Fewer Cops, More Homelessness & The Decline of Conversation (07/27)

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Your whole neighborhood goes black in seconds. Except your house. The Patriot Power Generator 2,200X from Four Patriots keeps your lights on when the grid goes down. It's the most powerful generator Four Patriots has ever built. Four Patriots gives you backup power without gas, fumes, or a loud engine. Just lights, a cold fridge, and peace of mind when the power fails. Right now, save $500 and get two solar panels free. That means you can recharge twice as fast, but only while supplies last. Keep your lights on, your food cold, and your family calm when the grid goes down. Don't wait for the next blackout. Visit 4Patriots.com. That's the number four, P-A-T-R-I-O-T-S dot com, and see why families trust four Patriots to stay ready. KFI AM 640. You're listening to the John Cobalt podcast on the IHeart Radio app. The John Cobalt Show, we are on 3 to 6. After 6 o'clock, whatever you missed, go on the podcast, John Cobalt Show on Demand on the IHart app. And we're live on YouTube and live on X right now. You can watch us on video. So head there and you could play along. YouTube.com slash at John Cobalt Show. Subscribe, become a member. It's good to have you here. We are now going to talk with J.B. Page from the California Post. It's got two stories. I want to discuss both of them. We're going to talk in a moment about Nithya Raman. She's now campaigning against Karen Bass. Deming Bass is responsible for the... increase in the mental patients and drug addicts in the streets. She's also claiming that her own district saw a 50% drop practically in street homelessness. I don't know how that could be, but we'll play a lawn. Also, and this will talk now, Jim McDonald, the head of the Los Angeles Police Department, he's the chief, said that... We're missing 4,000 cops. We're missing like one third of the department he needs. He needs 12,500 cops, and we only have about 8,500. Let's get Jamie Page on. How are you, Jamie? I'm good. How are you? So this was an exclusive interview information from Jim McDonald that you guys at the Post got. Let's talk more about it. Yeah, our public safety reporter Ben Chapman had a one-on-one with the chief and talked to him specifically about some of the crises that are affecting our city and what LAPD is up against. And I mean, we've known for a long time that the staffing shortage has been there and it continues to get worse, not better, under the current leadership. They just won't spend the money to hire more cops? Well, it's a little more new ones than that, but I mean, essentially some of it comes to that. We have a very, very progressive anti-cop city council. So, you know, there's a, could they continue to put roadblocks in front of anything that will allow LAPD to ramp up its staffing?

During budget cycle, even the police chief said that, you know, if we don't do anything about stopping the bleed now, we're really going to be in a crisis situation when the 28 Olympics comes here. But we all know we're seeing the crisis right now in the streets already. You call police and you're lucky if someone shows up. That's what I keep reading over and over. People call in. for crimes or weird things that they're seeing and the police just aren't there sometimes they never come we already went through this with the fire department being uh defunded 50% fire department you end up at the palisade situation so there's some disaster coming you can't live with a with with two-thirds of a police department especially with the olympics coming i mean they're not are they nuts and and this is the city council just blocks everything because they hate police so much We, and it's not just their LAPD. We also see this with our traffic cops, which are a separate division. They're also willfully understaffed and we're going to be dealing with the same thing. I mean, we deal with them not being able to go to an accident to be able to just do the day to days right now. And when we have an influx of people coming in, we're going to significantly see the impact of not investing in public safety. Is anybody shook up about this in City Hall or on the council? Does anyone see this and realize we're one-third a department short? And they say, well, maybe this whole ideology has gone too far. I mean, they're the regulars, right? Councilwoman Tracy Park, she's definitely part of public safety and has. over and over again tried to do something about what's taking place. Also, Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez, I would say that she's also a voice of reason on City Council and has... That's two. Yeah. At a 15. Yeah, I mean, the voices on the other side are just louder. Go to City Council anytime and you'll see the shirts and the loud abolitionist chant during council. I'm so tired. Those are mental patience. Those are honest to God mental patience. Many of them were paid to go in there and start screaming like lunatics. No country, no state or city can run based on the rantings of people who belong locked up in an institution. Oh, Ben, our police reporter, who was the lead on the story you're mentioning. Yeah. He just came here from New York. He was shocked to see how our police commission meetings run the first time. Crazy people screaming at the commissioners, right? Yeah. He said it would never fly in New York. No. Unheard of. Oh. Yes. Let's talk to you about the other thing here. So we all know the homeless numbers came out and... You know, if you believe these things. The street homeless is up 8%. Total homeless up 3.5% in L.A. But Nithya Raman is blaming Bass for the bad citywide numbers. She's claiming a 49% drop in street homelessness in her council district. Is that possible? Because I don't trust anybody's numbers. And this lady's running, you know, she's been against...

