got a , they've got to keep people around who otherwise would go and do something else , because it ain't fun and I I gotta tell you it was the best decision I ever made and because I went from being unhappy , really unhappy , every day , feeling like I was hurting people , to representing people in the Richmond court system .
Speaker 3And you know , richmond being sort of a twin of Norfolk in terms of its population size , its demographics and also the sort of suffering that Richmond and Norfolk have felt through the depredations of redlining , white flight , community disinvestment .
Speaker 3Norfolk was the first city in the United States where the Department of Housing and Urban Development paid for so-called slum clearance .
Speaker 3Oh really , oh yes , the HUD HOud hope program , h-o-p-e paid for the demolition of 162 acres of downtown norfolk and the uh in the name of so-called slum clearance .
Speaker 3And the car-centered , pedestrian , unfriendly , you not crime , dangerous , but like get hit in the street by a car dangerous structure of downtown Norfolk is was because Norfolk was like the guinea pig for a lot of mid-century ideas about how cities should be set up , ideas that are failed ideas , in the same way that mass incarceration is a failed idea about how to deal with criminal justice and criminal behavior , but without going too far afield . Richmond felt very familiar to me , having grown up even though I grew up in Virginia Beach and sort of the wealthy enclaves of Virginia Beach having spent time in Norfolk as a teenager and having gone to high school in Norfolk . It was so great , I loved that work as a public defender . I felt as if I was making a difference for people and that's it's hard to believe , but 20 years ago , you know , the only people who became public defenders , like in the public perception , were either oddballs or failures .
Speaker 2That's right , and you were around a lot of people that were in a lower middle class or lower class economics . No , you were not Okay .
Speaker 3Au contraire , I went to Norfolk Academy . Okay , to Norfolk Academy . It's a school that was founded 297 years ago . It was the first school in Norfolk and it is where you know . The Norfolk elite has traditionally gone to school , and so I mean by any measure . My family was wealthy when I was coming up , but we were just another family . In that crew it was doctors' kids , lawyers' kids , elected officials' kids , ceos . There were a few scholarship kids . When I got there it was 1985 , and the school had only integrated maybe 15 years before maybe 15 years before the integration was primarily , was it with minorities ?
Speaker 3Yes , I don't know the exact year , but the first black students began to attend Norfolk Academy in either the late 1960s or around 1970 . Oh , really that far back ? Huh , well , it was . I know that by the Norfolk Academy recently had a forum where members of the class of 1975 were invited back to campus to speak about their experience as part of Black History Month , and the marquee event was a panel discussion of both black and white alumni talking about the cultural interchange that came from learning around one another . So I know no later than 1974 , and I think significantly earlier , not significantly a few years earlier than that yeah , I would have to say .
Speaker 2they weren't allowed to go to school together in the 60s . No .
Speaker 3I mean the massive resistance ended in Norfolk right around 1960 , if I have the date right , 1959 , 1960 , when the Norfolk 17 integrated Norfolk public schools .
Speaker 3But , the private schools took longer , longer , and I'm very grateful to Norfolk Academy for the education it gave me , but it did not give . It was not a place of great socioeconomic diversity , the middle class . There was a group of scholarship recipient students who were there , but most of the sort of you know , not upper middle class and above students were the students of the faculty and staff . So my exposure to the real world was more through my father and my father's medical practice than it was any other way , I see .
Speaker 3Being in New Haven and sort of living in an actual city instead of growing up in the suburbs of Virginia Beach was one sort of eye-opening part of recognizing how birth and parentage and sort of the accident of birth or the grace we receive as God's children , depending on how we want to look at it , or the burdens that God asks us to carry because he knows we can that started to come into more relief living in Connecticut , living in New York and then very much so when I became a law clerk and started reading a lot of sort of Virginia criminal cases as part of my job . But by the time that I became a public defender , the realities of structural racism , the realities of the iniquities of the justice system , what now , like
Civil Rights Progress and Backlash
Speaker 3with no intentional irony , we hear people on the right talk about as a two-tiered justice system All of that was in pretty high relief for me Also .
