THE GOOD COPS LEFT — NOW WE'RE PAYING THE PRICE | Sequel Sunday

Six years after the police reform movement reshaped the national conversation, we're finally far enough away from the slogans to ask a simple question:

What happened after?

Across America, experienced officers retired, recruiting collapsed, detective units shrank, community policing disappeared, and taxpayers were left paying billions in settlements.

Meanwhile, federal agents are now conducting major operations in places like Los Angeles' MacArthur Park while local departments struggle to retain experienced personnel.

Tonight we're not arguing.

We're auditing.

Topics include:

• MacArthur Park federal raids
• LAPD and the Jameson shooting
• The police experience gap
• Criminal cases falling apart
• Convictions being overturned
• Taxpayer-funded settlements
• Community policing
• The hidden cost of losing institutional knowledge

📞 Call/Text: 252-CHAD-LAW

00:00 The DEA Is Cleaning Up A City Park

08:15 Did We Get The Policing We Were Promised?

11:45 The Experience Pipeline Collapse

16:50 Who Trains The Rookie?

28:15 When Cases Fall Apart

39:00 Why Federal Agents End Up Doing Local Jobs

43:30 Who Pays The Bill?

47:50 The Good Cops Left

56:20 Reagan Reminder

59:45 Final Thoughts

#CommonSense #PoliceReform #LawEnforcement #LAPD #SequelSunday

Transcript

Chadq: MacArthur Park, Los Angeles. And if you've never been, picture a park, an actual park. Grass, a lake, palm trees, paddle boats, the kind of place where, in a functioning city, the biggest emergency of the day is some kid dropping his ice cream in the duck pond. Now picture the DEA. Federal agents, over a hundred of them flooding that park after eight o'clock at night this month. Badges, vehicles, the whole convoy, because the open air fentanyl and meth market operating in the middle of America's second largest city had gotten so bad. That the people who are supposed to handle it couldn't. And the federal government had to roll in and, in their words, liberate the park. Liberate the park. We use that word for Normandy. Now we're using it for a picnic spot off Wilshire with a playground on it. And this isn't a one-time photo op. This is the third raid since May. Gangs, dealers, a documented fentanyl pipeline, federal federal trafficking charges in a place that has a duck pond. So here's the first question. I'm not gonna answer it yet. I just want you to sit in it with me for a second. Why is the federal government cleaning up a city park? Because cleaning up the park is the most local thing in the entire world. That's not a federal job. That's the beat cop. That's the guy who knows the block, knows the regulars, Knows which corner went bad and when. That is the oldest, most basic function a city has. Keep the parks usable. And somehow in Los Angeles, in 2026, that function has floated all the way to the DEA. Hold on to that. We're coming back to it. Because at almost the exact same time, same city, same week, Los Angeles is generating a completely different headline. A family dog, two years old, big goofy golden retriever St. Bernard Poodle situation named Jameson, shot and killed by LAPD in the hallway of his own building in front of the family who loved him. And here's how the night actually started. Somebody calls 911 to report a screaming woman, and the officers respond, which is correct, by the way. You hear a woman screaming, you go. That's the job. Except the woman wasn't in danger. The woman was screaming because the New York Knicks had just won the NBA championship. That was the emergency. Her team won. The dog, for the record, was wearing a Knicks shirt at the time. He was also a fam. And somewhere in the few minutes between somebody celebrating basketball and ma'am, can you secure your dog? The night ended with that dog dead on the floor, a family screaming for real this time. The mayor promising a thorough and transparent investigation and internal affairs opening a fire. And I'm not gonna sit here and litigate that one tonight. It's under investigation. Department says the dog charged. The family says he was a sweetheart who'd never bitten anyone. There are two sides and people whose actual job it is to sort it out. I'm gonna let them sort it out. But put the two stories next to each other for a second, same city, same seven days. One of them is telling you the local institutions are so overwhelmed that the federal cavalry has to ride in to handle a drug market in a public park. The other one is telling you the cops Who are there are rolling up to a basketball celebration and somebody's pet doesn't make it home. How does one city pull off both of those at the same time? How are you somehow not enough and not ready in the same week? Because that's not a coincidence. I feel like waving away. That's a pattern, and I want to pull on it. And before you assume this is just another cop episode, it isn't. This is not a news story, it's a sequel. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, the common sense extremist living in radical reality, the walking contradiction your professors warned you about, spreading truth on the only rainbow that matters, the red, white, and blue rainbow. And this is common sense. The show where we read the fine print so you don't have to, where we bring receipts so you don't have to ruin another Thanksgiving. The show for the other 80% of Americans, the people busy raising families, building businesses, paying taxes, coaching Little League, serving their communities, and wondering when common sense became controversial. While cable news, political consultants, professional activists, and social media outrage merchants spent all day arguing about the loudest 20% of the population, we focus on the people who actually keep America running. This is the big tent, the shelter for the politically homeless, the politically exhausted, the politically independent, and the common sense conservatives, tired of being told they have to choose between two bad ideas. Here, reality gets a vote, results matter, truth matters, common sense matters. Welcome home. All right, let's get back to the episode. About six years ago, the summer of 2020, this country had a very loud conversation about policing. And I'm not here to mock the people who showed up to it. A lot of Americans, good, reasonable people, looked at the what they were seeing on the media and said, you know what? This can be better than this. And they weren't wrong to want better, and they were promised better. That was the whole deal. The marches, the slogans, the city council resolutions, the consultants, the entire machine, all of it came with a promise stapled to the front. You'll get better policing, more