Speaker 1: And we continue at two oh five in the afternoon
Speaker 1: on the John Phillips Show. Mister Randy wgings in Culver City.
Speaker 2: John, it was the grand opening for the La Metros
Speaker 2: extension of the D line, going all the way now
Speaker 2: from Koreatown to the Miracle Mile. And to celebrate there's
Speaker 2: free Metro rides all weekend and they're even giving away
Speaker 2: t shirts that say.
Speaker 1: Ride the d oh no, yep. Well, I'm sure those
Speaker 1: shirts will be popular, but not for the reasons they're anticipating.
Speaker 1: Eight hundred two two two five two two two is
Speaker 1: jellphone number one. Eight hundred two two two five two
Speaker 1: two two. It is our pleasure to bolcome our next
Speaker 1: guest to the program. He's with the Hoover Institution up
Speaker 1: at Stanford University. He's also author of the forthcoming book
Speaker 1: The Counter Revel The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump
Speaker 1: and the MAGA Movement, available online at Amazon dot com.
Speaker 1: You can follow him on x at VD Hanson Victor
Speaker 1: Davis Hanson, Welcome, Thank you for having me, well, thanks
Speaker 1: so much for stopping by. And you are, in addition
Speaker 1: to being a guy who has his pulse on American
Speaker 1: politics and classics and all of those things. You're also
Speaker 1: a guy who understands California backwards and forwards. You're a native.
Speaker 1: You live here, you have raised your family here, you've
Speaker 1: worked here, paid taxes here. And I've got to tell you,
Speaker 1: as someone who has lived here my entire life as well,
Speaker 1: I've never been this concerned, slash depressed about the future
Speaker 1: of the state. As I look at the stable of
Speaker 1: candidates running for governor. This unimpressive list of career politicians,
Speaker 1: of people who have failed upwards their entire lives, who
Speaker 1: think that they're capable of running a state the size
Speaker 1: of California, But all of us know that they're not.
Speaker 1: They are bright enough to understand that they can't run
Speaker 1: on their own record. They can't say that things in
Speaker 1: California have improved under sixteen consecutive years of Democratic Party rule,
Speaker 1: first for Jerry Brown, then with Gavin Newsom. They know
Speaker 1: that crime is worse, They know that homelessness is worse.
Speaker 1: They know that the bullet trains a disaster. They know
Speaker 1: that none of us can buy insurance either for our
Speaker 1: homes or our businesses. They know that the budget is
Speaker 1: upside down and they're going to probably raise our taxes
Speaker 1: in any number of ways in the coming years. So
Speaker 1: what do they do. They spend all of their time
Speaker 1: talking about Donald Trump. And because they spend all of
Speaker 1: their time criticizing Donald Trump and criticizing Ice and weighing
Speaker 1: in on federal policy, they don't really spend much time
Speaker 1: at all talking about California Now, the voters who are
Speaker 1: going to be deciding who the next governor is. Of course,
Speaker 1: they don't benefit from that, but it also makes it
Speaker 1: difficult for one of them to break away from the
Speaker 1: pack because they're all saying the same thing. They're all
Speaker 1: criticizing Donald Trump, and they don't really create a differentiation
Speaker 1: between themselves and the other candidates for the voters. Are
Speaker 1: you as pessimistic as I am about this upcoming gubernatorial election?
Speaker 3: I'm afraid I might be more pessimistic. I have a
Speaker 3: scenario where it's probably close, maybe for a while, and
Speaker 3: then we have it. The counting will go on in
Speaker 3: typical California fashion for a month, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: we'll start to see sciu ballots start to be counted
Speaker 3: that we're mailed in twenty days later or except for
Speaker 3: people who were not here legally. So I'm just as
Speaker 3: suspicious of when speaking as a veteran of three or
Speaker 3: four different here in the San Joaquin Valley of congressional
Speaker 3: races where Republican candidates actually one on election day and lost.
Speaker 3: I think that's happened two or three times now. So
Speaker 3: a part of the problem in California is that they
Speaker 3: control that they've controlled with supermajorities, the legislature. They control
Speaker 3: the appointments to the judicial bench. All the superior court judges,
Speaker 3: I mean all of the sports leader judges are retired
Speaker 3: or retiring. So they have legislative executives, not one set
Speaker 3: wide Republican executive. And they have the legislative executive and
Speaker 3: judicial and then they have the administrative states. So there's
Speaker 3: there's nowhere. And then it's even more depressing that when
Speaker 3: you talk to people in your family and my family,
Speaker 3: they're voted for this and others forms that do. They
Speaker 3: admit that things are terrible, but they still keep voting because,
Speaker 3: as you say, it's we're not Donald Trump, or California's
Speaker 3: got the tech industry or since rediculous. But they'll talk
Speaker 3: about everything except the price of gasoline, kill a lot
Speaker 3: of hours, property car insurance, house insurance, the fire in
Speaker 3: La the fire and this year, any the water crisis,
Speaker 3: anything that matters to people, they won't talk about because
Speaker 3: they know what they did. But they also know that
Speaker 3: they know what they did, and the people are going
Speaker 3: to vote for them again. I think we've got to
Speaker 3: realize that it's not necessarily a political problem. It's a
Speaker 3: demographic problem. We've lost about two hundred and fifty to
Speaker 3: three hundred thousand people a year, and that adds up
Speaker 3: after thirty years, we've lost about eight million people more
Speaker 3: mc majon, Reagan, Pete Wilson, Schwarzenegger voters. And then we've
Speaker 3: had this eleven twelve trillion dollar market capitalization in Silicon
Speaker 3: Valley with this limitless amount of money. But that's why
Speaker 3: we have. The center of power is left southern California.
