Award-winning crime journalist Joe Marino joins the podcast for a candid, in-depth conversation on crime, policing, and public safety in New York City. Marino examines the complex issues shaping today’s justice system, from criminal-justice reform and evolving policing strategies to recidivism, media narratives, and the human behavior behind the headlines. Drawing on years of frontline reporting, he offers sharp insights into how policy, politics, data, and public perception collide—and what it all means for crime and accountability in America’s largest city.

Audio Transcript

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Joe Marino: Soft on crime and tough on crime, they are two sides of the same coin. You accomplish nothing without at least identifying what the underlying condition is.

Rafael Mangual: See, I disagree.

Joe Marino: Yeah.

Rafael Mangual: I disagree. All right. So here’s where I disagree, which is when you say accomplish, I think you have something specific in your head. When I think of what the criminal justice system exists to accomplish, the primary aim, the thing that it’s best at, the thing that it can reliably do is physically incapacitate people. By putting them in a cell, you stop them from injuring the community. They may commit crimes within the facility, but they can no longer injure the community when they are inside.

Joe Marino: And taking people out of operation.

Rafael Mangual: Right. And so the question is what’s the payoff? And the way that you figure that out is you have to have a sense of the degree to which these individuals are offending or would be offending if they were free. Now we have lots of studies on this that have sort of estimated the propensity of the median prisoner to offend. And right now the prevailing estimate in the criminological literature is about eight index felonies a year for the median person in state prison. Some of the older estimates that I think were probably better because they were using better survey data and they weren’t relying solely on reports because most crime doesn’t get reported put that number at about 15 to 25 and I think that’s probably more accurate. So if you’re talking about someone who’s committing more than a dozen criminal offenses a year, locking them up for a year saves the community a pretty decent amount when you consider the social cost of crime depending on the crime, but also the broader ripple effects on society.

It’s like now everything’s locked up behind plexiglass and CVS. There’s a cost associated with that that we all have to bear because a single person or a handful of people or a small slice of the population can’t bring themselves to follow the rules. And we can stop them by physically putting them in a box.

Joe Marino: I was walking into a Rite Aid or Dwayne Reed in FiDi and as I’m walking in, there’s a guy who was probably shoplifting and he was being pushed out by two cops because they probably called him or they got a call for shoplifting or whatever. And now it’s a struggle and now they’re on the floor, his shoes flew off and they’re trying to arrest this guy, whatever. These people, they’re just working a regular job in a store. They have a shoplifter, they call the cops and it’s this whole scene standing there, I think I’m buying a water or something and they’re in the checkout aisle. And I think what you are really speaking to is that particular sort of chaos. And I don’t know what the answer is to that. I could tell you right now incarceration is expensive and there are deferred costs to incarceration unless you’re going to indefinitely incarcerate everybody. And by the way, I’m agnostic on this. I’m not a criminologist. I don’t have a degree from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I could tell you

Rafael Mangual: It’s probably a good thing. No offense to Peter Moskos or any of my friends over at John J.

Joe Marino: There are people way more qualified to talk about the effectiveness of incarceration. Now what I can say is that when it comes to violent crime and a shoplift, a robbery, a burglary, a petty larceny can turn anything into something that escalates into something.

Rafael Mangual: A hundred percent

Joe Marino: I think that the answer that everyone is trying to come up with in law enforcement in the public safety sector is this. How do we enforce the rules without hurting people’s feelings? That is the question. Nobody likes shoplifting. Nobody wants to walk into a Dwayne Reed, have to ask somebody to unlock some deodorant or something. It’s inconvenient. Recidivism is a problem, but not all recidivism is the same. There are people that shoplift simply to resell that stuff on a secondary market. There are other people that just shoplift because they have some kind of underlying mental health issue or whatever. There’s a lot of different stuff going on. I think when you look at it and we do actively search for case studies with the sole purpose of, okay, here is the policy, here is the reform, here is the law that was passed. Can we, through case studies, educate people on the practical steps and implications of this reform, whatever that is, whether it be “raise the age”, whether it be bail reform. And yes, as we look at those case studies and we look at very specific individuals who offend and re-offend and with some consequence that is sometimes even fatal, listen, somebody pickpockets, they got 150 arrests for pickpocketing or jostling or whatever, you’re not really worried about that person.

But you are worried about somebody who has a persistent history where you start to see a rubric of not just petty larceny, but there is assault. Now there’s DV or now there’s robbery on top of CPW. There’s a bench warrant history, there are wanted cards for this person for a pattern of other things in other boroughs. That is a rubric of individual that you need to pay special attention to.

Rafael Mangual: And my big beef is that there are going to be those individuals who satisfy that rubric that indicate a significant degree of risk who are going to come before an office like Alvin Braggs on a shoplifting charge and because he has a blanket policy, we lose out on the potential benefits of pursuing that case despite the fact that that guy poses just as much danger as he would if he were in on a more serious charge. But before we keep going, I want to just acknowledge our listeners because we’ve started our conversation, which indicates the degree to which I’m so excited to talk to you. I’m really, really happy that you’re here. So for those of you who have been listening in on our sort of pre-recorded conversation, I am Rafael Mangual, your host of the City Journal Podcast. I am delighted to be joined today by Joe Marino of the New York Post, senior crime reporter. Joe, how long have you been with the New York Post?

Joe Marino: Since like 2015.

Rafael Mangual: Okay. And how long have you been a journalist?

Joe Marino: I started at the Daily News, interestingly enough, in 2007, but I started there as a news photographer, left in 2015.

Rafael Mangual: I’m really excited to talk to you because I mean, as everyone who listens to the show knows that I primarily cover crime here at the Manhattan Institute and at City Journal. And I think one of the most underappreciated perspectives that is just almost nowhere to be found in these broader conversations about crime and criminal justice and policing policy is the perspective of the people who write about it every day, who tell the stories every day who are in the mix and actually getting on the ground and following the trends of crime in a city like New York. And so I really wanted to bring you in just to kind of get your takes, your insights as somebody who’s in the muck on this every day. So I really appreciate you coming in to talk to us today.