accountability, more trust between cops and the neighborhoods they work in. Fewer bad encounters, safer streets. And look, those aren't crazy things to want. I want every one of those too. You want every one of those. There is nobody sane in this country sitting at home rooting for worse policing. So those goals were reasonable. The promise was reasonable. Which brings me to the only question that actually matters six years later. And I want You to notice what I'm not asking. I'm not asking whether reform was evil. I'm not asking whether the people in the streets were bad people. I'm not even asking whether police should be above criticism. They shouldn't, obviously. Nobody walking around with a badge and a gun should be above criticism. That is the entire point of accountability. The question is simpler than that and a lot more uncomfortable. Did it work? Did Americans actually get the thing they were promised? And then there's the version of that question that nags at me a little. What if, and I'm just floating this, I'm not landing on it yet. What if some of the reforms that were designed to make policing better quietly broke the parts of the system that were making policing work in the first place? Not on purpose. Nobody woke up trying to wreck it. But you ever reach into something to fix it and you pull out one wire, and it turns out that wire was holding up something you didn't even know was connected? I don't know yet. That's the honest answer. And that's exactly why we're doing this. Because tonight we're not arguing, we're auditioning. We're going to pull the actual receipts and look. Who left the job, the retirements, the resignation, who stopped even applying, how much experience walks straight out the door, and whether you can really hand a 20-year detective's caseload to a kid who's been out of the academy for six months and call it even. We're going to look at what happens to cases when the investigations get sloppier, the dismissals, the convictions that get thrown out years later. We're going to follow the lawsuits and the settlements and the bill at the end of it because somebody pays that bill, and I promise you, it's not who you'd guess. And we're going to look at the thing all those slogans were supposedly about in the first place: the community. Did the relationship between cops and the neighborhood get stronger? Or did it get a whole lot thinner? And every single one of those is a number, a real one, not a vibe, not a feeling, a number you can go check yourself. So treat tonight like a scoreboard, not a sermon, a scoreboard. Because six years out, we finally have enough room, enough distance from the slogans and the marches and all the hashtags and the sheer heat of all of it to ask one clean, simple question and actually answer it honestly. Did we get the policing these people wanted? Let's check the scoreboard. Six years, that's the distance we've got now, long enough that the tear gas is cleared, the plywood's off the windows, the murals have faded a little, and we can finally do the thing you're never allowed to do in the middle of a movement, which is just look at the results, quiet and honest. And let me be clear about what I'm doing here, because somebody's already typing. I'm not re-litigating the summer of 2020. I'm not putting anyone on trial. I'm not interested in refighting the fight the whole country is exhausted by. The protests happened, the promises got made, fine. All I want to know, all the scoreboard cares about, is whether the promises came true. So let's remember what they actually were, because they were not unreasonable. This country was told you're going to get better policing, more accountability, more professionalism. More trust between the badge and the block, safer streets. And say it with me. Those are good things. I want all of them, you want all of them. I have never once in my life met the guy who's like, you know what this country's missing? Sloppier cops. That person does not exist. So the goals were fine. The goals were great, honestly. Here's the question nobody stopped to ask in the middle of all the chanting. What would actually have to happen inside a police department for any of that to come true? Like mechanically, practically. If you want better policing, where does better come from? If you want more professionalism, who makes an officer more professional? If you want sharper judgment on the street, where is judgment manufactured? And the answer to every one of those is the exact same argument. It is not a budget line, it is not a slogan, it is not a training video you click through once a year while you eat a sandwich. It's people, experienced people. Every single good thing on that promise list runs straight through the most experienced people in the building. Hold that because it is the whole episode. Let me back all the way up out of policing for a second, because this isn't a cop thing, this is an everything thing. Every serious profession on earth runs on a pipeline of experience, not a metaphor, a literal chain where The people at the top spent years getting good and then spend back half of their careers dragging the next generation up behind them. You get on a plane tonight, you want the captain with the four stripes and the 10,000 hours and a couple of genuinely terrifying landings under his belt that he will never tell you about. You don't want the guy whose flight experience is a simulator app he's got open right next to his fantasy football. You go in for surgery. You want the surgeon who's done the thing 400 times. The attending. Not because the resident's a bad kid. The resident might be brilliant, but because there is a thing that only shows up on the 400th one, and you would really like that thing to be in the room when they open you up. It's the master electrician and the apprentice. It's the firefighter who's been inside a hundred burning buildings and knows by the feel of the heat on the back of his neck when a floor is about to go. It's the military. Ask anyone who's served. The officers technically run it, but the thing that actually runs it is the senior Nico, NCO, the sergeant, the guy with 15 years whose entire job is keeping the 19-year-olds alive. That layer, not the rookie, not the chief, the seasoned person in the middle has done it all for real and can teach it. That's the experience pipeline. That's the thing that makes an institution actually function. And when you pull it out, the institution doesn't get worse. It forgets how to do its job. Now let's go back to policing. Because here's what people don't understand. Because they've learned about cops from television. Cop is not made at the academy. The academy is the starting