breaking up encampments forever, even if they're in front of schools. So is this possible? Do we have any? It isn't. The irony is it's possible through Karen Bass's Insight Safe programs that have taken place in her district, to which she has posted on social media about. So yes, it's possible. It's so ironic that we're in this situation to incredibly progressive, permissive. policy makers fighting over these numbers who's at fault well i'm just thinking mathematically if you have an 8% increase across the city can romans district actually be down 49% is that even mathematically feasible i mean it's Good question. I would, I saw the math, it did add up, but I would say again, if you look at why in her district or what worked, it was those large inside safe operations that she did not show up at. I don't know if you remember, but she was, she. The last two that has been happening in her district, she wasn't even there for. But she didn't thank the mayor for those programs. I do want to highlight, though, that the Lhasa has said that the reason that we saw the increase is the time-limited subsidies program. So they give you money for rent and you look for apartments. They said the reason for the increase is this program, and that is the platform NIFIA is running on. So we have a Mithia program, which has already failed. That number is way too convenient for the agenda that she's pushing while she's running. I agree. You know, I just. She also said there was a 41% decline in tents. And of course, as we have found out, the Rand Corporation has found this out, a lot of tents disappeared, but the people living in them didn't disappear. They're just reclassified as rough sleepers. And they're sleeping in alleyways and in the bushes and under awnings and things. And they're not as readily visible because you don't have the big bright blue tent signifying that their existence. I think we're in the same camp. This whole system is, I don't know if you've done the count, but you go and you count and then you, they all have this formula. There's two people for a certain size tent. There's one for another size. So it's not like they're asking how many people are in here and writing a number down. So, you know, it's not, um, It's not a... So they're making up the number. They're making up the number. Because, yeah, who's going to stick their head in a tent to see how many people are in there? As they go. Yes, yes. It's definitely not a system that we've ever trusted when it comes to numbers. But our money, you know, this count, it's all about how we get our federal funding. So that's why we do it year after year. That's crazy.

Oh, this is crazy. Jamie Page, thank you for coming on. Excellent stories in the California Post on these matters. Thank you. And we'll have more coming up. You're listening to John Cobalt on demand from KFI AM 640. Here's another stupid idea. Up in Sacramento, in Sacramento, the legislature. It's trying to decide whether violent criminals can get the right to blame abuse as part of their legal defense. Violent criminals here. Four years in a row, they've considered this. Now, obviously, the police and the prosecutors say no. But if... If you have been a victim of sexual violence in a relationship or been involved in human trafficking, you could use your abuse as a legal defense for any violent crimes you commit with the exception of most murder cases. You know where this idea is coming from? What happened in the video? This idea is coming from Susan Bustamante. 71-year-old woman identified as formerly incarcerated. God, I hate that phrase. Cal Matters printed this story. Shame on you people. Ryan Sabalo. She should be known as a felon or an ex-con. That's what you do. All right? Former convict, former felon, not this formerly incarcerated. God, idiot journalists. This is why you can't get decent news coverage. Everything's so screwed up. They can't even speak English. Now, why did, why does Susan Bustamante at the age of 71 drive from Orange County, Sacramento every year to try to get them to give a big break to people who commit violent crimes? Again, the idea is if you suffered some kind of abuse, you can have an abuse excuse. Well, in 1987, and by the way, you have to go, let's see, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 paragraphs to find this out. 9 paragraphs. Bustamante was sentenced to life in prison, no parole. She hired her brother to kill her husband, Stephen Bustamante, and the brother also disposed of the body for a $100,000 life insurance policy that she and the brother were splitting. She wanted a break. You probably know what's coming. She wanted to tell the jurors during her trial how her husband beat her and threatened to kill her. She claimed, I only asked my brother for help, the idea that he would kill Steve that would never occur to me. Then he calls and says Stephen is dead. Then he threatened to call the police and say I planned it. He blackmailed me for Stephen's insurance. I was afraid of having my daughters take it away from me, so I gave in. I don't believe any of that. It's a nonsense story. The jurors didn't believe it. She should be in prison still, but Jerry Brown commuted her sentence because in 2017, he fell for the story. Even if the story is true, why don't you go home and keep to yourself? Don't stick your beacon to every other potential case.