Joe Marino: Thanks for having me.

Rafael Mangual: As you can tell, I’m just super excited to pick your brain today, but I want to start off just by giving our listeners a little bit of just insight into what your life is like as a crime reporter in a city like New York. I highly doubt that. I highly doubt that. Tell us.

Joe Marino: So I think that there are a lot of different types of reporters. I don’t think crime reporter is like a real ... It doesn’t really tell the story. I think that most crime reporters are really good general assignment reporters and that’s what I started doing when I started at the post. Everybody starts the same way you’re a general assignment reporter. You might cover a press conference for city hall one day, you might cover a press conference for some other random thing, but your primary job is to run on spot news and critical incidents and you go to those things and you learn the soft skills of how to just talk to people, witnesses. You’ll cover a press conference if it’s a police involved shooting, let’s say, or some other type of really major critical incident. And eventually some people like myself, you just sort of make that the job that you kind of decide you want. And I think that I just had a natural curiosity. I had some built-in advantages because organically I knew people who were able to sort of help me out and give me leads and things like that. And it wasn’t really a conscious decision. I didn’t say, “I really want to do this. “ It was just a product of me being from New York, knowing people, knowing people who were in law enforcement. And I had a real interest in how operations and then subsequently when we started really getting into a lot of the state criminal justice reforms, I had an interest in learning about the intersection of not only public safety operations, but also the legislative side and how the court system worked.

We were sort of in a moment where we had all of these new laws and everybody was apoplectic about it and I just sort of took it upon myself to try to find case studies that articulated what we were dealing with. There wasn’t enough data at the time. There wasn’t a lot of information, but everybody was kind of freaking out. “We’re going to have these laws. Nobody’s going to be held accountable. Nobody’s going to be able to go to jail. Everybody’s just going to be out.” Okay. And I sort of established a sort of methodology for identifying an issue, learning as much as I could about an issue, understanding what I knew about how the front end of the system worked, which is the police side. I learned a lot about response investigations and things like that. And now I was really learning the back end of that system and I was watching how these two things sort of were intersecting but not always sort of gelling.

Rafael Mangual: They’re almost at odds, right? I mean, we were talking earlier and you mentioned something that I thought was exactly right and spot on, which is that I think New Yorkers have been spoiled over the last couple of generations and so far as we’ve lived at a time in which the different elements of the criminal justice system were largely aligned and you could take that alignment for granted. The prosecutors wanted to put bad guys in jail. The police wanted to put bad guys in jail. The judges and the correction system wanted to put and keep bad guys in jail. There was general agreement about that premise. And then right around 2014, 2015, things really started to shift and you saw on the legislative side things like bail reform, discovery reform, raise the age, less is more, which is parole reform. You had the rewrite of the Rockefeller drug laws that basically defanged them, which were mandatory minimum sentences for different drug offenses.

And then you had progressive prosecutors like Alvin Bragg and Eric Gonzalez start promoting the idea that they weren’t going to prosecute certain categories of offenses. It’s almost as if everyone in the system is kind of doing their own thing. They’re not necessarily on the same mission.

Joe Marino: Well, I think that I’m a fact finder. I don’t generally have an opinion one way or the other about how prosecutors use their discretion. What I observe is a cultural shift by people who are not from New York and we have to accept that the general attitudes towards public safety, policing and accountability have changed. Yeah. When I grew up here and one of my commencement speakers at NYU was Ray Kelly and I don’t think that he would necessarily be on the shortlist to be a commencement speaker. I don’t

Rafael Mangual: Think he’d be able to get through his speech. I mean, we know, right? I mean, he tried to speak at Brown University, what was it that 2013, 2014?

Joe Marino: Yeah. And I’m going back to 2002 as him and I think Harold Prince and you have to accept that the attitudes towards the systems of accountability have changed. And to the credit of the police department, they’ve been living with bail reform, Raise the Age and all these criminal justice reforms now for six years and they’ve still made substantial progress in crime reduction. People will tell you even privately, they will say, people who are like real police, they’ll say,” Listen, you make it work. “But there’s a whole midstream and sort of backend to this system. So when people talk about recidivism and they see repeat offenders and it is a problem, it is because the system is making choices and there is a desire right now for both the front end and sort of the midstream and the back end of this portfolio of public safety to behave more like a healthcare system.

Rafael Mangual: It’s a good analogy.

Joe Marino: I mean, that’s what they want. They want something that is frictionless and maybe it should be. Maybe there are ways to look at the accountability side, the prosecutorial side of this system and say, are there alternatives that we are not exploring where we can get as good or better an outcome without it being excessively punitive or without making the process the punishment? And I think that is right now what is in the conversation. It’s we have this process, it’s been extraordinarily heavy-handed and there is a cultural shift right now for people to look at it and say, “What can we do to make it fairer? But what could we do to make it just kinder and gentler?” I don’t know if that exists. I don’t know what those answers are, but they want it to behave more like sort of like a hybrid law enforcement but with a healthcare component to it.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. No, I think that’s right. And I do think that people are grasping for some alternative. And I’ve always hated that word because I don’t think that it applies to the criminal justice system in part because I think there’s a lot of hubris undergirding the criminal justice reform movement in so far as it reflects this idea that we can make humans do what we want. And I’m of the belief that humans are incredibly complex. They’re not these malleable beings that are with strings that we can pull and reliably get them to behave in such a way. I think human behavior is largely out of society’s hands to dictate by and large. There are some things that we can do to build a general offense that will deter people to go beyond it, but I think by and large, what the criminal justice system does well is it physically stops people from doing bad things.