line. The academy teaches you the law, the forms, how to hold the weapon. The academy hands you a license to start learning. The actual cop gets made afterward in a car, sitting next to a field training officer who's been doing this 15 years and is watching every move you make, correcting you, telling you, slow down, you don't have what you think you have. Watch the hands, not the mouth. The rookie learns from the veteran patrol guy, from the detective who shows him how a real case actually gets built, from the sergeant who pulls him aside and tells him he was legally fine and tactically an idiot and then explains the difference. That's where a cop gets made in the handoff, veteran to rookie, over and over for years. So now ask the obvious question: What happens to that handoff when the veterans leave? And here's where we open the books, because they did leave. By the thousands, and we have the data. Start with the city we've been standing in all night, the LAPD in 2020. About 10,000 officers. As of this spring, roughly 8,600, the lowest it has been in about 25 years. Now hold on, because here comes the part that breaks the script everyone's expecting. The LAPD budget did not get cut. It went up. It kept going up the entire time. So this is not, and I need you to actually hear this, this is not a they defunded the cops story. Nobody took the money. The money is fine. The money is great. The people left anyways. And that right there is the whole point. You can't fix this with a checkbook. And Seattle proved it on camera. Seattle fell to its lowest staffing since 1991, bled something like 350 officers, and the city panicked and started throwing cash at the problem. $30,000 signing bonuses for experienced officers. And they still lost more than they hired. Turns out you cannot put 15 years of instinct in the gift bag. It's not on the menu. It's not for sale at any price. Portland. Portland is the one that should genuinely stop you cold. Portland got so thin it finished dead last. Forty-eighth out of the 50 biggest cities in the country, officers per resident. And listen to what specifically walked out the door, because this is the experience pipeline collapsing in a single sentence. By 2023, the entire Portland Police Bureau was down to one narcotics detective. One. Because back in 2021, they'd yanked nearly all of the narcotics officers and dumped them onto patrol just to keep answering 911. The bomb techs, the emergency reaction team, the canine guys, the people who'd spent 10, 15 years becoming specialists, gone. The Bureau's own report called it a tremendous loss of historic and institutional knowledge. That's not a budget problem. That's a brain. The city Had a brain, and the brain walked out the door. Chicago, 13,300 officers at the start of 2020, down under 11,700 a few years later. They've got a name for it inside the department. They call it Generation Resignation. One single year, 2021, almost a thousand cops left. And New York, New York is the sneaky one, because the headcount actually clawed back. So someone's gonna wave a chart at you and say, see, NYPD's fine, recruiting's up. Okay, so listen to what the cops themselves say about why people leave. The recruits are treating the NYPD as a stepping stone. You come in, you get a couple years of the best training in the country on the city's dime, and then you take all of that experience to some department with better pay, and nobody's screaming at you on a Tuesday. So even when the headcount looks healthy, the experience is leaking out the side door, the bodies stay newer. The skill walks. And nationally, it is the same fingerprint everywhere you look. The big police research outfit surveyed departments across the country. Two out of three reported more retirements, two out of three more resignations. And almost 70% watched the applications dry up, more leaving out the back, fewer knocking on the front. Now here's the translation. Because a number is just a number until you turn it back into a human being. when a city loses, let's say, 500 officers. The news writes, 500 officers. That is not what was lost. Take 500 officers, give them even 15 years apiece on average. That's 7,500 years of experience. 7,500 years of I've seen this before. Of knowing which door not to walk through, which dog not to shoot, of knowing the kid on the corner is holding versus the kid on the corner is just scared. Knowing how to talk a thing down before it ever becomes a headline. The LAPD didn't lose 1,400 officers. It lost something like 20,000, 30,000 years of judgment. And you cannot hire that back. You can hire bodies. You can't hire years. And here's the question I genuinely can't get out of my head, and the one this whole thing's actually about. Who trains these rookies now? Because the field training officer, the veteran in the passenger seat, that was a veteran job. So when the veterans left, a whole lot of the trainers left right along with them. Which means the brand new cop is now getting trained by someone who is barely less brand new than he is. The blind leading the slightly less blind. So actually sit in this with me. Who teaches the rookie to write a report that holds up in court 18 months later? Who teaches him to handle the evidence so the case doesn't collapse? Who teaches them to de-escalate a guy who's screaming so it ends up in a conversation and not a casket? Who teaches judgment? Who teaches restraint? Who teaches them the difference between what's legal and what's smart? Because they are not the same thing. And the gap between them is exactly where careers and lives go to die. Who teaches them the difference between justified and necessary? None of that. None of it is in the academy binder. Every bit of it gets passed hand to hand, veteran to rookie, in the car, on the call, in the parking lot after the shift. It is the most human transfer there is, and it only works if the veteran is still standing there to do the transferring. Pull the veteran out, and you don't lose one cop. You lose every cop he would have made better. And this is where I come back to Jameson the dog. And I'm gonna be careful here because I told you I would be. I don't know what happened in that hallway. I wasn't there. It's under investigation. The department says the dog charged. The family said he was the gentlest animal they ever had. Maybe the officer did everything right. Maybe he didn't. That is not my call tonight, and I'm not gonna pretend it is. But put the verdict down for a second and just look at the shape of the thing. A cop shows up to a call that turns out to be nothing. A woman screaming because her basketball team won a championship. He's got a couple of seconds. A door opens, a