Speaker 2Yeah , when you brought up redlining . These are all things I know . I know from one studying and then two living and experiencing it . But having to grow up in that environment where you were talking about and not seeing the structural racism from the standpoint of being an upper middle class person is usually pretty rare . So I was a little bit shocked when you said that .
Speaker 3I wasn't born with it . My mother was a campus radical . She was a big believer but also had to be a very careful campus radical as the first kid , getting her family to go to college and on a scholarship . I think if my mother had been born into a different family she probably would have been a doctor but didn't feel as if she could take the risk and but and it's , I think , that contrarian streak . I mean , I really was . God blessed me in an incredible way .
Speaker 3My great-uncle was one of the authors of the Iranian criminal code in the 1930s . He was a renowned professor at Tehran University Law School . He was a government minister . My grandfather was a colonel in the army . His father and uncles were all generals and governors . And that insider-outsider experience of like knowing that , you know , I came from people who had had sufficient favor to be able to do important work and then to have to like defend my heritage and like defend who I was , to a bunch of eight-year-olds and I want to say , like who was your daddy and granddaddy ? Like what makes you think you can tell me , like that you're so much better and that was you know ? I'd like to say that I somehow was born with a better moral compass than other people . But you know , we as Iranians don't fit into any of the neat sort of racial classifications or buckets of . You know , american bigotry , yeah , but uh way , it was created here .
Speaker 3Yes , yeah , we yeah you know , I and and but it's but the so I I was , I wasn't aware of it . You know , I grew up as sort of your , your good , you know , country club , rich kid , meritocrat , in terms of what I thought if you'd asked me at 14 or 15 .
Speaker 3But I was very much ready to receive the reality of American life when I was exposed to it . I think a lot of people and I say this , having grown up with wealthy people Like a lot of wealthy people like it creates a lot of cognitive dissonance . They don't and well , I don't want , I don't want to trash anybody , but the when people get exposed to information that suggests to them that that maybe it's not all hard work , maybe the bootstraps aren't available to people and therefore that perhaps grace and favor and maybe just dumb luck has contributed to one person's success and another person's failure , then they start to have to reassess like their own self-image . I could see that and it's an uncomfortable message . You know , I see that as a criminal justice reform advocate . You know , I don't .
Speaker 3You know , norfolk academy was one of the most formative places for me in terms of honor , service , gratitude , recognition of , of the requirement to give back . If you were , if , if you've gotten a lot from life already . But one of the things that made me a fired up criminal justice reformer was seeing the ? I classmates who did drugs . I classmates who committed crimes . I had classmates who committed crimes .
Speaker 2I had classmates who if they had been at name , your rough high school in whatever town in America would probably have been in jail .
Speaker 3Why weren't they ? We don't need to have the police involved in this . He's a good boy . Let's just work this out . I think we can fix this . Telephone calls would be made , informal arrangements would be hashed out . Neighborhood are considered obstruction of justice , or why ain't you calling the police or what have you would ? I don't mean obstruction in a criminal sense , you know , because I don't think when people do it in a not nice enclave , like as long as they're not breaking law . I watched people who grew up to be successful pillars of the community .
Speaker 3I saw what they were like as teenagers and I wasn't perfect as a teenager myself and the difference was that we had resources and we had reach and we had parents who both had the time and knew who to call . And you know , it's very , very much reminds me of the civil rights protests of 2020 and 2021 and the aftermath of the murder of george floyd and then the the january 6 protests , and it's like we're not . We're not asking you to shoot those protesters , we're asking you not to threaten to shoot us , and like it's one of the one of the real guiding moral principles and this really threw threw itself into high relief when I was a public defender was , you know , I don't criticize parents for looking after their kids , you know , and for trying to save them from a bad situation they may have gotten themselves into . Have a little grace . That shouldn't be .
Speaker 3Just because rich people do it one way and poor people do it a different way doesn't mean that poor people are doing it . Everybody should have the same shake Right ? We should be judged on who we are as human beings and I know that's a phrase that gets weaponized by people on the right all the time but just because they're talking about it the wrong way . Whether you're rich or poor , your outcome should in the justice system , at least whether you get a break , whether it gets worked out because it can be worked out shouldn't depend on whether you're rich or poor .