The guy, once he’s in handcuffs, he can’t hit you anymore. Once he’s in a cell, he can’t rob the liquor store around the corner or he can’t rape a woman in the stairwell of the housing projects. I think there’s a sort of sense that we’ve overcomplicated the idea of criminal justice. I think in part because of what you identified, which is there’s this discomfort with the sort of punitive aspect of it, right? No one wants to be the person who pulls the lever that takes this guy off the street for the next 10 years. I mean, after all, he has a life, he has a family that’s going to miss him. And I think what I’ve seen as someone who reads a ton of the reporting, including almost everything you’ve written in the last 10 years, is that there’s a risk associated with not pulling the lever often and that risk is not evenly distributed.

It’s paid for by people who are stuck living in these neighborhoods that have crime rates two, three, 10, 20 times the rate of some of the safest neighborhoods in the city and have to deal with a guy who’s got 20, 30, 40 priors. And we see how that plays out so often.

Joe Marino: Yeah. It’s a symptom and people that live in neighborhoods are, by the way, it could be at the upper or lower end of the economic spectrum, right? Everyone has a condition that they want taken care of. It could be narcotics, it could be noise, it could be a variety of things that fall in between the seven majors and they look to the police department for solutions to finding a remedy for whatever that condition is that they don’t want. And the reality is that it’s not an easy fix and it’s not a quick fix. So the police are in the business of, as you articulated, which is getting the guy or that condition resolved, arrested. Restoring order. Yeah. And taken out of operation. And previously, if you go back 20, 30 years, you would take the guy out of operation, you could see a judge, judge would probably set some form of bail and that person was out of operation for probably whatever that thing was, which may have been drugs or whatever for two to five years or whatever by the time he was in city custody or went to state custody. And we’re in a moment where that’s just not acceptable to people for pretrial detention. And the reality is we have due process and the consensus of the state legislature was due process should absolutely favor the defendant no matter what he did. So we’re in a moment where that discretion has been highly curtailed and the narrative has been that, okay, but these people represent these defendants or this subset of the defendant class represent a persistent nuisance to a certain community or the city. And that may be true, but I don’t see these reforms being rolled back.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think part of it though is that there was a misperception undergirding the reforms in the first place about how severe the system was. I mean, you kind of alluded to it just now, right? I mean, there was this idea that the sort of median outcome for somebody who had bail set in their case was that they were going to spend the entirety of the pretrial period locked up. But the vast majority, more than 70% of people who had bail set and couldn’t make bail at their initial hearing, which is only a small minority of people, I think it was only like 13% of offenders according to the city, the vast majority of them are out within two days. They eventually come up with the money. It just takes them a couple of days. Then there’s the very, very small subset of people who couldn’t come up with the money and those guys were spending a couple years.

But I think part of what really drove this was this effective storytelling about these one-off cases that were seen as representative. And one of the stories that comes to mind is Kalief Browder. So everyone who has heard that name, you ask them and they’ll tell you, “Oh, this was a guy who spent three years on Rikers Island because he couldn’t make bail for stealing a backpack.” And I tell people, I was like, “Well, did you know that bail was set up, I believe at $3,000 in that case and he couldn’t make bail at the initial hearing, but his family within a week, I think, was able to make bail. But bail was revoked. He was held not on pretrial detention. He was held on a probation violation because he was already out on probation for a separate case. So he was never actually eligible for release. That’s why he spent so long inside.

Joe Marino: Well, and there were other issues too. I think the complainant, if I remember correctly- Moved back to Mexico, I think. Yeah. The complainant was uncooperative. There was no case. There was no case. But alternatively, the argument criminal justice reform advocates would say is, why is this even an issue? He’s a kid. It’s backpack. The complainant is no longer available. The case is not prosecutable. So their argument is, what are we doing? Now it’s never on size fits all. If you remember last week there was a horrible, horrible incident of a 72-year-old gentleman who was pushed down the stairs and the fall was fatal, was unprovoked and random and the individual they arrested…

Rafael Mangual: Had just been released, right?

Joe Marino: Well, he had actually…

Rafael Mangual: He had just walked out of court a few hours earlier.

Joe Marino: He had walked out of court that morning. But he had prior arrests, but not a long list of prior arrests. It was a cluster of incidents for assault and I believe there was a burglary because he broke into a transit cleaning station or something like that. And one of the victims of a prior assault of his spoke to me briefly over the phone and she was just despondent over what happened. And she indicated that she did not really want to proceed as a witness in the prosecution of the assault on her and her friend, which by the way, happens a lot. Prosecutors lose the cooperation of victims all the time, or for other reasons the case are just not prosecutable. They’re not going to stand there. They’re not going to pass the sniff test in the courtroom, which is why deals are offered, so on and so forth. But the case was not closed. He had actually had an appearance on this person’s assault case the morning he was apprehended. So with or without her cooperation, he would’ve been at liberty, he would’ve been out in the world, he would’ve been in the community and he would’ve done whatever it is he was going to do and I don’t know what the answer is. Everybody is trying to solve for how do we narrow the probability that somebody is going to do something bad. Now, maybe a better question is we have a tremendous amount of information about these people when they appear before a judge and it’s a lot of the information that I see and my colleagues see and you cannot realistically look outside the four corners of the complaint of whatever they’re there for. However, when it comes to matters of mental health, the city has robust mental health and hygiene laws that have very good due process attached to them.

And so the question is if you really want to incorporate this healthcare aspect to public safety, and maybe it makes sense I hate to say it, but it seems to be that the most common point of intervention for people that are going through some kind of mental health crisis or some other kind of issue seems to be the courts. So if that’s sort of like the very last backstop and you want to make the system this sort of gentler, more intuitive service provider, then you have to take a look at the mental health and hygiene laws you have. You have to ask yourself, how can they be deployed when you have somebody in front of you that you have reason to believe might be going through some kind of mental health issue or pose a risk to the community. And there is due process there. It’s different than criminal due process. It’s New York City administrative law, but I think that’s a conversation worth having.