dog comes out, and in that two second window, a human being has to decide. That decision, the split second, adrenaline, never enough information decision, that is the entire job. That is what policing actually is. It is not the car chases, it is a thousand two second decisions a week. And whether they go clean or go sideways comes down to one single thing judgment. And that's the only point I'm making with it. Judgment doesn't get issued at the academy. Judgment is not in the handbook. Judgment is the thing that gets built slowly, badly at first, over years, standing next to someone who already made that exact mistake, so you don't have to. Judgment is the single most expensive thing a police department owns. and it is the one thing on earth you can't manufacture fast. So, what happened with that officer and that dog? The bigger question the headline should be forcing you to ask is this. Across the whole country right now, Are we putting more judgment on the street or less? More experience in that two-second window or less? And you already know the answer. We just spent 15 minutes on the answer. The veterans left in the biggest cities in the country by the thousands. Not in dispute. The recruiting got harder. Fewer people want the job at all. Not in dispute. And the people whose job it was to train the next generation thinned out right along with everybody else. So the handoff, the thing that actually makes a cop a cop, got weaker. So follow it where it goes. If you lose that much experience all at once, out of the most experienced layer of the entire institution, what do you think honestly happens next? What happens to the quality of the work? Because here's the thing about a weakened police force it doesn't show up where you'd look for it. It doesn't announce itself. It shows up quietly downstream in places almost nobody ever connects back to a staffing chart. It shows up in a case that falls apart because the evidence got handled wrong. In a conviction that gets thrown out years later because someone cut a corner that no one was ever there to teach him not to cut. In a prosecutor sitting at her desk with a file too thin to charge, staring at police work that just isn't good enough anymore. That's where we're going next. Not the cops who left, what happens to everyone else because they did. The cases that fall apart, the criminals who walk out the door, the convictions that come undone. So let's keep checking the scoreboard. So we left off on the handoff, the veteran in the passenger seat teaching the rookie every single thing the Academy never could. And I told you the damage from that doesn't show up where you'd think to look for it. So now let's go find where it actually shows up because it does. It always does. It does not show up at police headquarters. Headquarters is fine. The chief's got a podium and a press officer and a really nice seal on the wall behind him. It doesn't show up at City Hall either. City Hall figured out a long time ago how to hold a press conference about a problem instead of solving one. It shows up in three places: the street, the courtroom, and the worst one of all, somebody's living room. The victim's living room. The spot on the couch where an actual human being is sitting, waiting to find out whether the person who hurt them is going to face anything at all. That's where a staffing chart turns back into a person. Let me show you how. Here's the thing most people have honestly never thought about, because why would they? A police report, that thing you assume is just bureaucratic busy work, a form, a box, somebody fills in, that report is the foundation of the entire criminal case. It's what the prosecutor builds on. So if the report is sloppy, if the timeline's off, if a key detail's missing, if the officer wrote it like he was firing off a text, the whole case is now standing on a cracked slab. Same story with evidence. Evidence collection sounds like janitorial work. Bag it, tag it, log it. But it is not janitorial work. It is the literal line between conviction and a guy strolling out the front door of a courthouse, a free man. Break the chain of custody on one piece, one, and a defense attorney who knows what he's doing will take the whole case apart in front of the jury like he's unzipping a jacket. Nobody grows up dreaming about paperwork. I get it. But the paperwork is the case. The paperwork is whether the bad guy goes away. And doing it right, doing it so it survives 18 months later under a defense lawyer who is paid by the hour to find your one mistake, that is a skill, a taught skill. And it is one of the first things to go missing when the people who teach it are gone. So what happens when the people who knew how to do it right aren't there to teach it anymore? You get precisely what you'd expect. Thinner cases. A detective shortage so bad, remember Portland, one narcotics detective for the entire city, that crimes don't even get work because there's no one left to work them. And it's not just Portland. In LA, the detective ranks have gotten so thin that whole categories of lower level crime basically stop getting investigated at all. Not because nobody cares, Because there's literally nobody left to hand the case to. went up in Spokane, Washington, just this month. Prosecutors went from turning down a felony domestic violence case maybe once or twice a month to turning down more than a dozen. And understand what a felony domestic violence case actually is. That's a strangulation. That's a woman on the phone genuinely afraid she's not gonna survive the night. More than a dozen of those in one city in one month waved off. And the detective up there said the quiet part out loud. I'm not gonna bother assigning cases that aren't gonna get prosecuted, anyways. Sit with that. The system is now triaging, deciding in advance which crimes it can still afford to care about. When a case falls apart, bad report, mishandled evidence, witness nobody managed, a file too thin to charge. Who benefits? Go down the list with me. The victim? No, the victim gets nothing. The witness who worked up the nerve to talk. No. And good luck ever getting that person to talk again. The neighborhood? No. The taxpayer? No. There is exactly one chair at the table that benefits from bad police work. And it's the defendant, the person the case was against. And I want to be precise here because this cuts in a direction that oughta bother everyone. Left, right, all of it. Bad police work doesn't only let the guilty walk, it also locks up the innocent. Both. It's a wrecking ball and it swings both ways. Look at the national exoneration numbers. People convicted, sent away, and later proven flat out innocent. The