Speaker 2So how do we bridge that divide In your opinion ? What can we do to help bridge that divide ? Education ?
Speaker 3That's a piece of it . I don't want to get all glum on you , but we're we're seeing a backsliding in our ability to bridge that divide . We we just saw donald trump re-elected and sadly it was because not just because you know more people voted for him because it was about the same , but six million people stayed home because they couldn't see the difference between that guy and kamala harris . We were watching an assault on the rule of law , that's . That's making wealth and power and connections massively more important than the brand of justice you get today in the federal system than it did six weeks ago . Yeah , but I think that the way that we start to bridge the gap is by calling it out . I mean , one of the things that makes me different as a prosecutor and I think one of the things that makes people look at me as sort of a dangerous radical , which I'm just a guy driven by data , like I'm not a you know , no , you know you say call it out .
Speaker 2I think this is why we're here today Amen , this is why Donald Trump is president . I feel like we went through a whole period with calling it out and I think a portion of our society went . You know what ? I'm tired of you putting this in my face and saying , um , I should feel guilty about some of these things that are taking place , and you're just , you're just whining . So we want somebody else in office that's going to say , have the same thought process or belief or ideology that we do , and which led us to just a conclave of one step after the next two . We got to Donald Trump , would you ? Would you agree with that ?
Speaker 3Yes , okay , anytime that there's a major advance in American civil rights , there's always a backlash .
Speaker 2Yes , I'm a history major so I can pretty much take you through most of them . So it's just each one of the riots . Right after the World War , black people started making progress . We get a black president . So now we're going to have to take you guys back . I didn't mean to cut you off , but just go ahead . I see it , and I've seen it from the beginning , because it's something that I've studied .
Speaker 3But it's nice to know somebody else sees it . Well , I was a history major too , okay good .
Speaker 3A couple of weeks ago I was at Hampton and the head of the Pre-Law Institute asked me to come and speak on a panel Right , and one of the questions that I got from one of the young people in the audience great audience , by the way , really engaged , really promising young people but one of the questions was and it was from a young woman who said how do you , or how do I ? You know she was asking for herself . You know , how do I , as a student , thinking about going on law , how do I do this when it looks like everything that we're working for is getting rolled back ? And I asked the audience , I said does anybody here know who John Mercer Langston is ? And I got no hands , none , and that caught me a little bit off guard . So I know , you know the story , but John Mercer Langston was the first African American person to represent us in Congress and he was roughly 1870 , 1880 .
Speaker 2Yeah , I was reading about him yesterday .
Speaker 3He had more rights than his son did , right Because he was part of that brief experiment with equality after Reconstruction . It's really sad . Was he the ?
Speaker 2longest serving one . Once we had Reconstruction and they started electing all the black officials in the South , was he the last one that was left after they got rid of all of them ?
Speaker 3I couldn't remember that part yes , I think so he lasted the longest okay right side note , I found out recently that warwick county , which is now newport news , yeah , elected a black commonwealth's attorney in the 1880s I had . I did not know that I didn't know it either , okay , but but all of this history , erased untold ,
Crisis of Trust in Justice System
Speaker 3and that was sort of the point that I was making to the student and to the audience was you know if you talked to ?
Speaker 2I don't want to interrupt you , but that brought us Jim Crow . It did . Right after the Reconstruction period . That was progress . And then next thing , you know , there's Jim Crow . It did Right after the Reconstruction period . That was progress . And then next thing , you know , there's Jim Crow , precisely , and the rise of the terrorism with the KKK . Okay , exactly , go ahead .
Speaker 3Failures of the justice system Right Lynching rampant . Right 5% of lynchers ever indicted .
Speaker 3The other 95 , either a blind eye or the act of encouragement of law enforcement , both the police and prosecutors . And I reminded that student that the folks who organized the NAACP and it's an important organization I'm a life member , I've been part of the Norfolk branch for some years but the civil rights leaders who founded the NAACP enjoyed fewer rights than John Mercer Langston did . But they didn't just despair . We have to recognize that pushing against American power structures is always going to lead to a backlash . The question is are we able to regroup ? And we can't just cede the field . We have to recognize that sometimes we're going to be fighting on our heels and we may spend the rest of our lives fighting on our heels . John Mercer Langston died in another sort of civil rights dark age .
