Our number at stake.
Our nation is facing a number of very pressing issues as we know.
But corporate media when talking about the rise in crime in the US has
decided that it's far more important to focus on petty crimes.
Including a recent case involving a man who allegedly stole ten steaks from
a trader Joe's.
>> Have they caught him?
Is he on the run?
>> Well we'll give you the details.
We'll give you all the details.
Now Al Sharpton actually talked about this on cable news today and
I wanted to share that video with you.
Let's take a quick look.
>> Those two guys were chasing you from the store.
>> You go to a local pharmacy drain, read or write any of them and
you've got to get someone to help assist you.
I mean they they have the little button there, hit the buzzer and
the guy comes over and unlocks your toothpaste.
I mean we're talking about basic stuff.
What did I miss then we now have to lock up to these days.
>> I mean Eric Adams said he's gonna do his best to fix this.
I'm just curious.
I mean he's got a governor who's saying, Well I don't know that we want to give
the judges any power to make decisions on whether they've seen the same bad guy
in front of him like 12 times in the past week.
And then you've got a DA.
I know you talked to the DA.
The DA is gone now.
We don't wanna punish anybody unless it's like really bad.
So yeah you can steal whatever you want to steal and
yeah we won't do any jail time and then you've got awoke city council.
I'm just curious as eric Adams gonna be able to do anything.
Well he's obviously surrounded by elected officials who want new york to
remain chaotic.
>> Well I think he's got a challenge there because there is a debate in the criminal
justice system and there are those that are concerned including me about
overloading the system and the jails with petty crime.
But at the same time you cannot have a culture where people are just at
random just robbing and stealing and is out of control.
>> Now that's the conversation that typically takes place on cable news right?
And again it's always focused on petty crimes.
And look I'm not like an apologist for
people walking in and stealing things like I'm not excusing that.
However there's this insane increase in violent crime.
We're talking about homicides, things like that and
there's like a little bit of coverage on it.
But there's never any criticism for a failing institution in response to it.
So in the case of violent crime, the failing institution would be policing.
The whole purpose of police is to protect and serve.
When they talk about petty crime they do so
because it gives them an opportunity to criticize criminal justice reform.
>> City council, >> City council,
>> The woke city council
>> The woke city council which by the way
I think that there are examples of some policies that had unintended consequences.
Maybe we need to rethink them.
I'm not dismissing that either.
But I just think it's interesting how there's just this avoidance in providing
a critique on the institutions that are supposed to keep us safe,
that are not keeping us safe when it comes to violent crime.
And this hyper focus on petty crimes, like stealing steaks and John, I'm gonna go to
you in a second, but I do want to go to this video featuring the thief who stole
the stakes because that is what spurred this conversation in the first place.
>> Those two guys were chasing you from the store,
they said they didn't pay for any of it.
Why are you stealing it?
What for the homeless?
What are you gonna do with it?
You got more you took in there?
I don't give a right?
>> So john, if you are trying to get people to take the uptick in crime
seriously, this is a serious problem.
Fascinating that that's what you're gonna highlight, right?
Someone who says I'm homeless, I'm going to eat the steaks.
Like joe Scarborough didn't see that as, wow, I have some sympathy for
this guy, He's hungry and that's why he did this.
Maybe we need to fix the system that led to this symptom.
No, they look at that and they're like, we must crush him,
then let's go after the woke city council >> Or
I mean that might be expecting too much of joe Scarborough.
But how about both?
How about, let's also talk about that.
Let's not just exclusively take what was maybe a ten minute segment on
a thing that presumably a couple million people gonna watch.
Of a panel of exclusively multimillionaires,
>> [LAUGH] Totally
>> To talk about how a guy stole
$100 worth of steak.
I don't know, maybe it's like two buck chuck there.
I don't know. It was trader Joe's maybe it's not
even $100.
So that that's the problem.
I mean there's a lot of problems that I have, but that's the main one.
Nobody watches the video of that guy and I don't know that individual.
I don't know what his life is like.
I don't think he's getting away with murder.
He's getting harassed by people because he's stealing garbage bags to put
stolen meat in there so they can eat.
Do I like shoplifting?
No, that guy's got a rough time too.
He's not the person that I'm gonna invest my rage into this week.
But then like they could be and I know you're gonna get to like big crimes,
the sorts of crimes that corporations can commit that
ceos can commit that are several billion stakes worth of crimes.
I would rather focus on that.
Or even if you're gonna do like Al Sharpton and you're gonna tell this
anecdote about like, my God, they're locking up the toothpaste and everything.
I didn't know we were living in that world.
Well, okay, again,
you're gonna seem pretty disconnected as a result of that story.
Very similar story.
Almost said Joe Rogan, John Oliver, he did analysis of the racist
policies of what sorts of hair products get locked up in stores.
Like there's a lot of interesting things you can talk about that are in the same
neighborhood as the pointless elevation of one petty crime that they decided
to focus on.
>> That's fascinating.