Rafael Mangual: Absolutely. But it’s also one that I think a lot of the same people in the criminal justice reform movement, these advocates, are against the idea of coercing somebody into treatment, which is one of the reasons I think you’ve seen a pullback away from compelled inpatient mental health treatment over the last several decades. New York State has cut its capacity in these long-term hospital beds, New York City has cut its capacity. So there’s always going to be a question of where do we even put them, assuming that we can get people to the point where they’d be willing to accept it. But I want to go back to this non-cooperating witness who you spoke to, because that story just made a ton of waves when it broke. A lot of people reacted to it. And I think the main point of reaction was one of the things that she told you, which was part of her rationale for not cooperating, which was this idea that, well, I don’t want to contribute to putting another Black man in prison.

Joe Marino: I get it.

Rafael Mangual: Which triggers the race issue that I think really is behind a lot of the reform movement that we’ve seen over the last decade plus. It’s that particular sensitivity about the racial disparities in our criminal justice system.

Joe Marino: Well, she indicated to me that she did not want to... She is also African American and she did not want to be responsible for putting another African American person in jail. And I think she also felt simultaneously terrible about the outcome, but non-cooperation I think happens for primarily the person does not want to be involved in a complicated, ongoing criminal matter. It’s a convenience thing. And she did indicate to me that her injuries at the time were not substantial. She didn’t need medical attention. She did what probably 99 percent of people do when they get on a subway and somebody bumps into them or pushes them or somebody’s just on the street and they get into it with somebody, there’s no predictive measure for will somebody do something this heinous. And when you look at this person’s their history of contact with law enforcement, it’s not extensive, it’s just very condensed and it’s condensed around these sort of violent, emotionally disturbed outbursts.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. This guy had how many priors?

Joe Marino: I think four since last year, maybe six.

Rafael Mangual: Right. Yeah. That’s the part that I think people were concerned because it’s not a big number, but it It’s in a small period of time, getting arrested six times in a year is hard to do.

Joe Marino: Say. Everything is in the details. Listen, you’re writing stories every day and the top line is recidivism. The top line is junk justice and some of it is you could definitely point to areas of responsibility, whether it’s in the charging decisions that are made, the plea decisions that are made, the sentencing decisions that are made. There are multiple points of potential failure when you see the outcome as what it is. But I’ve also seen people who have served time in state prison, they’ve been released, they’re on parole, they do something devastating anyway. Everybody’s trying to solve for the same thing, which is how do we sort of narrow the field, identify policing, everybody likes to say laser focused, precision. What is the precision? What are these predictive tools that you’re going to use in the framework of due process and civil liberties?

Rafael Mangual: Well, I think the city already kind of uses one. I mean, one of the things that a lot of people talk about in the criminology world, at least with respect to pretrial detention, is algorithmic risk assessment. So there are different factors that the system has information about and how many prior arrests, how many prior convictions, how many prior jail and prison stays, over what period of time, what’s the nature of the prior arrests and charges age, education level, employment history, where you were arrested, where you live. All of that can be put into a matrix where these factors are given different weights and will spit out-

Joe Marino: Yeah, CJA will score you. Right. Exactly. But the state criminal justice reforms have basically rendered that.

Rafael Mangual: Right. Well, CJA still does it for flight risk. And what’s interesting is that the Center for Court Innovation a few years back actually did a study to assess whether the same algorithmic risk assessment tool that they use for flight risk could also predict rearrest risk and they found that it was very accurately predictive of re-arrest. The problem in New York, of course, is we’re the only state in the union that categorically prohibits judges from considering dangerousness in pretrial detention.

Joe Marino: They do. So we have this, the state legislature decided that they wanted to create a carve out for a subsect of the penal code for pretrial detention. Right.

Rafael Mangual: Well, for bail eligibility.

Joe Marino: For bail eligibility, right? So there is a carve out that some prosecutors will use, which is harm on harm theory. You have to argue it. You have to get a judge to buy into it. You have to…

Rafael Mangual: And just for the listeners who don’t know what that means, harm on harm means the person has a pending case. They’ve been rearrested for an offense that causes harm to another with that pending case and now they can be held on bail or remand even if the original underlying charge is not bail eligible in the statute.

Joe Marino: Right. And I think the top line is it’s very difficult to quantify because the old methodology for quality, everything from quality of life crime to serious felony crime was you arrested somebody, they were likely going to be incarcerated pretrial or predisposition and you weren’t going to see that person probably for another two, four, five years. The old methodology for doing things is we were able to take people out of operation for longer. And the new world we live in is that there is more oversight. There is more legislation that narrows the parameters for us to do that. And I have to say that even with all of those restrictions, even with some very counterintuitive legislation for the purposes of doing proactive policing and things like that, the legislation has gotten more restrictive, but the results if you are tracking the police departments on crime statistics are very, very good. They have figured out how to police and to their credit, they’ve taken something that was a substantial headwind only because they didn’t know how they were going to respond to it with not being able to take people out of operation the way they had in the past where now some subsets of crimes warranted a DAT. They were going to see a higher volume…

Rafael Mangual: DAT being desk appearance ticket, right? So you’re just released from the precinct.

Joe Marino: Yeah. And they weren’t used to seeing what they might call like frequent flyers, a higher volume of the same person doing the same thing. But to their credit, I think what they did very intelligently was really sit down with prosecutors, sit down with the private sector, small businesses particularly. And they understood how to get cooperation and maybe not on every arrest, maybe not on every individual, but they were able to very intelligently with their own data. And the NYPD’s data collection, their crime control strategies, they produce a quality product and they can articulate whether it’s retail theft, grand larceny, auto, shootings, they’re able to articulate to prosecutors, listen, this is where we are seeing the most persistent threat, whether it be grand larceny auto, retail theft, and they can make an intelligent argument for why prosecution here is necessary and cooperation is necessary. So it’s not just some one-off. I think that the police department to its credit has taken a lot of the guesswork out of the, they call them violence-

Rafael Mangual: Reduction Zones.