Speaker 3And now Lee Highway in Arlington is named Langston Boulevard . That may seem symbolic and it may seem kind of dispiriting in a world where anything having to do with civil rights and with inclusion and the redressing of historical wrongs is under attack from the Trump administration . But you know , we , we take a couple forward , we take one to two , sometimes three back , but we're , we're better now than we were in 1619 . And we , and you know , countries and cultures evolve over historical time . No , not in the span of an individual's life .
Speaker 2You mentioned Hampton University , I went to Norfolk State . Behold , behold , that's right , the green and gold . So , as a consequence of the Reconstruction , not being able to go to college at white universities during that time period , you had the springing up of black universities . So , uh , and now it's something that I look at and go . Okay , I know you guys are not seeing this the same way . There's progress . Every time there's a pushback , but we're talking about coming after education and not funding universities , black universities , and I'm sitting there going . We have our universities that are black . So you hear a lot of concerns with people that are black students and you know , um , where am I going to go school ? Where am I going to get the funding ? You have your universities . So , um , that's something I always thought is encouraging . Just , you can just see the various steps , but I didn't want to make a show . You brought up hampton and I went to noah state , so I was thinking of HBCUs . Okay , sorry .
Speaker 3I get it . I remember telling the folks the Hamptonians I was like , don't yell it too loud that I came across the water . I don't want to get crossed by the Spartans , but it's . I mean we're . The work of progressive prosecution is , in part , a call-out game . Game is the wrong word . It's a call-out process . I mean we live in a country where , out of of homicide and the fact that people kill each other , people kill people in front of people they know and there's some fear . But a significant portion of it is also a lack of trust in the system . People do not trust the system , system . Why should I call the police when all the police have done and all the prosecutors have done is jam up low-level people while the dangerous people are walking around ? Why should I help put somebody else in the system when so many people have gone into the system and have never come back out ?
Speaker 2So you acknowledge that there's a lack of trust in the justice system ? Huh , Absolutely .
Speaker 3Absolutely , and I get it . Anybody who studies the justice system can see and go back to what we were talking about a couple couple of minutes ago on about lynching . The fact that lynching was was mob violence , premeditated murder by mob yeah , and absolutely and and that nobody would ever be prosecuted for it .
Speaker 3In rare instances where anybody was charged , the juries would walk people and to say nothing of the racially charged backstory to a lot of lynchings . Who looked at whom wrong ? Who was talking to the wrong person ? Not crossing , not getting in the street and off the sidewalk at the right time . It was about the reinforcement of racial hierarchy . And you know , I got to give credit to the Norfolk Police Department because in the academy the Norfolk Police Department teaches their recruits that Norfolk has one of the oldest police departments in the Union . No , they either it was , and they're taught that it has its origins in the slave patrols .
Speaker 2That's what the recruits are taught .
Speaker 3They are absolutely taught that in the academy . They are taught that which , when you talk about a few steps forward and a few steps back , and this isn't something that just happened . This has been some years , at least since before I was Commonwealth's attorney , and that doesn't mean that they're slave patrollers now . In fact , one of the reasons that I love Norfolk and I love prosecuting in Norfolk is , you know , we have 540 officers on the force , somebody's number one and somebody's number 540 in terms of ability , initiative , honesty , whatever , however you want to measure it . But this police department , nobody is perfect , but they are trying to think about it in a different way and they are trying to acknowledge where they come from .
Speaker 3I do the same thing as a prosecutor thing . As a prosecutor , you know I say that the criminal justice system and my predecessors in office going back , you know , for the hundred and some odd years that there have been commonwealth attorneys in Norfolk . We didn't always do it right . You know whether you were rich or whether you were connected , whether you knew somebody , whether you were white or black , had a lot to do with the kind of justice you got , and that's wrong . And even if people , setting aside people's lived experiences .