You know, if you've got a bad marriage like that, how about you get in the car and hit the gas? Not that I'm sure ex-husband, you know, former husband deserved to get killed, but you don't do it. And you don't hire your brother to do it because that could really unleash mayhem on the world. Because a lot of people don't take responsibility for what they do in a relationship. California law already allows defendants to cite abuse that they experienced and call in expert witnesses. I never understood why expert witnesses are given any credence on any side of an issue. They're all paid. And if they didn't give the testimony that the defendant wanted or that the prosecution wanted, then they wouldn't make the money. I don't understand. Everybody carries on all day about the credibility of witnesses, right? The legal profession. The sanctity of the legal profession. You have hired liars is what you have here. Because if one size hires an expert, then so does the other. 100% of the time they disagree, which means one of them is lying. And they're paid. They're paid to lie.

So, of course, the legislature. You know, why don't, why are we even, why don't we just go the whole route of the Democrat Socialists of America and just abolish prisons, just abolish everything, right? No more legal system. No more legal system, no more constitution, just to abolish everything. See what happens. I'm sure it's going to be fun. All right. We've got more coming up. You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI AM 640. It's the John Cobalt show. We're on from 3 to 6. Moist Line, 877 Moist 86 for Friday. You got anything that's enraging you. That's the place to go. Beats smacking someone in the face. 877 Moist 86. You're usually a talkback feature on the I-Heart radio app. Last hour, Debra and I were talking about this sad, pathetic Gen Z generation that has no idea. how to get to know somebody and develop a romance, develop a dating. I didn't say they had, you said they had no idea how. I just said it's, I understand why they go and do online dating because it's hard to find people. It's hard to meet people. It's really hard to meet people when you don't talk to them. Yes, that's true. Which leads to this story. According to a new study. People are speaking far fewer words every day than they used to. I'm not going to get through the details of the study, but they carried around a device that recorded you speaking at certain times during the day. And the average number of words in 2005, which is pre-smartphone, was 16,632 words. In 2019, it had dropped to 11,900. And every year, participants in the study spoke about 340 fewer words a day than they did the year before. Because they're texting so much. Is that why? That is part of it, yeah. Because they're no longer speaking with people. You also have more people. Well, you can order everything online when you go shopping, including your groceries. And as this writer writes in the Atlantic, a generation ago, living life required conversations. You talk to the grocery store cashier, the receptionist at the office, at the doctor's office. At a neighborhood restaurant, you'd call to make a reservation. Now you never have to talk to anybody. Well, you like that. Yes. I do, because I don't like talking to people. With the exception of those infuriating bot things, when you have to get on the phone, I'm so sorry you're having trouble, Mr. Cobalt. I'm so sorry to hear that. I understand that you're having trouble with your order. I'm so sorry to hear that. It's even worse when it's a bot saying those things. Because at least with the customer service reps, when they did that, I could start yelling at them and get them all flustered and upset. But the bot doesn't get upset. In fact, I had a bot that I started yelling at. I think I'm going insane. Sunday afternoon, I had to go through my wallet and I discovered one of my credit cards that disappeared.