single leading cause of those wrongful convictions year after year isn't bad luck. It's official misconduct. In one recent year, it showed up in over a hundred of about a hundred and fifty exonerations. And the money this country has paid out to people at wrongly imprisoned has passed four and a half billion dollars. Billion with a B for getting it wrong. Then there's the other side of the wrecking ball. The guilty going free. One New York PD detective's word got so discredited that a judge tossed 133 felony convictions tied to him all at once. An officer in Indiana, whose written reports didn't match his own body camera footage, they dismissed 51 of his cases. Anchorage, a prosecutor shortage, put something like a thousand cases on the scrap heap in a single year. Some of them assault, some of them child neglect. And put real names on it because none of this is abstract. In Houston, it came out that a single narcotics officer, a guy named Gerald Goynes, had been building cases on lies. And the dominoes started falling. Person after person who'd sat in a cell on his word, walking back out into the daylight, more than a dozen of them, years of their lives just gone, and not one of those years coming back. Same exact movie in Chicago with a sergeant named Ronald Watts. Who ran a racket for years? A whole shelf of his drug convictions had been thrown out because the cop who built them was dirty and nobody standing above him caught it in time. And there's the quiet part, nobody connects. The supervision that's supposed to catch the bad one before he becomes a hundred ruined cases? That's a veteran's job too. Drain the experience and you don't just lose good policing, you lose the thing that was catching the bad policing too. Now picture who's actually in that pile. Behind every one of those dismissed cases is a person who did something to somebody else. And behind that person is a victim who got told essentially, we know, we just can't prove it well enough. Go on home. That's the bill. And notice who's not paying it. Not the chief, not the counsel, not the activist who moved on the next cause two cycles ago. The victim's paying it. The block is paying it. But those are the cases that at least got opened. There's a second cost, quieter and honestly bigger. And it's about the cases that never happened at all because the cop was never there in the first place. Because here's the other thing that collapsed after 2020: the proactive part. I mean the part where a cop is actually out present working the area before anything goes wrong, and these numbers are not subtle. San Francisco, traffic citations down roughly 90% in a few years. 90%. Portland, two thirds fewer drivers getting stopped. Chicago stops down nearly half in one year. San Diego cut its stops more than in half in over a decade. And in a survey of a thousand police officers, around 60% just came out and said they're less likely to make a stop than they used to be. I'm gonna be straight with you because this is where it gets argued hard. There's a genuine fight among the researchers about what that drop means. One camp, and they've got the studies. Says when officer pulls back, crime climbs. They call it the Ferguson effect. And there's serious work out of California showing exactly that pattern after high-profile incidents. However, the other camp, also armed with studies, says, hold on. It's messier than that. You can't clearly pin the crime swings on the pullback. And I'm not gonna stand up here and pretend I personally settled a debate of a whole building full of criminologists hasn't. That'd be a little ambitious for a Sunday. But you don't need to win the academic fight to see the simple part. Set causation aside for just one second. A cop who isn't making stops, isn't walking the block, isn't talking to the guy who owns the shop on the corner. That cop isn't learning the area. He doesn't know who belongs and who doesn't. He doesn't know the regulars, the troublemakers, the kid who's drifting towards something bad but can still get turned around. That relationship, the local knowledge, that's presence. And this is something I keep coming back to on this show because it just keeps being true. Can't solve a problem you refuse to look at. And you sure cannot see a problem if there is nobody there to see it. Presence is the whole game. An absent cop is not a neutral cop. An absent cop is a blindfolded city. Which finally walks us all the way back around to that park. MacArthur Park, the duck pond, the paddle boats, the hundred-plus federal agents and the DEA liberating it from open-air fentanyl market the locals simply could not get a handle on. And again, Careful, this isn't about whether the feds are heroes or the villains of that story. Maybe they did a fantastic job. It's not the question. The question is the one I asked you to hold way back at the top of the night. And now you've got enough in your hands to actually chew on it. Why is the federal government doing the most local job that exists? Cleaning up a city park is not a federal function. It never was. That's beat cop work, that's local knowledge work. That's the officer who's walked this block for 10 years and knows every dealer by his first name work. And somehow that function got so hollowed out in America's second largest city that it floated all the way to the DEA. So what's changed? And that's not a trick question. We just spent 40 minutes on what's changed. The experience walked out the door, and the local knowledge walked out with it. And when the local layer can no longer hold the line, somebody has to. So the federal layer comes down to do a job it was never built for in a park with a playground on it. That's not a story about drugs, that's a story about a vacuum. Pull enough capable people out of the middle of anything, and something always rushes in to fill the empty space. This time it happened to be the DEA in a duck pond. And on the far end of the exact city, that exact same week, Jameson the dog. I'm still not relitigating it, still under investigation, still two sides. But sit with the fact that it became a story at all. A national one. The outrage, the memorial in the hallway, the GoFundMe, the mayor out front, promising transparency. And here's what the headline ought put in your head. Six years ago, we were promised policing was going to get better, calmer, more professional, fewer of precisely these moments. So if the reforms worked, if quality went up, Why are we still cranking out these stories? Why is the outrage cycle still running right on schedule? I'm not saying one officer is the whole system. I'm saying the steady drumbeat of these stories is a symptom. And a symptom is always pointing