Speaker 3We now live in a world of the exonerations because of faulty witness identifications that have been turned out , by the discovery of police misconduct and perjury and lying , by Brady violations , the deliberate hiding of evidence by prosecutors , suppressing evidence of people's innocence , in violation of the United States Constitution , in a desire to win . These things are real . They are part of true crime podcasts and true crime television all over America . Though , setting aside whether people think that the justice system is unfair because it's biased against black , brown and broke people , there's also the flaws in the way that prosecutors and law enforcement officers have , over historical time , treated their work . And then we haven't even touched on police brutality , police violence .
Speaker 3We haven't even touched on police brutality , police violence , philando Castile , george Floyd , breonna Taylor , the you know catalog of people who have fallen victim to people who never should have had a badge that all of this means that people do not trust us . And you know , somebody know . You know I'm not the only prosecutor who says this . One of the first tweets that came out of the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia when President Biden's US attorney was confirmed was there is a crisis of trust in the justice system . All of us who actually care about being effective prosecutors have to recognize it and have to call it , because the end result of this lack of trust isn't just that four out of 10 murderers are walking around in the street , it's that other violent crimes are solved at under 50% rate . And bear in mind , that's just enough to make an arrest . If I went to trial with enough to make an arrest , every case would result in a not guilty
Crime Rate Trends and Root Causes
Speaker 3. That's not proof beyond a reasonable doubt , that's just probable cause . The solve rate and solve rates for property crimes . That are a tiny fraction even of that , and a lot of it is . I ain't picking up the phone , but then there are the downstream problems . Okay , I picked up the phone . But then they're the downstream problems .
Speaker 3Okay , I picked up the phone , I ain't going to court , no , I'm not coming to court . Oh and , or somebody comes to court . But the same people who have suffered from over policing , from wait a minute like you snapped up my cousin for this thing , that was a bunch of BS , but nobody's getting arrested People who have seen the inequities in the justice system and it doesn't have to be three minutes ago . It could have been something that happened 35 years ago in St Louis and they moved here to Norfolk . It's going to affect how they view the system and what that means is those lived experiences and all the things , the drumbeat of all the things that we've talked about . That means the bar for what juries want to feel as if they have enough evidence to convict is way higher than it was 25 , 30 years ago Way higher . And that creates a problem in our holding legitimately guilty people accountable .
Speaker 2So you feel as though it's getting better .
Speaker 3It's got to get worse before it gets better .
Speaker 2What does that ?
Speaker 3mean I think of it as an infected wound . And having a doctor daddy , and a nurse mama means I'd spend a lot of time with medical analogies . Okay , but if you have a wound and the wound infects and it cakes over , it may look as if it's healed , but it's not and in fact that infection can get much more serious under the skin . And if you want the wound to heal , you have to open it back up . You have to cut open whatever's already caked over . You've got to clean it out . You've got to treat it over . You've got to clean it out , you've got to treat it . And then you've got to let it heal . And that means there's going to be pain and blood before whatever it is gets fixed , and all of that will eventually leave a scar . But you can't leave it untreated . Leave a scar , but you can't leave it untreated .
Speaker 3And , just like you , said that , that you know , every time we make a major advance in civil rights , we're getting more people woke . If you will , you know another one of those terms that the right has poisoned and and I refuse to walk away from them , because every time we walk away from a term , we we're implicitly telling the right that they were right and that's why I call myself progressive prosecutor and don't care yeah .
Speaker 2So , folks , just in case , so anybody's listening to me when you hear the term woke , it's being used incorrectly . It has nothing to do with a culture war . It has everything to do with africanism and , uh , pan-african leaders of the early 19th century bringing awareness to the culture and ethnicity . So the term is being incorrectly used , by the way .
Speaker 3So just want to point that out I appreciate the sharpening , okay , oh , to put it a different way , you know , the more we , we raise awareness , yeah , of the fact that the system treats people differently , yeah , or ?
Speaker 3that or that there are two americas , the america of the wealthy and the privileged , that the system treats people differently , or that , or that there are two americas , the america of the wealthy and the privileged , and the america for everyone else . Yeah , there's the backlash , but that's part of the trust building process . You know , when I , when I go to a civic league or when I go to a neighborhood and I say I understand that , why you all may not trust me , you may not trust the police , you may not trust the system , you're not crazy , you have a right , that is a trust building and , hopefully , a credibility building exercise . Because then when I say , look , this case is a case with mitigation , this is one where treatment alternatives what have you are important . But this case is a more serious case where prison is really the only option that we're looking at because we have a public safety obligation . It doesn't sound like the old mass incarceration talk of the 60s or the 90s , at least to some people . Right .