Speaker 3: There's no Sammy Ordians or anybody like that anymore. It's
Speaker 3: it's Kamala Harris, Jerry Brown, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, you
Speaker 3: name it, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom. They're all Northern California
Speaker 3: leftists that are all either nevol kids, are very very
Speaker 3: wealthy and they feel they have all that Silicon Valley
Speaker 3: money and they live on that coastal strip. So the
Speaker 3: Joyas Brooke League, and they heard a lot of their wealth.
Speaker 3: But some of them they make a lot of money,
Speaker 3: and it's a kind of a medieval society. Everybody else
Speaker 3: is pretty poor. There's no middle class like there used
Speaker 3: to be. We add into the matrix at twenty seven
Speaker 3: percent of the population was not born in the United States.
Speaker 3: So if you've got a problem with truckers from India
Speaker 3: that haven't been property licensed, and that's a constituency. If
Speaker 3: suddenly you're a racist and you're anti Indian. If you
Speaker 3: have a problem with DUI with a lot of Hispanic
Speaker 3: drivers they're here illegally from Mexico, then you're a racist.
Speaker 3: If you've got a problem with people swarming in a
Speaker 3: jewelry store in la or walking out with something and
Speaker 3: you hate blacks and that DEI and MESSI. So it's
Speaker 3: just DEI, d I d I in down Trump Donald Trump,
Speaker 3: and nobody talks about the real problems that affited everybody.
Speaker 3: And I've never said so, I'm pretty pisionistic.
Speaker 1: I have a friend of mine who is a smart lady,
Speaker 1: college educated lady, white collar professional, retired now homeowner in California,
Speaker 1: fun to go drinking with, fun to have dinner with
Speaker 1: politically a partisan liberal Democrat, and you get a couple
Speaker 1: of drinks dinner, and you start talking about the homeless problem,
Speaker 1: and she hates it. She moved out of Los Angeles
Speaker 1: because she can't stand it. You talk to her about
Speaker 1: retail theft. She hates the fact that her local drug
Speaker 1: store is shut down, her local Starbucks is shut down
Speaker 1: because of retail theft, and because of all the problems
Speaker 1: associated with crime. She recognizes that the bullet train is
Speaker 1: never going to be built. She complains about the fact
Speaker 1: that her insurance company dropped her and it's very difficult
Speaker 1: for her to buy insurance. She doesn't like to pay
Speaker 1: more money in taxes. She understands that people are stealing
Speaker 1: from medical in terms of everything that we've learned from
Speaker 1: Nick Shirley and CBS News regarding the hospice care fraud
Speaker 1: going on in the San Fernando Valley. But when you
Speaker 1: ask her, okay, are you ready to start voting different
Speaker 1: and put an end to that, she doesn't regard those
Speaker 1: issues as political. She regards those issues as parochial, as
Speaker 1: just problems with the area that you live in. To her,
Speaker 1: politics is all about Donald Trump and hating Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: and she takes that extremely myopic view of what is
Speaker 1: political and what is politics to her, and that's how
Speaker 1: she casts her ballot. How do you break through to
Speaker 1: someone like that who knows better but will not change
Speaker 1: the way they vote, at least now.
Speaker 3: I don't think you can, because I've had that similar experience.
Speaker 3: And what's going to change is that what can't go
Speaker 3: on won't go on. And when you're losing well over
Speaker 3: a quarter million high earners and you've already got one
Speaker 3: percent paying almost fifty percent of the income tax, which
Speaker 3: is intel of the budget, and you're driving out refineries,
Speaker 3: and now you're doing the most suicidal thing, driving out
Speaker 3: the billionaires. And then you've got twenty one percent of
Speaker 3: the population below the poverty line, and you've got fifty
Speaker 3: percent of all verse or medical verst forty percent of
Speaker 3: the population is on medical. At some point, there's not
Speaker 3: enough to victimizers and offensors to pay for the victimize
Speaker 3: and the oppress. They're running out of targets and pretty
Speaker 3: much they're getting down to the nitty gritty people who
Speaker 3: are you know, have a farm or they have a
Speaker 3: family business, or their grandkids are here, they can't leave.
