In this talk, Charles Fain Lehman—senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal—explains why so much crime goes undetected, what it actually takes to restore public order, and why the “Karens” objecting to antisocial behavior are onto something.
Recorded: May 19, 2026 at UATX.
00:00 — Preview
00:26 — Why Charles defends the obvious
02:26 — Broken windows theory
07:05 — Criminal invasion
09:04 — Why violent crime nearly quadrupled
10:24 — Does remediating disorder reduce crime?
12:25 — Why the NYPD doesn’t police Bryant Park
16:19 — If it works, why don’t we do it?
18:22 — Disorder is exclusionary
19:04 — Are we allowed to talk about this?
23:25 — What does the criminal justice system actually do?
26:52 — Individual rights vs. community rights
28:55 — Why does disorder policing work?
30:49 — "Essentially all crimes go uncaught"
33:39 — Academic criminology
37:07 — The role of the state
39:49 — Do the interests of the public outweigh the rights of the individual?
40:53 — Save our cities
42:50 — Q&A: What is justice?
45:05 — Q&A: The practical responsibilities of citizens
47:52 — Q&A: Who breaks the law?
50:41 — Q&A: Police discretion
56:15 — Q&A: Should we criminalize hard drugs?
01:00:36 — Q&A: "When people are off the streets, crime goes down"
01:06:47 — Q&A: Big cities vs. small towns
01:10:02 — Q&A: "Public disorder is the natural state of the world”
01:14:30 — Q&A: How disorder affects our perception of crime
01:16:45 — Q&A: Criminological findings & corporal punishment
01:19:46 — Q&A: Campus law enforcement
01:21:12 — Q&A: Helping those in need
01:22:36 — Q&A: Bad prosecutors disrupt the entire system
Events at UATX
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How to Be an Elitist with Professor Alex Priou: Churchill and Strauss on the challenges to excellence in an age of mass democracy.
Destination Mars: Survival Not Guaranteed with Professor Eliah Overbey: Cosmic radiation, bone-melting microgravity, and how scientists plan to bioengineer the space-ready human.
Is Beauty Objective? with Professor Clay Greene: Why people defend their taste like a basic human right, and whether beauty has any grounding in biology, God, or social life.
The Future of American Freedom with Professor Jonathan Yudelman: Tocqueville’s “soft despotism” and Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address on the threats to American liberty.
Will the Real Bible Please Stand Up? with Professor Carson Bay: Who decided which texts made it into Scripture, and how those canonical lines were drawn.
America’s Founding Principles with Visiting Professor Chris Nadon: Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration and his Letter to Holmes: the ideals, contradictions, and reckoning with slavery at the root of American political life.
The Technology & Philosophy of AI with Dean Clint Staley: How large language models actually work, the ethics of copyright and liability, and whether a machine could ever truly think.
Transhumanism with Professor Allen Porter: The moral, political, and religious stakes of engineering enhanced humans and posthumans.
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