I'm sure it's hair products for women with fine blonde hair.
>> I don't, it was a while ago.
That's probably what was no, but yes, there are sorts of products in sorts of
areas that get locked up that could have made for an interesting conversation.
>> Yeah.
>> But that again, is questioning corporations in the same way that we might
want them to question the police.
But no, they don't want to do that.
They wanna question homeless individuals.
They wanna question the woke city council without ever defining what about the city
council being woke has resulted in a shoplifting uptick, right?
Maybe the pandemic has people losing their jobs by the millions has resulted in.
>> And look again, I'm going to repeat.
I do think that there have been some policies, some implemented in California,
for instance, that had good intentions but
have also led to some unintended consequences.
It's okay to talk about that.
However, being hyper focused on that as opposed to the fact that there's
a giant increase in homicides that by the way go completely unsolved.
That is a problem.
But they don't talk about that.
So we'll get to the violent crime in just a second.
But I also wanna talk about what you alluded to John,
which is the corporate crimes that take place.
Things like wage theft, which I would argue harm a lot more people than a random
homeless person who's hungry and stole a few steaks from trader Joe's.
So this tweet helps you visualize just how big of a problem, wage theft is.
And so the largest blue square,
you see there is minimum wage violations, okay.
To the tune of $23.20 billion.
I know you guys can't read that.
So I'll just tell you what it says.
And then you have overtime violations to the tune of $8.80 billion.
That's the second largest square, okay.
And then all the way on the right hand side,
the smaller boxes indicate auto theft burglary larceny.
So when we're talking about, >> Robbery is tiny.
>> I mean, especially compared to minimum wage violations,
wage theft in this country.
I mean we did a story about Amazon stealing tips from their delivery workers
insane insane.
So I never like to do that what about ism?
That's like, yeah, let me be an apologist for
one type of crime by bringing up this crime.
No crime is crime.
We should find solutions.
But also we should ask ourselves what leads to the type of crime
that we're talking about in the case of someone stealing toothpaste or stakes.
I would argue that is a symptom not because people are inherently terrible or
inherently criminal.
There's a breakdown in our system that we should address.
When it comes to violent crime,
that also is a symptom of something we need to address.
But there's never any criticism toward the lack of effective policing or
the necessary investigations to actually find who the perpetrators are.
So many of these cases go unsolved, but don't worry, you will get your ticket for
crossing into the car pool lane when there's a double yellow line,
you will get that ticket.
>> Yeah, that's why the sort of you were saying there, like I'm not trying to do.
What about ism about the crimes?
Well, first of all, the sorts of crimes they're focusing on are illegal and
are prosecuted.
That is the sort of thing that cops are trained to deal with.
There are some people that are trained to deal with corporate crimes,
sorts of crimes ceos and wealthy individuals do, But they also then
have to go up against ten times their number in extremely well paid lawyers.
So there's always gonna be that extra protection.
It is fine to focus on those things when they're not being pursued to the same
degree.
And the actual dollar amount of those sorts of crimes is way, way, way higher.
And we can also point out since we're identifying sort of structural causes.
They're freaking out there about this guy stealing the stakes and Fox News will
have something about somebody going into a CVS and taking something.
There are some people who are newly homeless and
desperate homelessness has gone up during the pandemic.
That is not something that should come as a surprise to us.
There are people warning us for literally years and the government and
much of that media was perfectly fine to say.
Yeah, yeah. We first
called the evictions in the foreclosures for like six months for like a year.
Isn't that enough?
At some point just kick these people out if they can't pay.
My heart goes out to the landlords.
Well that's fine.
They matter too.
But there are consequences to sending millions of people out onto the streets.
We asked for you to not do that.
You were fine with it.
There might be some consequences in terms of an uptick in petty crime in
the short term.
>> Now I want to turn to what the reality is in regard to non petty crime,
actual violent crime, including things like homicide.
Let's go to graphic six year.
There have been more than 400 shootings in Oakland this year, nearly 50% higher
than last year and more than 700 armed robberies also up 50% from last year.
People are using stolen vehicles and carjacked vehicles to commit robberies.
Groups of two or three are costing unsuspecting community members and
robbing them and so those are violent crimes.
They barely get discussed in the media and there's never really any discussion about,
Hey, what would be effective, non-abusive policing look like?
Policing that actually keeps communities safe, but
doesn't do these preemptive shootings that end up killing unarmed individuals?
There are 31 or
there were 31 fatal shootings 143 nonfatal shootings in the city last year.
The report said the total number of shootings in Seattle last year represents
a 43% increase over 2020 totals and a 78% increase over 2019 figures.
And so look, there are all sorts of issues right now with an uptick in crime.
I just think that what the corporate media tends to focus on tells you a lot about
what their priorities are and which institutions,
they're willing to criticize.
The fact that they've boiled this down to petty crime and
woke city councils is ridiculous.
There's no real analysis there.
I think that it's just garbage meant to distract us from a breakdown that we're
seeing in our institutions overall, really.
>> Yeah