Speaker 3: But anybody that's mobile is leading. And these are the
Speaker 3: people who pay. These are the people they despise that
Speaker 3: they pay the tab and they're not the people who
Speaker 3: are on public assistance and getting cash. They're not the
Speaker 3: people who need the scene of an accident. They're not
Speaker 3: the people who shoplift, They're not the people that's the
Speaker 3: overhead charge in California. These are the people pay for
Speaker 3: that overset charge. But when you lean when these people leave,
Speaker 3: and it's all different ethnic backgrounds are leaving. You know
Speaker 3: a lot of successful in Mexican American, Indian American people
Speaker 3: are leaving. And when you get all of these successful
Speaker 3: people or upwardly mobile people, then who is going to
Speaker 3: pay for these people, especially if you have a Republican
Speaker 3: administration again, because I'm not going to bail them out anymore.
Speaker 3: And it's just I don't know. I mean, all the
Speaker 3: successful sectors that we need. The oil and gas has
Speaker 3: been destroyed. The timber industry has been destroyed, the membal
Speaker 3: industry have been destroyed. They've got hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 3: acres that are out of production because they can't get water.
Speaker 3: Even though we have a pretty good wet year every
Speaker 3: year now. So they've attacked agriculture. They go after all
Speaker 3: the successful industries and make it almost impossible, and then
Speaker 3: when people leave, they insult on it. I talked to
Speaker 3: a very prosperous guy that's a big donor at Stanford,
Speaker 3: and he said, it's not so much as they gouge
Speaker 3: me taxing if they insult me. So it's like it's
Speaker 3: my duty to pay for all these flaudulent schemes they
Speaker 3: dream on, and then they insult me for being so stupid.
Speaker 3: So I'm not even stupid anymore. And I think that's
Speaker 3: what's getting people angry. They insult them as well as
Speaker 3: take them to the cleaners. And they're not going to
Speaker 3: do it anymore. And you know it's and that's hard
Speaker 3: to do in California. It's the most naturally abundant, affluent,
Speaker 3: beautiful state in the nation, and how you turn that
Speaker 3: into prevatory is pretty hard to do that. They've managed
Speaker 3: to do it, and they won't stop. It's never enough
Speaker 3: for them because they get up every morning thinking I
Speaker 3: haven't had enough socialism. I have to do allow of
Speaker 3: social stuff today and I have to hate Donald Trump
Speaker 3: more and then they go to bed. I think I
Speaker 3: didn't do enough. I should have done more to hate
Speaker 3: Crump and playing more socialism into Californy. And it's always
Speaker 3: it's very sad. We have the top twenty universities in
Speaker 3: the nation. We have supposedly the top five, not the
Speaker 3: top five to five of the top twenty Stanford, cal Tech, UCLA,
Speaker 3: UFC and U s boute. But when you go to
Speaker 3: those campuses and you see what they're teaching, when you
Speaker 3: talk to people who hire their graduates, would you want
Speaker 3: to hire a law graduate from UCLA or Standing when
Speaker 3: they've when they've driven out of federal judge or a
Speaker 3: speaker in sulfomm and their whole curriculus dei and they
Speaker 3: don't really know contract law or bond law or any
Speaker 3: of the traditional legal disciplines. So everything has been done
Speaker 3: down four or five notch is the medical, legal media, everything,
Speaker 3: it's kind of a common denominator. They have so many
Speaker 3: people that are poorly educated that you really can't have excellence.
Speaker 3: And when you try to strive for excusing that whole
Speaker 3: Bourg comes in your face and says you're a classicist.
Speaker 3: And I mean in the sense that you hate people
Speaker 3: of a different class you hate, you're a racist or
Speaker 3: a natives, your chancellors, you're homophobis misogynous. That they never
Speaker 3: deal with the argument. And so unless it's got to
Speaker 3: get a little bit worse, I think until the state
Speaker 3: is dysfunctional, and then maybe they'll call am a cavalry
Speaker 3: or I don't know, the fire department, somebody that's put
Speaker 3: out the flame. But it's amazing just watching that debate
Speaker 3: with Karen Bath. I just her whole debate was, I
Speaker 3: can't say a word because I destroyed the city as
Speaker 3: much as it was not destroyed when I inherited, I
Speaker 3: destroyed it further, I'm just going to kind of smile
Speaker 3: because I know I have all the unions behind me,
Speaker 3: and I'm gonna, you know, call you all these names.
Speaker 3: And then but she didn't even she didn't make an
Speaker 3: attempt to talk about the fire or water problem anything,
Speaker 3: and they don't. That's kind of a contempt they have
Speaker 3: for the voter. Now, it's like, we own the system,
Speaker 3: We own the legislative, judicial, and executive branches. We have
Speaker 3: to bu rockers, and we can do whatever we want
Speaker 3: if we want to pay somebody in seven hundred thousand
Speaker 3: to hard to run water in power in La into
Speaker 3: the reservoirs. We can. If we want the Wuty Amendment
Speaker 3: mayor to phone in a bomb fleet and be a sellon,
Speaker 3: we can. We want the mayor to go to Canada, Ghana,
Speaker 3: or wherever she went, we can. It's kind of an
Speaker 3: arrogance of power they have.