Speaker 3That's sort of , if you wanted to , if I had to boil down the entire progressive prosecutor movement . It is to trust building progressive prosecutor movement . It is to trust building . Trust building through transparency , through accountability and through the use of data correct , you know , through the use of data to do the things that actually make us safer instead of the things that we've that people feel make us safer . And again , the , you know , progressive prosecutor is another term that the right has abused and that some people in in my own sort of ideological lane say we should stop using , and I just flat out refuse to do it yeah but that's part of the culture war too .
Speaker 2Yes , yeah , you're soft on crime . Crime , um well , and we've heard all of them , all the things that go with that being a a progressive prosecutor , so , um I'm used to it .
Speaker 3It's uh , you know as as well as I do that it's false , as well as I do that it's false . The old school idea . Right now , 20 years ago , when I started doing criminal law , the difference between a Republican and a Democrat when it came to ideas about criminal justice was effectively zero . It was in the middle of the mass incarceration consensus . There had been a big war in the early 1990s over parole and the abolition of parole and so-called truth in sentencing laws , and that was the depths of the war on drugs and the violence that came out of the war on drugs . That was an era when New York City's murders peaked at 2,000 in 1990 . 2,100 , I actually think . The number right now is about 500 , by the way and that's in .
Speaker 2New York City . Yes , so crime is down as a whole in the country . Is that correct ? Yes , Unequivocally yes . And what do you attribute to that too ? No one cause , but incarceration is not one of them the rehabilitation process . No , it's not Okay . No , it's not that either .
Speaker 3Okay . Crime is not a problem per se . Crime is a symptom of other problems and the way to affect the crime rate is not to pick one prosecutorial philosophy or another . It is to invest in people and in neighborhoods . If we really want to drive down the crime rate in the United States , we need to have blue collar jobs where people can put a roof over their family's heads . We need to have education and early childhood education and child care available and child care available , and not one kind of education for people from wealthy enclaves and effectively no education for everybody else .
Speaker 2We're moving away from all of that right now .
Speaker 3Amen , and that's what's really scary
Progressive Prosecution Impact in Norfolk
Speaker 3, al . Yeah .
Speaker 3Because you know I'm sort of the last line of defense . Yeah , for civil rights and for fairness . You know you've got the president and then you've got Congress . They fall , then you have to rely on your governor and your state legislators . If they fall , then I'm left to make sure that we're not going back to the old ways . But what people forget . You know , there are all kinds of memory holes with the Trump administration and one of them is that the spike in violent crime that we saw that's only now starting to ebb , that's only now starting to ebb came out of decisions that the Trump administration made about how they responded to COVID and they- . Protest .
Speaker 2All of those things , yeah .
Speaker 3You know it's very interesting . The Brookings Institution just put out a study and Brookings determined that the protests actually did not drive up the crime rate . Really it was fascinating . And the way it's very difficult to come up with good data in the social sciences . It's why I walked away from political science to become a history major .
Speaker 2Okay .
Speaker 3But the way they were able to do it was to look at the increases in violent crime . Everybody talked about the COVID crime wave . It was very specific kinds of crime . It was violence and it was not property crime . Property crime actually fell , it was violence and Brookings had an accidental sort of isolated group that they were able to study . It was Bat sort of isolated group that they were able to study . It was Baton Rouge . Baton Rouge , Louisiana , in the mid-2000s and early 20-teens . So Brookings I take it had been studying what had been going on in Baton Rouge , because Baton Rouge saw a violence spike at a time when other places didn't . It had been an outlier .
Speaker 2Really .