Joe Marino: Violence drivers though, the people who are causing the most persistent amount of crime in particular subset. And so they’ve taken a very intelligent approach where they get the buy-in they need from prosecutors no matter what county they’re in. And maybe that’s the way going forward that policing is done. Maybe it went from sort of just being like a wide net being cast to now making an intelligent thesis for why we now have to be more aggressive with this.

Rafael Mangual: Right. No, I think that’s exactly right. And I’m a big fan of the way that the NYPD has been approaching its precision policing strategy, really focusing on high crime areas and not big high crime areas, like really micro geographic units of the city where crime risks are more pronounced and then identifying the problem people within there. This is something that we’ve known in criminology for a while. I mean, one of the most famous studies on this came out of Sweden founding that 1 percent of the country’s population was responsible for more than 60 percent of all the violence. And so we see that pattern play out in society after society and throughout history. It’s relatively consistent, both the concentration of crime demographically within a small subset of the population, but also geographically. It’s consistently in New York about 1 percent of our street segments. So corner to corner, both sidewalks account for 25 percent of the violence. About 5 percent of the street segments see about 50% of all the violence in the city every single year, and about 40 percent of the street segments don’t see any crime whatsoever. So we can be intelligent about how we deploy resources. And I think the police department has been incredibly good at that, especially over the last 10 years. And the current commissioner, Jessica Tisch, I think has really taken that to a new level, which has been very encouraging. But for people who read the stories that the Post prints, many of which you’re an author or co-author on, it’s like whenever there’s a heinous crime, it’s almost always the case that this person’s got a troubling criminal history. They’ve got either a massive number of prior arrests, they’ve got an active criminal justice stats like they’re out on parole or they’re out on pretrial release or they’re out on probation and it leaves people asking the question. It’s like, why is this guy out on the street?

Joe Marino: Well, there’s two answers to that. I’ve seen it both ways. I’ve seen people that have all of the markers of somebody who has had persistent contact with criminal justice. And sometimes if it’s a violent crime, you will see contact with police for violent crime, harm robbery, whatever that’s not uncommon. But I’ve seen it the other way too where a person does not have an extensive history. They may not have any discernible history at all. But yes, the question is there’s a horrible thing that happened. We’ve identified the person that’s done this horrible thing and everybody asks the same question, “Well, why didn’t anybody do anything to stop it? “ And sometimes it’s one or two answers, yes. They were probably previously incarcerated. They were released when they were supposed to be released or they may be on parole. They may have served parole. Now that person has fulfilled their obligation and something terrible happened. Sometimes that’s not a satisfying answer because people are looking for ... Everybody’s looking for the same thing, which is what went wrong, how could this possibly happen? And sometimes there are many legitimate things that could have gone differently.

Rafael Mangual: Sentence, no parole being denied.

Joe Marino: Sentencing parole revocation or certainly have seen individuals where they qualified for parole revocation, but it speaks to the fact that these systems do not behave necessarily in lockstep with each other. It is a complicated connected systems, but not really interconnected and they’re not talking to each other in real time.

Rafael Mangual: It’s a huge problem because it basically leads us to a situation in which we’re leaving a lot of money on the table. You’ve got a police department that is obviously doing the right thing. When you see an alleged murderer who’s got 50 prior arrests, it tells you the police are concentrating their resources on high-risk people. Yeah.

Joe Marino: I mean, it tells you that I think the wise thing that the police department does is they do embrace data and technology because intuition is always going to play a certain role, but I think that in the old days, intuition, casting a wide net was sort of just the way you did policing.

Rafael Mangual: Oh, necessity in part, right? I mean, they just didn’t have

Joe Marino: Integrated data systems. And now the modern way of doing policing is understanding what the underlying conditions are that you’re dealing with and underneath that, who is responsible? And they are very good at data collection and sort of parsing out where the resources need to be deployed and they do it. I think they’re really second to none in deploying data and incorporating it into investigations and enforcement. They’re very good at it.

Rafael Mangual: I think that’s exactly right.

Joe Marino: But there’s no perfect... Inevitably, you write a story about a terrible thing that happened to somebody and inevitably it’s because it’s human nature, people are aghast and they look to assign responsibility. At the end of the day, the responsibility is that person. Do I think that there are certain efficiencies? Do I see certain opportunities for efficiency? Yeah. And I think that it actually does come back to making the system frictionless by making it more efficient. The reality is that you have many different stakeholders that are not ... They’re not in sync. Parole, the NYPD, the courts, if somebody is out pending disposition of a case but they’re out and they’re in a program and that program is not a secure facility, who is being notified of compliance? How long does it take to notify the court of non-compliance?

Rafael Mangual: Right. Yeah. I think a lot of people have sort of come to understand the idea of supervised release as a bad euphemism because there’s no real supervision.

Joe Marino: But I would say the one thing that should be of concern with supervised release is, is it an appropriate fit for every defendant? What if you’re unhomed? What if you don’t have a phone? So should the person not be given supervised release simply because they may not have a home?

Rafael Mangual: Also, I mean, what does it mean to be supervised? I mean, it was just a fatal stabbing in the Bronx of a kid who had an ankle monitor on.

Joe Marino: Yeah. So interestingly enough about the ankle monitors, which are the New York City Sheriff’s Office runs that program. They say that the ankle monitor, when it comes to adult individuals, they find very high compliance because cognitively their brains understand the gravity of the situation they’re in.

Rafael Mangual: Right. I think this perp was 22.