Speaker 1: In the old days in California. And I asked this
Speaker 1: question to Joel Pollock yesterday. We had elites that would
Speaker 1: not let us go off the rails. The railroad industry
Speaker 1: Southern Pacific, the oil industry, the Chandwer family, you could
Speaker 1: talk about the Boswells and some of the growers in
Speaker 1: the Central Valley. They would pull the plug on these people.
Speaker 1: If a mayor of Los Angeles turned in the performance
Speaker 1: of Karen Bass, or a governor turned in the performance
Speaker 1: of Avenues, they would say, Okay, that's all from you.
Speaker 1: And they did that. They did that to Upton Sinclair
Speaker 1: when he ran for governor under the Epic program, the
Speaker 1: End Poverty in California program, and he wanted the state
Speaker 1: government to own the means of production. And these those entities,
Speaker 1: along with Louis B. Mayer and William Randolph Hurst and
Speaker 1: others said no, we're not going to do that. Why
Speaker 1: is it that the elites just roll over to these
Speaker 1: buffoones instead of pulling the plug like they should.
Speaker 3: Well, I think the nature of the elite and the
Speaker 3: big money is much different. You're talking about people that
Speaker 3: did real things. I'm not not making some people who
Speaker 3: were billionaires. To David mean a agribusiness baron, or an
Speaker 3: oil baron, or a real estate baron. That was something concrete.
Speaker 3: It was a pragmatic thing, and they were pragmatic people.
Speaker 3: But I don't think anybody realizes when you're in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 3: I mean Apples, it's got a market capitalization of a
Speaker 3: billion dollars, and when you add in Google, and you
Speaker 3: add in all of those companies, and the only thing
Speaker 3: that would gives me some hope is that the left
Speaker 3: is so crazy that they're turning on Mark Andresen and
Speaker 3: then Whowitz and Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg. They are
Speaker 3: turning on them and a lot of them. They're not
Speaker 3: going to be conservative, but they're not going to give
Speaker 3: them as much money as they used to. And you know,
Speaker 3: but when you have somebody like Lisa Jobs, that's worth
Speaker 3: ten billion. She can run the Atlantic at a huge
Speaker 3: loss and print all that invective against people. She can
Speaker 3: give all this money to all these foundations and causes.
Speaker 3: And so the nature of money is much different in
Speaker 3: two ways. It's not the pragmatic mind that goes into it.
Speaker 3: It's a guy that's just very young and he's very insulated.
Speaker 3: He's got a particular skill set, he's got a global audience,
Speaker 3: and that's a big difference. They're younger, and they're just
Speaker 3: completely different than the old wealth. These guys were really different.
Speaker 3: And I can tell you here in the San Joaquin Valley,
Speaker 3: when you saw an agrid business billionaire, I knew a
Speaker 3: lot of them. They had cowboy boots on and Levi's
Speaker 3: and a cowboy hat, and you wouldn't be able to
Speaker 3: make a distinction between them. And they're higher than money,
Speaker 3: even though they lived pretty well and they were wealthy,
Speaker 3: but they were pragmatic people. But when I'm at Stamford
Speaker 3: University and when I see these people come on campus,
Speaker 3: so I have to speak and I see these, you know,
Speaker 3: a guy with flipflops and long hair and he's stalling
Speaker 3: off about Trump, and somebody whispers to me, Well, he
Speaker 3: just got a paradigm that's better than tapal. He just
Speaker 3: sold out for three billion dollars. It's just staggering amount
Speaker 3: of wealth it's in. And that's what it probably mirrors.
Speaker 3: When San Francisco sneezes. LA gets the flu, we get
Speaker 3: the food. All these ideas, all these ideas that are
Speaker 3: toxic are invented in that nexus between San Francisco government,
Speaker 3: Silicon Valley, Stanford, UC Berkeley twin left wing that trains
Speaker 3: these people. And that's that. You know. LA used to
Speaker 3: be a conservative place, and the left used to say, well,
Speaker 3: we can't compete with them because they're so wealthy and powerful,
Speaker 3: and LA runs everything which we could run of it. Well,
Speaker 3: now they're much more powerful than Los Angeles. They have
Speaker 3: a lot of we're going to have.
Speaker 1: We're going to have to leave it there. Victor Davis
Speaker 1: Hansen from the Hoover Institution up at Stanford University, author
Speaker 1: of the forthcoming book The counter Revolution, The Fall and
Speaker 1: Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement, which is
Speaker 1: available for pre order online at Amazon dot com. You
Speaker 1: can follow him on x at vd Hanson. Victor Davis Hanson,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for stopping by.
Speaker 3: Thanks, thank your hap for having me.