I hadn't used it in a while. It was one of those cards we got because it was 70,000 free miles on an airline, but I didn't need it. I didn't use it. And it disappeared. And who knows where, right? So I call just to stop it and get a replacement. And the bot just didn't understand what I needed. And I was, I got into bot hell. I was in a loop where it kept circling me back to, to the beginning. And I just started yelling. And then I realized how profoundly stupid I was. I'm sitting by myself on a sofa yelling at, it's not even a recorded voice. I don't know what it is. You know, it's a thing. It's a thing. Well, at least you realized that you were an idiot and you stopped. No, I kept yelling at it. Oh, never mind. So this researcher, what's this researcher's name? Valerie Valeria Pfeiffer, University of Missouri. And she says that.

The conversations you have with strangers or people you don't know as well, those opportunities have declined a lot in recent years because people said a text or a DM. They don't call a friend on the phone. See, I still call my friends, especially the older ones, a lot. And I'll talk with them for a long time. My sons some years ago. got startled by the idea when I told them to go call somebody. Startled? Huh? Well, they said, no, this is very common in that generation. Well, you don't do that. What do you don't do that? Well, how else are you going to talk to them? I'm very impatient with this. When I read the stories, look, well, I don't know how to go on a date. Well, you've got to ask somebody. Well, I know how to get a hold of them. We got to call them. Well, when I get a call from my kids, what's wrong? Are you okay? Because they usually text me. Oh, I know. My wife does that too. Well, here's an idea. Answer calmly. But it's just a reflex because I'm so used to them hardly calling me. They're always texting me that when they do call, a lot of times it's a problem. There's something about mothers who assume everything is a disaster. I mean, what's the phrase I heard? They catastrophes everything. Everything is a catastrophe. She wrote a book, and there's a study where researchers compared college friends who communicated face-to-face. compared to video, audio, or other instant messaging, in-person conversation led to the most emotional connection. You had to do a study for that, huh? Online messaging. led to the least emotional kind of. Well, there is no emotion in a text. In fact, you can misinterpret what somebody writes. And I know I have been misinterpreted and I know that I misinterpreted. You've been misinterpreted? Yes, can you believe that? That's hard to believe. I know. Yes, like, for example, I no longer text anything. that would have any slight emotional subtext to it with my wife. Nearly a hundred percent chance it gets misinterpreted. Sarcasm does not work at all. In fact, all forms of humor do not work in text messages with wives. I don't know if that's true with you. But people tend to take the written word literally. Yes. And... I'm too much of a, like, sarcastic jerk. So it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't play. So, yeah, you know, all these stories go back to the same thing, is everybody's afraid of personal connections. I mean, it's why like the whole, the whole government workforce in Sacramento.