Joe Marino: At 22 years old, you’re right on the edge. It is not a one size fits all tool. And supervised release, listen, for 99%, who really wants to see somebody? I’ll never forget. I can’t remember how long ago this was. There was somebody who was in arraignment court in Brooklyn because they bought like a $25 Percocet off an undercover. And I’m looking at this and I’m wondering what the actual value of ... Yeah, he bought a Percocet. The guy was extremely infirm. He came into court with a walker, he could barely sit and he bought a $25 Percocet off undercover. I don’t know if there is a tremendous amount of value in just sort of writ large saying, “This person is going to be ... We have to set a prohibitively high restrictive bail on something.”

Rafael Mangual: Ueah, I think that’s where most people are, right? It’s the reasonable position. It’s also, I think the default prior to the bail reform, that guy was not going in. And the vast majority of people were not getting bail set in their case. The vast majority of people who got bail set in their case were making bail at arraignment, right?

Joe Marino: But the state legislature felt because as you said, the narrative was that if there is even one possibility that a child be…

Rafael Mangual: I think it’s this tension between people who are more comfortable with type one versus type two errors. There’s the risk of locking somebody up who doesn’t need to be locked up and that’s a risk that you should be concerned about. But then there’s the risk of not locking up somebody who needs to be locked up. And there are some people like myself who are much more concerned about that second risk. I think you’ve committed a crime, you put yourself in jeopardy, you have the responsibility to deal with the consequences of that, of which potential jail time is one. I feel less bad for you if we put you in jail and you didn’t need to be there, then I feel less bad for that defendant than I do for the 76-year-old guy who gets shoved down the stairs because the dude was able to walk out of court a few hours earlier despite six arrests in the last year, many of which were violent.

Joe Marino: He was there on a return appearance on an open case. And the argument is, well, if there wasn’t a state law that prohibited a judge from holding him on his prior assault arrest, would he have been at liberty to murder this individual? And the answer is we don’t know. We don’t know.

Rafael Mangual: We don’t know.

Joe Marino: We don’t know. I have seen families come up with substantial bail for a defendant, tens of thousands of dollars. Now partially secured bond makes it more accessible.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. But that’s another thing.

Joe Marino: I get it. I get it.                                                                                 

Rafael Mangual: I don’t want you to misunderstand me. And I think a lot of people who are engaged in this debate misunderstand the sort of anti-crime side because people like me are not saying, “I prefer a judge to set a high bail that I think that that is the most efficient or the right way to go about it.” I think that I am perfectly happy to take cash bail virtually off the table universally. I would much rather see judges reorient the pretrial release and agree around risk so that if you are a high-risk person, you’re going in irrespective of how much money you could come up with.

Joe Marino: I would go a step further. I think that you should reorient the pre-arraignment process to include conferrals with the district attorney, the defense counsel, health and hospitals when necessary and DHS and come up with an abstract for this person if their crime, if they are there for something that is non-bail eligible, I think you have an opportunity to take an intelligent look at where they’re at in their life and maybe connect them with a supervised release that is a little bit more sophisticated than what there is now. Listen, supervised release right now is mandatory in person or phone check-in and okay, you’re getting a level of compliance from someone who is able to comply or someone who has agency over their life. But as we know and as we’ve seen, particularly with violent or fatal implications, there is a subset of the defendant class that is there at arraignment that have sometimes documented even on their desk snapshot documented issues of where they have been EDP calls, domestic incident reports where they are either the victim or the complainant or the perpetrator. And in so far as you have valuable information about this person, if the state laws don’t allow you to hold that person on that charge, there is something else you can do that might be more productive. But the problem is we simply don’t have the infrastructure for it.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. No, I think that’s right. I mean, one of the other barriers to getting the good information to make these decisions, and a recent story of yours inspired me to write about this, is the practice of sealing more and more of these prior arrests, which could be clouding our ability to make sound judgments about the risks that somebody poses. So what brought this to mind was there was a piece covering in the post the triple machete attack at Grand Central Station. And what stood out to me was that I watched the police press conference after that attack and they noted that the alleged offender’s criminal history included three unsealed arrests. And I caught onto the unsealed qualification there because it indicated to me that there was some other history that they couldn’t acknowledge. And then the post reported that that person had, I think, more than a dozen prior arrests. And I thought, okay, well clearly there’s a disconnect. I don’t think that it is confined to a single case. And I started reaching out to prosecutors and they said, “Yeah, a lot of times we get defendants who we can’t see their sealed criminal history. It doesn’t come in our packets and we won’t ask for bail or we’ll give them maybe a lighter plea than we would’ve had we known.” And then we’ll get a call from the arresting officer saying, “Why’d you give this guy such a light touch when he’s got 14 priors?” And they’re like, “Well, we only see two or we only see three.”

Joe Marino: Yeah. I mean, the reality is that with a lot of these recidivists, there might be a third maybe more of you see a substantial, especially the more persistent contact a person has with law enforcement, you tend to see, especially if it’s ridiculously long, you tend to see a high ratio of sealed arrests or voided arrests. And there’s a variety of reasons why an arrest could be sealed. The case was just not prosecutable or wasn’t credible. So an arrest was made, prosecutor determined the case wasn’t prosecutable or credible.

Rafael Mangual: Or it just fell onto the list of cases that a particular prosecutor’s not going to pursue, right?

Joe Marino: Yeah. Or there was a plea that upon successful completion of those conditions, the case is sealed and you go out. So the basket of reasons as to why an arrest will be sealed is wide and varied, but is it a feature of someone’s profile who is a subject or a defendant of violent crime? It can be. Yeah. I think it’s all data points at the end of the day. So when you look at the average person is going to watch something on the news, they’re going to read about something in the newspaper and the reaction is always the same. “Here’s this horrible thing that happened. Here’s the person that did it. This is how many times he’s been arrested. Why is this happening?” And the answer is realistically, we really don’t know because unless you want to live in a city that takes a maximalist approach to enforcement and incarceration, that is the only way you are going to get to that baseline.

Rafael Mangual: I think that’s right.