Speaker 1: Eight hundred two two two five two two two is
Speaker 1: a telephone number one eight hundred two two two five
Speaker 1: two two two. If you'd like to email the show,
Speaker 1: you can do so at Johnny don't like show at
Speaker 1: gmail dot com. That's Johnny don't like show at gmail
Speaker 1: dot com. And my picks for the upcoming election are
Speaker 1: now up. I just confirmed it right now on the
Speaker 1: KSFO website. It's right there at KSFO dot com, KABC
Speaker 1: dot com. If you're curious as to how I'm filling
Speaker 1: out my ballot, my ballot is on the website right now.
Speaker 1: That's not to say that you should vote the same
Speaker 1: way I do. Do your own research, figure out what
Speaker 1: works for you, and vote that way. But a number
Speaker 1: of you email me and want to know just exactly
Speaker 1: how I'm voting, So find we put it up on
Speaker 1: the website, so it's there for your enjoyment.
Speaker 2: Wait a second, Johnny, you didn't vote for Pamela Price.
Speaker 1: Hard to believe, isn't it.
Speaker 2: You think people should support Ursula Jones Dixon over this
Speaker 2: crazy lady.
Speaker 1: If you want to find out why I came down
Speaker 1: that way, Randy, you can check out the podcast where
Speaker 1: we talk about Pamela Price. Oh, we have talked a
Speaker 1: lot about Pammy Price in the past. So if you
Speaker 1: want to find out why exactly John doesn't want to
Speaker 1: go another round with the recalled Alameda County DA Pamela Price.
Speaker 1: Search for the John Phillips Show.
Speaker 2: Wherever you get your podcast, whether it's the Apple podcast app, iHeart, Spotify,
Speaker 2: search for the John Phillips Show, hit subscribe. You can
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Speaker 1: App, the KMJ now app.
Speaker 2: We're on the big KMJ set days at two and
Speaker 2: Saturdays at noon in the Central Valley. Excuse me, so
Speaker 2: many different ways to listen live to what we're doing
Speaker 2: here every single day from noon to three.
Speaker 1: Make sure you subscribe.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of interesting, exciting stuff we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about later on in the year, so you want
Speaker 2: to be subscribed, and you can download all the podcasts,
Speaker 2: including all the ones where we talk about the airing
Speaker 2: of the grievances from one pam E.
Speaker 1: Price, Jeph for Brown and find out well we're experiencing
Speaker 1: more problems with the nine to one one system here
Speaker 1: in California with those details. Here's mister Randy Waning.
Speaker 2: This time it's San Diego County that is seeing a
Speaker 2: shortage of nine one one operators that is leading to
Speaker 2: longer and longer nine one one wait times. For more,
Speaker 2: here's NBC seven in San Diego.
Speaker 1: For me, I need to transfers to the paramedics.
Speaker 4: So, based on national standards, the San Diego County Sheriff's
Speaker 4: Office is not answering nine to one one calls fast
Speaker 4: enough and is an ongoing shortage of emergency dispatchers.
Speaker 2: This is becoming a statewide problem. And part of the
Speaker 2: issue here is these standards are very very high obviously
Speaker 2: for these jobs, and they're very very very very stressful,
Speaker 2: so people quit and it takes over a year to
Speaker 2: train somebody.
Speaker 4: We have an update right now for you to an
Speaker 4: NBC seven investigation that found that some callers are waiting
Speaker 4: minutes for an answer, with many of them just hanging up.
Speaker 5: An investigative producer.
Speaker 1: What is this Oakland, Well Shang was right on top
Speaker 1: of that.
Speaker 4: An investigative producer, Mike Dorfman reports the county has essentially
Speaker 4: given up trying to fill more than a dozen empty positions.
Speaker 5: You know, you'd think that would be the last thing
Speaker 5: they do at a time when performance is below national standards.
Speaker 5: Even though the county admits that more dispatcher bodies equals
Speaker 5: a faster response, when every second counts, beeping.
Speaker 1: Noise you hear.
Speaker 5: Is bad news, and investigator bad news at the San
Speaker 5: Diego County Sheriff's Office. It means at least one nine
Speaker 5: one one caller is being forced to wait potentially for
Speaker 5: life saving help.
Speaker 1: Most Oh, boy, nine on one, please hold well and
Speaker 1: keep in mind it's not just crime victims who called
Speaker 1: nine one one. You could be having a stroke, You
Speaker 1: could be having a heart attack, you could be having
Speaker 1: a medical event where getting you to an emergency room
Speaker 1: is critical to making sure that you survive or making
Speaker 1: sure that you have a good quality of life if
Speaker 1: and when you survive. I remember a story when we
Speaker 1: were covering the nine to one one failures in Oakland.
Speaker 1: Somebody was having a medical episode. Nine one one had
Speaker 1: put them on hold. They knew an ambulance was not
Speaker 1: going to come, so they called an uber and had
Speaker 1: the uber take them to Kaiser. Oh God.