Speaker 3Okay , yes , but Baton Rouge's violence spike looked similar to spike in violence we saw during COVID , had begun before George Floyd's murder and that it tracked and followed the same pattern as Baton Rouge's two crime spikes . Excuse me , baton Rouge had dislocations in those two periods Hurricane Katrina and there was a major series of floods in Baton Rouge afterwards . Also , if memory serves , what Brookings was able to determine was that the violence spike that we saw during COVID was not all over everywhere , though it did happen in a lot of different places , but the violence spike was most pronounced in places with two characteristics a poverty rate of 30% or more and large numbers of young men either out of school or out of work . And the reason that that tracked was a whole lot of refugees from Katrina moved to Baton Rouge and were out of school and out of work in 05 , 06 . And then a whole bunch of people got put out of work during that second series of floods in the early teens . And those were .
Speaker 3It's taken us years to figure it out , but those were the main ingredients for and it's funny because I remember coming into office in 22 in the middle of Norfolk's crime or violence spike , the year before I took office and the year I took office had the two highest numbers of murders in Norfolk since the late 1990s . It was 64 the year before I took office and 63 my first year . The numbers were almost 100 in the late 90s , by the way . Almost 100 . But they had been , people had been used to having them in the 30s and 40s . They had even fallen into the high 20s one or two years . But it was and people were calling for and especially there had been a spike in sort of downtown violence . But there was this sort of demand , especially on me . I got elected very much as not part of the . You know , yes , I have this elite education . I'm very much a Norfolk political outsider .
Speaker 3I am not an insider . I was elected over the opposition of the Norfolk political establishment . They were practically united against me and they ran somebody in the primary against me and that person got 20% and I got 60% because the message of criminal justice reform and the message of progressive prosecution is very much what Norfolk's voters want . But when I came in there were all of these demands Get tough , longer sentences , send a message . I could spend another half hour and I won't . I'll spare you talking about the fact that sending a message .
Speaker 3All the social science research shows that that doesn't work , that the certainty of an arrest has a little bit of a deterrent effect but sentence length has zero , and that when people start talking about getting tough , we all are going to be pretty tough on murderers . It's the get tough . The hammer tends to fall on people who've committed low-level offenses , who are sitting ducks , because that's the people on whom we can jack sentences up , because we've already got them . The evidence is usually strong . We don't have witness intimidation problems and you know and we we had the mayor of the city call me out an all but name on television in 22 . He's on tape saying we need a prosecutorial philosophy that will hold violent criminals accountable . I remember watching on TV and going like , yeah , I agree , that's what I'm doing , but I remember saying back in 2022 , when everybody thought that it was me being a progressive prosecutor that caused this violent spike that predated my taking office , that no , like these dislocations , we don't know what's going on here , but we need to ride it out .
Speaker 2And guess what ?
Speaker 363 murders , next year 42 . Last year 37 . As the dislocations of having young men out of work and out of school . That's why I say , if we want to affect the crime rate , good schools , good blue-collar jobs , so it's not just neurosurgeons who can make money and put a roof over their families' heads .
Speaker 2Well , if all of these policies take place and it starts to inversely go up , we're going to find out if that your theory is uh , or your . Your factual research is correct .
Speaker 3I'm really worried . I'm anticipating an increase in crime nationally over the next few years because of it . I I hope I'm wrong , but I'm really , really concerned about it . And I'm concerned two ways , because anytime you have more murders , you have more mothers burying their sons and daughters , you have more heartache , the social costs . You also have more children growing up without a parent , which you know the children need their parents . If you don't want the streets to raise kids , you've got to have moms and dads . That's a criminal justice reform idea in itself . So that's why we don't ask for 20 years when two will do , because that's 18 years worth of parenting that's gone .
Speaker 3But my concern isn't just that . My other concern is that the get tough crowd you know , the folks who are calling for the legal equivalent of like bleeding a patient instead of giving them antibiotics crowd is going to start getting the upper hand again . Because , I mean , one of the lessons that we've learned from the Trump era is that everybody says they don't like negative campaigning . Everybody says that they want positive messages . That may be true , but a fear-driven narrative is generally more effective than a hope-driven narrative , and what that means is , if we have a violence spike , we're also going to see a return to mass incarceration on a scale we haven't seen since the early 1990s . We're already seeing it at the federal level .