Joe Marino: And nobody wants to live in that city. You don’t mind because less than 20 percent of the people in the city really are worried about public safety as an issue.

Rafael Mangual: Right. But I think there’s a middle ground between the maximalist approach and the minimalist approach that we take.

Joe Marino: You know what I think it is? I think it’s technology. I think it’s technology. I think it is if you really want to see outcomes that make sense and minimize the opportunities, you want to maximize your outcomes and you want to minimize your opportunities for things to fall through the cracks. I do think that it is about incorporating technology and coming up with more sophisticated data runs and the way information is shared right now between parole, probation, the courts, the NYPD, you need something that is a little bit more interconnected where everybody is sort of communicating instantaneously. And I think that information and data is key to coming up with outcomes that make sense.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And one of the things that I think you and your colleagues at the Post are really good at is getting your hands on that information. I mean, being able to get to a point where you can print the actual amount of prior arrests that an individual has, right?

Joe Marino: It’s definitely a data point. Does it tell the whole story? Sure. Probably not. The reality is we’re living in a city right now where really the drivers, the underlying issues and drivers of crime that seem to be of concern to the public are people who are suffering with a underlying mental health issue.

Rafael Mangual: Sure. Well, I think part of the reason that everyone’s so concerned about those folks is that their offending is less predictive. You can’t really…

Joe Marino: It’s unpredictable.

Rafael Mangual: If I don’t want to get caught in a gang shooting, I know what neighborhoods to stay out of at what times, right?

Joe Marino: Well, the thing about gangs are, and the NYPD, it does gang take downs constantly.

Rafael Mangual: Hugely valuable.

Joe Marino: Yeah. It’s a high value thing that they do and that type of violence falls under a rubric of proceeds, property, and even these more abstract social media respect beefs that sort of bleed into the whole drill rap thing. But they satisfy a rubric that is ... It’s understandable and it allows for investigative leads. When you’re dealing with somebody who has an undiagnosed mental health problem, where maybe there’s been zero contact with the criminal justice system, zero contact with police, no domestic incident reports, no calls for an emotionally disturbed person, that person is an unknown. And the reality is as it stands now, there is no predictive measure you have for somebody where you have zero historical information on them to do something catastrophic. And that I think for the subset of the city’s population that is concerned about crime, that is the type of individual that they are likely to be concerned by because they travel around the city, they use the transit system and I don’t know what enforcement tools you have to address that.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. Well, one thing I want to ask you about is just how it is that you have been able to sort of ... Because I imagine it takes some kind of relationship building to get somebody to go into a system and tell you like, “Hey, actually he’s got more than three prior rests.” How do you-

Joe Marino: Nah, nobody tells me that.

Rafael Mangual: How do you figure it out?

Joe Marino: No, nobody tells me that.

Rafael Mangual: How do we get our hands on that information?

Joe Marino: I don’t know. You figure it out and tell me. I don’t know.

Rafael Mangual: Because I think the public…

Joe Marino: I have no idea.

Rafael Mangual: I think the public could really... I mean, that to me is one of the most valuable services that traditional city crime reporters provide.

Joe Marino: I think that the goal, generally speaking, is you want to try to be able to form relationships with people who have very good intentions and who are knowledgeable and who they themselves are subject matter experts and they believe there’s a value in talking to somebody in media and having candid conversations about whether it be incidents, whether it be subjects of interest, whether it be policy. And I think more important than asking people for information as in what can you give me right now? I think that if you’re willing to start the conversation with asking how things work, not, “ I need this, can I have this? “But can you share with me how your job works and explain to me how you arrive at certain policies and certain decisions. And I think that that builds a very sincere rapport and eventually you just have on earnest conversation after another and that’s how you get information.

Rafael Mangual: One of the other things that New York City has is because we are sort of the center of the globe’s attention, we are also So home to, I think, some of the more outrageous crime stories. You have obviously your sort of regular urban stuff, the crazy person who shoves somebody in front of a subway train. But I’d love to get a sense of what are some of the other insane stories that you’ve covered. One that I really want to ask you about is Luigi Mangione, who’s back in the news because of terrible-

Joe Marino: The Mangionistas.

Rafael Mangual: Yes, the Mangionistas, these…

Joe Marino: Crazy. The thing about Mangione is it started out as just a shooting in a very, what we would colloquially call just a good address. It was a shooting in a high traffic tourist area in Midtown. So that as a crime reporter, you’re automatically going to be raised up on that and you’d be like, I need to find out what’s going on here because there’s not supposed to be a shooting zone. And if there is, you’re thinking it’s got to be robbery, domestic. You’re not thinking assassination of a healthcare CEO. So I think that as a crime reporter, one of your first jobs is you’re tracking all day. Even right now that I’m not looking at my phone, I’m not really tracking what’s going on and I’m a little worried.

Rafael Mangual: You’re missing something.

Joe Marino: I think the important thing is to be paying attention to what’s going on, having a natural curiosity about things. Having people that are receptive to answering your questions as to if something is going on, what is going on? And I think that your biggest asset, if you’re going to be a reporter, a particularly reporter that deals with the police, is you are going to be someone who is affable and you’re going to ask them intelligent questions and by expressing a sincere interest in what they do, they will be inclined to share information with you about critical incidents. I know that sounds very vague, but I don’t think that being more specific than that is necessary because that’s literally how it works. Right. And so when Brian Thompson was murdered, I found out immediately who it was by someone who wanted to share that with me. We were able to put a story up relatively quickly. I actually was working with a very good editor that morning and we were actually the wires were citing the New York Post, which is a good feeling, but I would rather be right than first. I don’t think there’s a lot of value in being first if you’re not right. We were able to really build the story out throughout the day and we were able to drive the coverage and obviously the public for a story like that is not just a New York audience, it’s national, it’s international and that was a very busy, busy time.

Rafael Mangual: I can imagine.