Speaker 6: Most of the time the people are calling the Sheriff's
Speaker 6: department on their worst days.
Speaker 5: Amuels knows a thing or two about emergencies. She's worked
Speaker 5: in this building for twenty years, first as a dispatcher.
Speaker 6: It is not an easy job, but it is a
Speaker 6: very rewarding.
Speaker 5: Job, and now as one of its five communications coordinators.
Speaker 5: She also understands that there's a lot of room for improvement.
Speaker 6: It is not where we want to be. We don't
Speaker 6: want people to wait any amount of time on nine
Speaker 6: one one.
Speaker 5: The National Emergency Number Association says dispatch centers should be
Speaker 5: answering ninety percent of nine one one calls within fifteen seconds.
Speaker 5: NBC seven investigates analyzed county data and found the Sheriff's
Speaker 5: office is missing the mark on that standard. In our
Speaker 5: first story.
Speaker 2: In Oakland, it was missing the mark by like fifty percent,
Speaker 2: and then Shan got it up like a couple of
Speaker 2: percentage points, so what from an F minus to an F.
Speaker 1: And then she was crediting herself for making it not
Speaker 1: quite as bad as it was before.
Speaker 5: In our first story, we found that only seventy six
Speaker 5: point one percent of calls were picked up in fifteen
Speaker 5: seconds or less. That was during twenty twenty four. Now
Speaker 5: compare that to new data from last year, almost no
Speaker 5: improvement seventy six point five percent.
Speaker 6: Staffing is a huge part of it. If you need
Speaker 6: people to answer the phones and to dispatch the.
Speaker 5: Calls, Hiring and retaining dispatchers is a challenge for the
Speaker 5: entire industry, and the Sheriff's Office is no exception since
Speaker 5: at least.
Speaker 2: Twenty nine I mean, it takes a very specific kind
Speaker 2: of person that even wants to do that job. It
Speaker 2: doesn't pay as much as some other positions that are
Speaker 2: as stressful, and the standards obviously are so high that
Speaker 2: a lot of people don't even pass the test.
Speaker 1: No, and you know what good for them they should be.
Speaker 1: They should have high requirements to be a nine to
Speaker 1: one to one operator. You don't want to put some
Speaker 1: buffoone in that position and have them screw everything up.
Speaker 5: Since at least twenty nineteen, about two dozen or more
Speaker 5: of its dispatcher positions have been vacant out of about
Speaker 5: one hundred and twenty five total.
Speaker 6: Kids don't grow up and think I want to be
Speaker 6: a public safety dispatcher, So we have to work hard
Speaker 6: to even introduce this career as a possibility to people.
Speaker 5: But now it's giving up on them.
Speaker 2: You know, as tough as this job market is, think
Speaker 2: about that. There are twenty five open positions for nine
Speaker 2: to one to one dispatchers in San Diego County and
Speaker 2: no one's applying.
Speaker 1: Oh no, but that's the case across the board. For
Speaker 1: positions that require highly specialized training, most organizations have a
Speaker 1: difficult time filling those positions. There's a lot of people
Speaker 1: out there who have very few skills who are looking
Speaker 1: for work. It's a problem if you're looking for one
Speaker 1: of those jobs. But if you want to be a
Speaker 1: nine to one to one operator and you have the
Speaker 1: proper training, my guess is you can pick your department.
Speaker 1: Or are we lucky we signed that contract?
Speaker 2: We have no skills, but now it's giving up on
Speaker 2: the hope of filling thirteen of those empty slides.
Speaker 5: Instead, those positions were reclassified, a few turned into management jobs,
Speaker 5: while the rest left the division entirely bolstering the crime
Speaker 5: lab and.
Speaker 2: ETO to deal with the budget deficits. They took all
Speaker 2: those vacant positions and they move the money to other
Speaker 2: places and just said screw it.
Speaker 5: Great bolstering the crime lab and even human resources. Is
Speaker 5: that the right move to be doing at a time
Speaker 5: when you're not hitting standards.
Speaker 6: The unfortunate part is our positions are hard to recruit positions.
Speaker 6: That's kind of how they're defined. So when positions sit
Speaker 6: vacant for a periods of time and we cannot fill them,
Speaker 6: typically they get reallocated elsewhere.
Speaker 2: And the fewer dispatchers is like that house that's been
Speaker 2: on sale for a year. At some point you know
Speaker 2: no one's buying. Take it off the market, and the.
Speaker 5: Fewer dispatchers left to do the job. Also often have
Speaker 5: to deal with the fact that emergencies in public places
Speaker 5: means they'll be inundated with calls like this deadly crash
Speaker 5: last month in San Marco's callers flooded the com center
Speaker 5: to report it. Samuels pointed to alternative ways to carry
Speaker 5: the load.
Speaker 6: Maybe you can solve this problem without people, right.
Speaker 1: Uh, oh AI is going to do that job too,
Speaker 1: not a good idea.