at something underneath it. When policing quietly drops, when the cases come apart and the guilty walk and the proactive work disappears. Who's the actual victim here? It's not the cop. The cop's having a rough run, sure, But the cop is not who I'm losing sleep over tonight. And it's definitely not the criminal. The criminal is an awful lot of these stories, is the guy catching the lucky break. The victim, the real one, the primary one, is the ordinary person. The mom who called about the break-in and never got a callback. The shop owner, who quietly stopped reporting the shoplifting because What's the point? The witness who stuck out her neck and watched the case evaporate in front of her. The family on the block that's gone quiet, not because it's gotten safer, but because everyone just stopped expecting anything to get done. So hear what this conversation actually is, because somebody is going to try to tell you something that it's not. This is not me carrying water for the police. I'm not here to protect cops. Cops can look cops can look after themselves, and the bad ones should be held to account hard. This is about protecting the people the police are supposed to be protecting in the first place. The community. You! The entire point of having competent institutions is so that a regular person on a regular bad day can pick up a phone and actually trust that somebody who knows what they're doing is going to show up and handle it. That trust. That is the product. And when the experience drains out of the building, that trust is the very first thing to die. which leaves exactly one more question: the one that turns all of this from tragedy into transaction. Who pays for all this? Because somebody does. Every bit of this, the blown cases, the lawsuits that come pouring out of the bad ones, the settlements, the whole pile. It carries a massive price tag, a real one and real dollars. And I think when you finally see that number, and then you see exactly whose pocket it gets pulled out of, you're gonna be a little angry. I was. Underneath the money, there's a deeper one still, because if you spend six years telling an entire profession that it is the villain, toxic, radioactive, the bad guy in every single story. You have to ask what that actually does. Not to the cops already there, to the people deciding right this minute whether to ever become one at all. What kind of person raises their hand for a job the whole culture agreed to hate? The short answer to who pays is the most annoying answer there is. Eventually, everyone does. But let me show you the literal dollars first because the dollars are insane. Start with New York. Last year, one year, New York City paid out $117 million settling police misconduct lawsuits. Over a thousand of them. And that wasn't some freak year either. It was the fourth year in a row over a hundred million. Add it all up since 2019, the NYPD's misconduct tab is pushing $800 million, almost a billion dollars. Now here's the part that should stand the hair up on your neck. Where does that money come from? It does not come out of the police budget. It comes out of the city's general fund. The general fund, ladies and gentlemen. That is the same pot that pays for the parks, the libraries, the pothole guy, the after-school program. So the police department itself feels nothing, pays nothing. The department writes the bad check and the taxpayer quietly covers it in a totally different room out of money that was supposed to do something else entirely. It's the perfect setup when you think about it. The one institution that ran up the bill is the exact institution shielded from it. Try running your own house that way and see how it goes. And New York isn't alone, it's just the biggest. Chicago last year paid out over $200 million just for wrongful convictions. Just that one category. And a single settlement inside that number was $90 million. One. Los Angeles, going back a stretch. Paid out around $880 million in settlements, and the police department was the single biggest slice of it, north of 40%. Philadelphia had one narcotics unit, CIS officers, generate 173 lawsuits all by itself. And when the Washington Post went and actually counted across 25 departments, the number cleared $3 billion. New York, Chicago, and LA alone made up two and a half billion of it. Let me translate this because a number that big doesn't actually bite until you Turn it back into things. New York's 117 million in one single year is conservatively north of 500 cops you could have hired and fully paid for that year. Or call it a couple hundred seasoned detectives, the exact people we spent all night saying there aren't enough of. Or a school resource officer sitting in every middle school in town, the one who's actually in the building when it goes wrong. The money's still left in the drawer. And Chicago's 200 million in a single year just for wrongful convictions? You know what that builds? The community mental health response teams that every side of this argument swears up and down they want in every neighborhood that's been begging for one. Instead, it walked out the door to pay for getting it wrong. Folks, every dollar that leaves as a settlement for bad policing is a dollar that did not go to more policing or better policing or anything a city needs. So get the picture straight. Bad policing doesn't only cost you trust, it costs you the library hours, it costs you your road. It's a tax. Nobody voted for it, nobody will ever call it a tax, but you are paying for it. And notice one more time: exactly who's not standing at that cash register. The officer's not paying, the department's not paying. The activist who spent the summer of 2020 behind a bullhorn isn't passing that hat. And the criminal who caught the lucky break sure isn't chipping in. It's you. It always lands on you. Now, a whole industry grew up around all of this, and I want to handle it honestly because it's easy to get cheap right here, and I'm not going to. Over the last few years, you've got this enormous ecosystem online. The auditors, the Know your rights channels, the guys who show up specifically to film, the lawsuit driven encounters, the viral clip that's got eleven million views by lunch. A cop has a bad ten seconds on a Tuesday in Ohio, and by Wednesday it is everywhere on earth. And here's me being fair because fair actually matters. A lot of that has been good. Genuinely good. Some of those cameras caught things that needed catching. Some of those lawsuits dragged real abuses into the daylight that absolutely should have been dragged out. The camera in a regular citizen's hand has exposed misconduct that the old system buried for decades. I'm