Speaker 3Trump has effectively , you know , they call out progressive prosecutors . They say , oh , you don't enforce the law , that's bonk . We enforce the law . Every prosecutor in America has to decide where their
Future Concerns and Election Outlook
Speaker 3resources go , and Trump has paused the enforcement of two laws , one called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and one called the Foreign Agents Registration Act . The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes it illegal for American executives to bribe foreign government officials to get contracts , and the Foreign Agents Registration Act requires people who are lobbying on behalf of a foreign government to admit that they're doing . That Doesn't stop them from doing it , they just have to say they're doing it .
Speaker 3So we have now legalized , like corruption in foreign countries to enrich big corporations , and legalized foreign influence here in this country yeah , though , because he's not enforcing the laws and he's now said he's going to go back to looking for the death penalty on all kinds of people . So we now have we we have a justice system . That is quite saying out loud and loudly if you're rich and you're gonna do whatever you want .
Speaker 2You can do what you will , yeah and if you're poor like and you commit some kind of so-called street crime .
Speaker 3We are going to kill you again like we used to and and we'll see that filter down people progressives will get unseated . People like me will get unseated because people return to a fear-based narrative , and the people who will pay the price are the millions of people who wind up in the American prison system Wow and the people left behind in their neighborhoods who wind up less safe and more dislocated and more disinvested . It's always poor people and disadvantaged people who pay the hardest price , right .
Speaker 2Well , I don't know , we have to just continue to keep battling . I'm assuming It'll pass too , hopefully numbers that I quoted for norfolk .
Speaker 3You know homicides down 42 , property crime 40 pardon me violent crime down 40 , property crime down 27 . Our jail population is about half of what it was 10 years ago . In my whole term in office , with one exception , not a single child has gone to adult prison because I've not permitted it . There are , we can have successes . I prefer national successes , but at least locally I'm even if the data , even if , like nobody from Harvard comes down and studies it , even if nobody knows it , no matter how much I shout about it , I feel as if I'm not my daddy , I'm not healing people , but I feel as if I'm able to make a difference , because a different Commonwealth attorney would have not done these things . And you know the amount of human capital . You know we've been very smart about it . Like I know how to drop the hammer . I do sometimes . Right .
Speaker 3But in a by being very individualized , knowing exactly why I'm doing it and being able to articulate why , and thereby by being able to use that data and intelligence to be able to create massive savings in the number of people who I will not demand felony convictions on , who I don't need on supervision , who don't need to go to adult court , who don't need to have criminal records , who do need diversion , who do need treatment . The number of years in prison that people aren't serving because I feel a moral calling to do it the right way , even under pressure . The number of dads who were there to play ball with their kids , who've paid their price , who've served their sanction , who are returning citizens and are not disappeared into the system forever Like that . You know , when St Peter pulls up the rolls . I'm hoping that that's the stuff that will be in my plus column .
Speaker 2Yeah , I hope so . Plus , column , yeah , I hope so . Well , um , I appreciate you coming in and talking with us and , hopefully , when is the election ?
Speaker 3oh , the primary is june 17th okay , and that and in nor that was the election we voted 70% for Kamala .
Speaker 3And that's June 17th and the early voting start is May 2nd and I feel confident about the work . I feel proud of the work . It's not just me , it's 85 people in my office doing this work , 40 lawyers , 45 staff . 85 people in my office doing this work , 40 lawyers , 45 staff . But my fear is , it's not personal , nobody owns an office . But my fear is that if we don't mobilize , if people don't know there's an election , if people stay home like they stayed home when we needed Kamala bad that we could see a return , because I've I've heard my opponent talk that you know , if there's a change in administration in Norfolk , we'll see a return to the old ways . And we just cannot . We can't afford that . We can't in human terms , we can't afford it .
Speaker 2Gotcha All right . Thank you for coming in and talking with us and we're going to do whatever we can to help keep you in the eyes of the Norfolk community and your ideas , and hopefully you'll come back in and talk with us again .
Speaker 3It's been a pleasure to speak with you . I will . It will be a pleasure to come back anytime .
Speaker 2All right , thank you . Thank you , all right . That concludes today's episode of listen up . Like to thank you for joining us and , uh , catch you next time and listen up . For anyone watching this channel , I ask that you please like , like and subscribe for upcoming videos .