Speaker 6: So one of those is going to be our hyper
Speaker 6: AI that is answering our new non emergency.
Speaker 5: Number, that system allowing dispatch.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, if you've ever dealt with a customer service
Speaker 2: number where they now have an AI agent and you're
Speaker 2: trying to just get them to transfer you to a
Speaker 2: human being.
Speaker 1: It is real tough. There are two types of phone
Speaker 1: calls that I make where I know I'm wasting my time.
Speaker 1: If I call and I'm talking to a and you
Speaker 1: have to press one for English, and then you have
Speaker 1: to try to find the correct apartment and you have
Speaker 1: to go through the phone tree before you finally get
Speaker 1: to a live human being, you are going to waste
Speaker 1: an insane amount of time to not get to the
Speaker 1: right person. The other issue is if you get a
Speaker 1: foreign call center. Those people are not properly trained and
Speaker 1: they can never fix a problem, and if you have
Speaker 1: some minor issue that needs to be resolved, you will
Speaker 1: spend an hour on the phone to not have it resolved.
Speaker 1: And it's funny because sometimes I'll call them out. I'll
Speaker 1: say you're at a foreign call center, aren't you, And
Speaker 1: then they'll get real defensive and I'll say, I need
Speaker 1: to talk to someone in the United States, and then
Speaker 1: they'll start lecturing you about how they're equipped to do
Speaker 1: everything that the people in the United States are equipped
Speaker 1: to do. And there's no point in sending you to
Speaker 1: the United States because they're the one that answered the phone.
Speaker 1: But the reality is is based on my experience, the
Speaker 1: foreign call centers are totally worthless, totally worthless. And what's
Speaker 1: nuts is instead of phasing them out, they're so much
Speaker 1: cheaper to operate. My local dermatologist here in California has
Speaker 1: a foreign call center that answers the phones. It's not
Speaker 1: the people in California that are sitting behind the front
Speaker 1: desk that answer the phones. It's a foreign call center
Speaker 1: in some other continent.
Speaker 5: That system allowing dispatchers to focus more in emergencies. That
Speaker 5: could be the reason why there's been some gains in
Speaker 5: the first four months of this year. Data shows the
Speaker 5: comp center answered nearly eighty percent of nine one one
Speaker 5: calls within fifteen seconds or less, an improvement but still
Speaker 5: under the ninety percent goal.
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 2: That's the latest on the staffing shortage of nine to
Speaker 2: one to one dispatchers this time.
Speaker 1: I'm in San Diego County. Eight hundred two two two
Speaker 1: five two two two is the telephone number one. Eight
Speaker 1: hundred two two two five two two two. My ballot
Speaker 1: is now live at KSFO dot com, KABC dot com.
Speaker 1: It's out on the social media accounts KABC on Twitter,
Speaker 1: KSFO on Twitter I just retweeted it. So if you
Speaker 1: want to find out how I'm voting in the primary election,
Speaker 1: that ballot is now live and on the internet. Let's
Speaker 1: go to John and Ventura. John, Hello, doing so good.
Speaker 7: A lot of people don't understand with the nine one
Speaker 7: I'm a retired law enforcement with the dispatchers, and the
Speaker 7: nine one one dispatcher actually am all the other calls.
Speaker 7: Well in front of them, there's a button that's read
Speaker 7: that says nine to one one. You could have the
Speaker 7: homeless person calling in to complain or a fight, So
Speaker 7: they have to get off that line to get on
Speaker 7: the nine one one line. So a lot of these
Speaker 7: agencies that are so busy are now pulling officers off
Speaker 7: the street, and they've given them six month assignments and
Speaker 7: they'll have to answer those phones and then then put
Speaker 7: the call in and send it to the actual dispatcher. Really,
Speaker 7: these dispatchers speech every two or three hours from pones
Speaker 7: to the console, and it just becomes a lot harder.
Speaker 7: They pull the officer off the street, retaining overtime behind
Speaker 7: the officer now that was on the street when they
Speaker 7: go in for six months. So they can at least
Speaker 7: train them to where they can answer those calls and
Speaker 7: get them to the dispatcher that puts them out to
Speaker 7: the officers in the street. So this is affecting me.
Speaker 7: I know you guys said it earlier, but it's affecting
Speaker 7: people all over the state. It's not just San Diego.
Speaker 7: There's certain areas. This is happening everywhere in the little
Speaker 7: cities as well. It's hard to come by these dispatchers.
Speaker 7: They're so valuable to the officers in the street. So
Speaker 7: I just wanted to let you guys know that's kind
Speaker 7: of how it worked.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for the call. We appreciate that.
Speaker 1: It seems like an unbelievable waste of resources. Cops become
Speaker 1: cops because they want to be out on the streets,
Speaker 1: they want to fight crime, they want to do all
Speaker 1: the things that cops do. And if they have to
Speaker 1: be nine to one to one dispatchers too, that means
Speaker 1: there's fewer people in the black and whites. All right,
Speaker 1: it's time to open up the California crime bladder. And surprise, surprise,
Speaker 1: this one takes us back to the San Fernando Valley.