not gonna pretend otherwise, and I'm definitely not gonna tell an American to stop filming the government. Film away. That's your right, and honestly, it's healthy. But step back from any one video and ask the bigger question: why is there so much footage? Why are so many officers making such Basic mistakes. We're not talking hard, complicated judgment calls. The basic stuff. The thing a 15-year veteran would simply never have done because somebody taught him better 15 years ago. The camera isn't creating the mistake. The camera is just the X-ray. And the X-ray keeps showing the exact same fracture. A force that's younger, greener, trained by people who are barely less green than they are. With the veterans who could have caught the error long ago are gone. The recordings didn't lower the quality of policing. The recordings are showing you the quality of policing. There's a difference between those two things, and the difference is the whole ball game. And here's the part I think actually matters most for the next 20 years. Forget the cops already on the job for a second. Let's talk about the ones who hadn't signed up yet. The pipeline going in. Because here's something that the labor market does quietly that nobody plans and nobody can stop. When you make a profession ugly, and I mean ugly in the social sense, radioactive, the punchline, the villain in every movie and every campaign ad for six straight years, you change who's willing to walk through the door. And I have to be really careful here because this is the exact spot where a lazy version of this argument drives straight off a cliff. I'm not gonna say that only bad people become cops now. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying only racists or only authoritarians or whatever the worst faith version of it is. That's garbage, and it's not what the evidence says. Here's what the evidence actually says, And it's narrower and more interesting. The research is pretty clear that when people perceive a job as dangerous and despised, and that perception shot straight up after 2020, fewer of them apply. The applications dried up. We already saw that. And departments got so desperate to fill the ranks that a lot of them did the thing you can do when you can't find enough applicants. They lowered the bar, dropped education requirements, loosened standards. That part is documented. So the honest version of this, we know the pool got smaller. We know the standards came down in places. Think about what actually makes a great community cop, not a TV cop, a real one, the kind everyone left and right says they want. It's empathy, it's emotional intelligence, the ability or reading a situation, reading a person, knowing the difference between somebody who's dangerous and someone who's just terrified. It's patience, it's restraint, it's the ability to build a relationship, talk a thing down, manage a conflict instead of pouring gas on it. That's the dream officer. That is the exact person every one of these promises was about. Now, here's the uncomfortable little fact about that exact person. The empathetic, sharp, emotionally intelligent one with the great judgment, that person has options. A lot of them. The whole labor market wants that person. They can go be a nurse, a teacher, a counselor, run a team, start a business. They are the single most mobile worker there is. So when a job turns toxic, When you spend six years telling that specific person that this career is shameful and that the whole country is gonna hate them for choosing it, Who leaves first? Who never applies? The people with options. And the people with options are disproportionately the exact people you most wanted in that uniform in the first place. I can't prove that one to you with a clean stat, and I'm not going to fake one. If the most empathetic, most capable people increasingly pick a different door, who's left coming through this one? And is that more of what the promises asked for or less? I'm just asking the question. But man, it's a question. And that right there is the whole thing. That's the part I genuinely can't shake. So let me put the promises back up on the board. The real ones, the reasonable ones, the one I told you up front, I actually agree with. The movement wanted better policing, more accountability, stronger trust between cops and communities they serve, and safer neighborhoods. Now look at the scoreboard we've actually filled in tonight. The most experienced officers gone by the thousands. Recruiting harder than it's been in a generation. The community relationship, thinner, fewer cops present, fewer of them ever learning the block. The lawsuits up. The settlements in the billions paid by you. Trust by basically every measure is shakier. And the institution itself, weaker, hallowed out right through the middle, leaning on the federal government to come handle a drug market in a city park. What if the movement was aimed at a real problem, a genuine one, because there were problems, but in swinging at it, it reached in and weakened the very systems that were quietly producing the good policing in the first place? What if that thing that promised better policing helped us hand us less of it? Not on purpose. I keep saying that and I mean it every time. Nobody set out to wreck it. But intentions don't go up on the scoreboard. Only outcomes do. And look, if you've been riding with me this whole way, you've probably already figured out that this was never really an episode about cops. It's an episode about institutions, about invisible machinery sitting underneath the things we all count on. The experience, the mentorship, the presence, the slow stack up knowledge that nobody ever sees and everyone depends on. It's about incentives and what happens to people when you yank on them. And it's about the oldest, most expensive mistake there is: tearing into something to fix it before you ever bothered to understand what was holding it up. Because you can pull that wire in a thousand places. Policing just happens to be the one with the body cameras rolling. The pattern is everywhere once you learn to see it. So. Six years out, we've finally got the distance and we've got the receipts enough of both to ask it plainly and ans answer it honestly. Did we improve policing or did we accidentally weaken the people and the systems that were holding it together this whole time? So think about it, MacArthur Park, the DEA, over a hundred federal agents moving through it after dark because an open air drug market sitting in the middle of America's second biggest city had gotten past the point the locals could handle or chose to handle. And I told you right at the top, I wasn't going to answer