Joe Marino: Because it was a cat and mouse game. It was a manhunt. And so being able to, I guess to your earlier question, how do you access, how do you get details about what’s going on and keep a pace with things? And the answer is luck. You have to be lucky enough to have relationships that far predate anything you’re working on that day and be able to call upon people’s sense of their sense of charity to help you because they believe that the mission of dealing with the media is to put out the right information. A lot of the people I talk to all share the same belief, which is that it’s better to have the right information out there first and have to unwind wrong information.

Rafael Mangual: It’s every writer’s worst nightmare, right, having the correction.

Joe Marino: Well, it’s bad for the public. It’s bad for the public. I don’t particularly want to deal with anybody who wants something. I can’t say that I’ve ever dealt with anybody that is looking for something in return. They feel that there is an intrinsic value to speaking to people in the media because they want the correct information out there because they believe it helps law enforcement and it helps the public.

Rafael Mangual: We were just talking about the Mangione case and I just can’t help but contrast the aftermath of that case with the aftermath of another case that I know you covered, which is the Daniel Penny trial. I’m just looking outside the courthouse at these two periods in time and when Daniel Penny was facing trial outside were angry protestors calling for his head and with Mangione where there seems to be much less ambiguity about the legality of what he’s alleged to have done, you have fan girls outside and people calling for his release.

Joe Marino: Yeah, he is.

Rafael Mangual: And yet you have-

Joe Marino: He may very well get jury nullification. It is well within that jury’s right to vote their conscience.

Rafael Mangual: I mean, how did we get here? How did we get to a place where somebody who is…

Joe Marino: It’s intersectionalism, it’s power dynamics. And Jordan Neely, the very sad story of Jordan Neely is he was supposed to be not on that train. He was supposed to be in a treatment program and he was in the pendency of the case.

Rafael Mangual: He had walked out of that treatment program.

Joe Marino: He had elected to leave that treatment program and with his various issues that he was dealing with ended up on that train. And obviously what happened was, look, it’s tragic. There’s no winner. Everyone here is losing. I spoke to somebody who was intimately involved with Jordan Neely’s pending case and they were despondent, much like the young woman who declined to cooperate with the prosecution of the suspect’s case and the murder of the.. Yeah. They were despondent. They were inconsolable that Jordan Neely had died because they knew why they were in that program. They were adamant that putting him in that program was the right thing to do and they were inconsolable that this happened. And the one thing they said to me that carries me through this day is that we are simply very bad at building bridge services. For people that do not benefit from incarceration could benefit from treatment, but we lack a substantial bridge to making it compliant in a meaningful way. And when I think about Jordan Neely, I think about someone that should be alive, someone else who peripherally had their life ruined.

Rafael Mangual: Completely awful. Yeah.

Joe Marino: Who are the winners here?

Rafael Mangual: Nobody. And yet I don’t think that Daniel Penny as a defendant, was ever in a place…

Joe Marino: Why people pick and choose who are their heroes and who are their villains? Yeah. Listen, if Luigi Mangione looked like Richard Jewell, do you think anybody would be out there?

Rafael Mangual: I guess not. Maybe. I don’t know.

Joe Marino: There is a charisma. There is an allure. The issue certainly is a sympathetic one. I can’t account for why people I’m agnostic on it, but I said this in another podcast on Mangione. I said, “Well, if you can assassinate healthcare CEOs, I don’t know, do you stop at journalists? Do you stop at reporters you don’t like that write things that you disagree with?” And you could find some, you could put together a sophisticated thesis for why they should be gone. I mean, where does it stop? Who decides? You, somebody else?

Rafael Mangual: Right. Yeah. I mean, I was listening…

Joe Marino: That’s a weird road to go down, right?

Rafael Mangual: It’s very weird. I was listening to these Mangionistas outside the courthouse just the other day who were saying, “Well, he did terrible things. He lived immorally. He made blood money.” It’s like, well, it seems to never have occurred to them that somebody could draw the same conclusions about them, that they live in order to the world’s better off without them. And yet there’s this sort of unwillingness to investigate the implications of one’s own ideas and to see whether they could be applied to them in the world’s way.

Joe Marino: Yeah, I saw it. Listen, whether or not I find what they said objectionable or not, it’s irrelevant. They’re press card holders. There’s a whole to- do now about should they have press cards. A federal judge in Southern District decided that there’s due process for who gets issued or revoked press cards. There really isn’t too much discretion. There’s a very loose criteria. Clearly they satisfied it at some point, unless somebody just rubber stamped it. They satisfied it. They have a press card. It’s the interesting drama of the day, but yeah, he is a hero to... He has a contingent of people that unconditionally support him.

Rafael Mangual: Which is nuts to me.

Joe Marino: Yeah.

Rafael Mangual: It actually makes me sick. It actually makes me sick.

Joe Marino: I live in both worlds. I’m friends with people who are quite conservative. I’m friends with people who are very progressive and liberal and it does give me a fair amount of perspective on both sides. And the on commonality seems to be power and who has it and who doesn’t and we’re wrestling with it, I think more disturbingly in a national way with homegrown extremism. And I think that political violence right now is no longer going to be the anomaly. I think that it is something that people feel comfortable touching on and I think it should be a concern to everybody. And Mangione it is a form of political violence based on a perceived economic injustice and whatever his rationale is, I don’t think that illegally it provides justification for murder, but certainly people have found that there is moral justification and that is something that we should be paying attention to.

Rafael Mangual: I agree.

Joe Marino: My opinion.

Rafael Mangual: Well, I wish we could continue the conversation and not end on that unhappy note, but I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I hope you’ll come back because I think what you do is so interesting. It’s so valuable to the city of New York. Yeah, it’s all right. It’s so valuable to the country. No, it really is. It really is. It’s important work and I don’t think people in your line of work get enough recognition, so I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much.

Joe Marino: It’s fun. We’re not saving lives. Thanks. Thank you. Appreciate it.