that have been off for six and a half years now, and they didn't want to go back to the office because they don't want to deal with people. They don't want to deal with each other. Like coworkers who used to work together in the office every day don't want to go back to sitting next to each other and interacting with them. Well, they also want to go walk their dogs on the company's dime. They don't want to get dressed. Yeah, exactly. They want to stay in the robes. And also your attention span. also dissipates. Not only does it dissipate because you're constantly in stupid scroll mode, but we don't have as many chances to follow as someone tells a lengthy, complicated story. It's harder, apparently, to have normal conversations with people, especially from the scrolling generation, because there's no experience they've had sitting down and listening to you talk about your day in any detail. Boy, it's really time to get out. Like for me? Yeah, but where are you going to go? You know, maybe just, I wonder if Elon Musk will just, you could buy a spaceship and just go. He'll shoot you into the sky and you just, you're going to die in the chair. You know you would miss it too much. You can say all you want. You're not going anywhere. No, no, I want to leave the planet. That's a real urge. You're going to bring a microphone with you? I can talk from space if, you know, if you'll listen. I'll just be up there. But then I'm not going to be with you. And you'll be down here. Nah. Then I'll be working from home. You're listening to John Cobalt on demand from KFI AM 640. We are on from three to six. In a few minutes after six o'clock, you're going to have the podcast release, John Cobalt Show on demand. And you could listen to what you missed. We have Royal Oaks on today to talk about the upcoming, well, they're going to trial for that singer David. You know, the guy who had the chopped up girlfriend, the 14-year-old girlfriend in the trunk of his car. Yeah, that's going to go to trial, shockingly. And we also had Michael Michae on from USC to talk about the California gas prices and the complete refusal of Gavin Newsom and the legislature to give you a break, even a nickel's worth of a break. As our gas sits at $5.64 a gallon, while 23 states in this country are in the threes. And 47 states are in the threes and fours. And no matter what, they do not budge. It is screw you. Now, I mentioned before that Nithya Raman is claiming she, that her street homeless number is down by 49%. And I flat out don't believe that. There's so much lying that goes on with housing numbers, especially by candidates. Here's another number. I'm having a hard time believing. Lineage logistics, they're the ones who had $85 million, no, 85 million pounds of rotted food trapped in the Boyle Heights warehouse that caught fire, remember? And then...

After the fire, there was a horrific, disgusting odor that's been going on for weeks. The fire was June 17th. And as of last Monday, they announced that they'd only hauled away 4% of the rotted food. And that was over a month. July 20th, right? Fires on June 17th. July 20th was the... was the reporting day for this, 4% removed, 96% of the rotted food still there. And you heard about the rats and the flies and the whole thing. Now they're claiming in the last seven days, they have now removed 50% of the rotted food. They went from 4% on... July 20th to 50% today. Now, how can that be? That's... How have they cleared out nearly half the food? When they could barely make a dent in it for five weeks. They got a tremendous amount of criticism because the stink is horrendous. Now, Karen Bass did give them a 45-day... deadline. But who listens to her? I mean, I, oh, I will say we drove down the 10 freeway on Saturday night coming back from the lake. And I was all bracing myself for the stink. And I didn't smell the stink. And I was surprised. I thought maybe the wind was blowing in another direction. But linear logistics claims that this rotted food has been sealed in deodorized containers and is being transported off site. They said they removed the wall separating the burned and unburned section of the building, and that helped speed up the cleaning of the unburned section, where I guess all this food was trapped. But I don't know how they actually removed. Because that would be over 40 million pounds of food in seven days. You see, I just can't believe anything I read. And I don't trust that any reporters go out and say, well, how can that be? How do we know that's true? They put it on their website, so it's true, and it gets reported as fact, and you know the routine. I can't tell you how difficult it is to actually do this program in recent years because I just absolutely don't trust anything I read or anything I see or anything I hear. I just don't. And if you ask me, how do I figure out what to go with? I have no idea. I wish I could boil it down to a secret. I don't know. I'm just relying on instinct. I don't think we miss very often, but boy, it's a headache. It's a headache because everybody lies. And the reporters lie and everybody's got their weird agendas and everybody's twists and the truth and everybody's withholding truth, which is the worst thing at all of all. You don't know what they're not telling you. This didn't exist. Even a few years ago, this didn't exist like this. And nobody's ashamed of it. Nobody's embarrassed by it.

Everybody embraces it. But that's the world I've got a deal in. All right. We got, oh, Mark Thompson. Well, that's exciting. Mark Thompson is in for Tim Conway tonight. And our podcast will be released in about, oh, I don't know, just a few minutes after 6 o'clock. And you could watch the show on YouTube whenever you wish. That video is all recorded, and that'll be posted in a matter of seconds. Michael Crozier has the news, then Mark. And Michael's live in the KFI 24-hour newsroom. You've been listening to the John Cobalt Show podcast. You can always hear the show live on KFI AM 640 from 3 to 6 p.m. every Monday through Friday. And, of course, anytime on demand on the IHeart Radio app. KFI, AM 640. More stimulating talk.