the question yet. I wanted you to carry it the whole way. So let me ask it one more time, now with everything stacked up What does it say about a city, about a country, when the federal government has to come do the most local job there is? I'm not going to oversell that picture. The feds being in the park is not the end of the republic, but it's a tell. It's the kind of thing that does not happen when the local layer is healthy. You don't call Washington to come walk your beat. You call Washington when the beat quietly stopped getting walked, and nobody can quite tell when it stopped. That park is a symptom. We spent the whole night tracing the disease back to its source. So let's hold the promises up to the light one last time, because they were good promises. I keep saying that, and I'm gonna say it one more time because I don't want a single person walking away from this thinking it was a hit job on the idea of reform. The country was promised better policing, more accountability, more trust between the badge and the block, safer streets, stronger relationships. That's the scoreboard we agreed on to be judged. Not mine, theirs. The one the movement itself put on the wall. So six years later, more experienced officers or fewer? A stronger training pipeline or a hollowed out one? More trust or more viral outrage by lunchtime? Cheaper or billions out the door in settlements you paid for? More cops who actually know your block or a duck pond full of federal agents. I'm not gonna read you the verdict. You've been staring at the same scoreboard I have all night. You can see the numbers. I trust you to do the math yourself. But here's the part I really want you to carry out the door, because it's so much bigger than cops and so much bigger than 2020. Every institution you depend on, every single one, runs on the same hidden fuel. Not slogans, not mission statements, not the seal on the wall behind the guy at the podium. People, experienced people, and the slow, invisible handing down of how the thing actually works. The hospital. Isn't the building, it's the attending who's seen it 400 times. The airline isn't the plane, it's the captain with the terrifying landings he never talks about. The school, the firehouse, the military unit, same story every time. The thing that makes it work is the experience in the middle, quietly dragging up the people coming behind it. And that fuel has one property nobody respects until it's already gone. It's slow to build and it is fast to lose. You spend 20 years building a master. You can lose them in an afternoon. And you can't order a replacement online and have it on a porch by Tuesday. We just learned that lesson in policing this year, out loud on camera, in a Good institutions don't run on how loud you were in the summer. They run on who's still standing there in the winter. If you wanted to reform policing from the inside, really fix it the right way, who would you actually need? You'd need the best ones, the veterans, the ones with the judgment and the credibility and the standing to look at a young officer dead in the eye and say, no, we don't do it like that here. And let me show you exactly why. The reformers from within, the good cops, could have dragged the whole culture forward by the collar. Now, here's the gut punch. Those people, the most capable, most respected, most reform-minded officers in the entire building, were also, almost by definitions, the ones most able to walk out of it. The best people always have the most doors. So when the job went toxic, the very people you'd have needed to fix it from the inside, were the very people most free to just leave it behind. If it's even partly true, it would mean the movement didn't only lose bodies, it may have lost the exact people who were its single best shot at the reform it actually wanted. That's not a villain story, that's a tragedy. Which brings me to tonight's Reagan reminder. Back in 1964, before the governor's mansion before the White House, Ronald Reagan said a thing I think about constantly. He said, The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so. And I want you to hear that the generous way, because that's not the way I mean it. He's not calling anyone stupid, he's not calling anyone evil. He's saying the most dangerous person in the room is not the one who knows nothing. It's the one who is absolutely rock solid certain about something that simply isn't true. In 2020, a whole lot of good people were dead certain they understood how policing worked. And exactly what would happen if they pulled this lever and cut that wire. And listen, I grew up in California, Santa Barbara, then most of my adult life in Los Angeles. So these aren't abstract dots on a map to me, these are my streets. And I watched an awful lot of certainty get poured into a machine that almost nobody holding a microphone had ever once looked inside. That's the reminder. It's not government bad, that's the lazy bumper sticker, and you won't get it from me. It's something quieter and it's stitched right into the red, white, and blue rainbow, The whole big tent of people I'm talking to right now, left of me and right of me both. Before you tear into something, before you cut the wire, be really, really sure you understand what it's holding up, because good intentions never show up on the scoreboard. Only outcomes do. So I'm not gonna close tonight by telling you who was right and who was wrong. That's the easy show. Everybody else is already making that one all day on every channel. I'm going to close exactly where we opened with the only question that was really ever on the table. Six years ago, this country made itself a promise about policing. Better, safer, fairer, more trusted. So look at it, honestly, and then ask yourself the one question the people who made that promise never quite circle back around to ask. Did we get the policing we were promised that the defunders wanted? No. Their worst imagination has come true. I'm Chad Law, America's binary brother, the last gay conservative, common sense extremist living in radical reality, spreading truth on the only rainbow that matters, the red, white, and blue rainbow. That's the Big Tent, folks. That's tonight. Defund the Policers manifested and created the exact worse police force than they ever could have expected, and it's only getting worse. Don't forget the phone number 252 Chad Law. That's 252 Chad Law. We're on X, Instagram, Substack. And if you're on Rumble, stick around while I go to the after hours. Roll up my sleeves and answer all the questions that you guys have been sending in. Give us about 10 seconds or less to reset the studio, and we'll be right back to answer your texts.