Speaker 1: There have been way too many stories about way too
Speaker 1: many crazy people near where I live. I'm going to
Speaker 1: need all of you to support our advertisers so I
Speaker 1: can afford to move out of the valley. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: here's a psycho who was shooting a flare gun at
Speaker 1: the hillsides in Woodland Hills. Here's CBSLA.
Speaker 8: Neighbors and Woodland Hills say they're living in fear after
Speaker 8: a man accused of shooting flares and screaming through the
Speaker 8: night turn their quiet street into a nightly nuisance.
Speaker 1: They say they're desperate for help and afraid for their safety.
Speaker 1: Slas see this is what happens.
Speaker 2: You see the news and you see what happened with
Speaker 2: naked crazy man in you recta, and you think, wait,
Speaker 2: we got a crazy man here in Woodland Hills. We
Speaker 2: need the news too. We're going to see so many
Speaker 2: reports about so many crazy people that live in the
Speaker 2: San Fernando Valley.
Speaker 1: Well, we have a nut who's actively trying to start
Speaker 1: a fire and there's just nothing you can do.
Speaker 8: See thesla's Lauren Posen spoke with residents tonight who are
Speaker 8: hoping something gets done before someone gets hurt.
Speaker 9: When the sun sets, the trouble starts. Neighbors say, the
Speaker 9: chaos from this house is jumping over Ventura Boulevard and
Speaker 9: straight onto their doorsteps. I've been getting videos of him
Speaker 9: all night long, the sound of burning brush just steps
Speaker 9: from homes in Woodland Hills.
Speaker 1: In the dead of the night.
Speaker 10: He started screaming and getting angry, and he started shooting
Speaker 10: off flares towards towards our building.
Speaker 2: Why do you get a flare gun? Nowadays a boat
Speaker 2: right my unit.
Speaker 9: People living into Pound homes above Ventura Boulevard say, the
Speaker 9: man living across the street started it with a flare gun.
Speaker 9: They asked us not to record their faces. They're terrified
Speaker 9: of him.
Speaker 10: I was afraid that he would catch our roof on fire,
Speaker 10: the trees on fire, or everything on fire. We were
Speaker 10: actually all of us in this are complex. We're afraid
Speaker 10: to leave.
Speaker 1: They say.
Speaker 9: Since March, he's been a erratic.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, imagine living next to a crazy, drugged out,
Speaker 1: schizophrenic Gilligan.
Speaker 11: He'll come out like around one in the morning, screaming obscenities,
Speaker 11: racial slurs, like every race possible, and he'll stay up
Speaker 11: to about four all of them.
Speaker 1: It sounds like he checks all the boxes.
Speaker 11: And he'll stay up to about four am in the morning,
Speaker 11: we went.
Speaker 9: To the house, which sits squeeze between businesses on the boulevard.
Speaker 9: We rang the bell on the gate, no one answered.
Speaker 11: He definitely needs help. I feel bad for the parents because.
Speaker 2: I'm tired of saying he needs help. Yeah, I don't care.
Speaker 2: He needs to be in a nuthouse. How about that.
Speaker 11: I feel bad for the parents because they want to
Speaker 11: get him help.
Speaker 9: We also called the man's parents, I'm sorry, this person
Speaker 9: is not available, but it went straight to voicemail.
Speaker 1: Because of course.
Speaker 9: The neighborhood sits in District three, represented by council Member
Speaker 9: Bob Lumenfeld. His office tells us LAPD's Major Crimes Division
Speaker 9: is investigating and discussing next steps with the DA, but
Speaker 9: until something is done.
Speaker 10: Four nights out of seven that he's interrupting our.
Speaker 9: Sleep and residents are left to deal with this.
Speaker 10: Every night. We're like, we text back and forth on
Speaker 10: my neighbors. Did you hear anything tonight? He's quiet? Right?
Speaker 10: What's he going to do next? Is he going to
Speaker 10: shoot off a flair? And what if someone's not here
Speaker 10: to call the fire department?
Speaker 2: Boy, when he actually does get carried away to the
Speaker 2: nut house, what are they going to talk about.
Speaker 1: My guess is he won't be in the nuthouse long.
Speaker 9: These residents really want this man to get some help,
Speaker 9: but they worry as each day passes and nothing is done,
Speaker 9: that their safety is being compromised. We did reach out
Speaker 9: to LAPD for an update on the investigation, but so
Speaker 9: far we haven't heard back yet. Reporting in Wooden Hills,
Speaker 9: Lauren Posen, CBSLA.
Speaker 1: There you go, another nut All right, that's going to
Speaker 1: do it for us. Have a great weekend everyone. Randy
Speaker 1: will be hosting the show next week. I'm on vacation
Speaker 1: and then we'll be back and go over the ballot
Speaker 1: and give you all the latest on the upcoming election.