A Yale researchers ‘hot mic’ gaff reveals the academy’s woke bias

Is it possible that snarky, elite academics, who support extreme criminal justice reforms, privately mock and disdain the actual experiences of minorities and other vulnerable New Yorkers?

Last week, Ryan McNeil , Director of Harm Reduction Research at Yale’s School of Medicine, inadvertently answered that question.

As part of his funded “research” on safe injection sites, McNeil spoke via Yale University Zoom with Shawn Hill, co-founder of the Greater Harlem Coalition , which supports treatment access for drug addicts.

But after the hour-long interview, a hot mic recording caught McNeil and his colleague lambasting Hill for recommending the researchers engage with actual Harlemites about the effects of increased local drug activity. “Rather than talking to people like me, a talking head, on the street impact,” Hill urged, “go and find out what people say.”

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Unfortunately, McNeil, like so many criminal-justice experts, was more concerned with upholding an ideological agenda — drug decriminalization — than wrestling with the reality of everyday citizens. He doesn’t want to hear that safe injection sites, like the one at Harlem’s East 126th Street, have introduced harms. Human feces litter the nearby MetroNorth train platform, as mothers shuttle their kids to the school directly across from the safe-injection site. There, dealers loiter alarmingly close to kid-filled classrooms.

“That dude suuuuuuuuucked,” McNeil groaned like a teenage girl, thinking his recording with Hill had stopped. Through a vocal fry, he pilloried Hill’s “discursive framing of community” that excludes “folks who use drugs.” Translation? Predatory dealers and addicts passed out in filth cannot be a problem to the community: they are the community. At least, the only community that matters to McNeil.

But, like so many Ivy League “experts,” McNeil knows why someone might suggest addiction is bad: racism. The only reason Hill could propose that squalor is harmful, McNeil twaddled on, is just “white discomfort” with visible drug use. McNeil’s blather that “white discomfort” has some East Harlemites demanding an end to local drug bazaars is comical; three-quarters of the neighborhood is black or Hispanic.

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You don’t need to catch a  MetroNorth train all the way to New Haven to discover academics like McNeil, who are funded to confirm the political “findings” that they seek. The Data Collaborative for Justice at Manhattan’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice accepts NYC tax dollars to do exactly that. In March, they published a report finding cops are “disproportionately issuing summons in black and Hispanic neighborhoods,” which they say “perpetuates the criminalization of poverty.”

This criticism was issued without considering if these neighborhoods suffer from disproportionately high levels of summons-able crimes, such as reckless driving, open drug consumption and disorderly conduct — and, in fact, warrant enforcement.

Data indicates both are true. Traffic deaths have dropped by 4% in NYC’s white neighborhoods — but surged by 13% in black neighborhoods and a horrifying 30% in Hispanic ones. Meanwhile, in 2022, the OD rate was over one-and-a-half times greater for NYC blacks than whites.

No wonder a Gallup poll found that 81% of black Americans want the same or more policing in their own communities. And per a Manhattan Institute survey , most want greater quality-of-life enforcement combating “broken windows” offenses such as public urination, graffiti and littering. Apparently, it’s not all “white discomfort.”

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But as with Yale’s research, John Jay’s report frames facts around a political narrative rather than listening to the impacted communities. In this case, the biased agenda was articulated by the de Blasio-era NYC Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative Plan . John Jay was contracted to fulfill six of the plan’s “reform initiatives,” including sniffing out “structural racism” in NYPD’s internal systems and comprehensively documenting “the past and present history of racialized policing in NYC.”

None of these initiatives (currently all labeled “in progress”) ask researchers to determine if police enforcement makes black and Hispanic New Yorkers safer. But why would they?

To a racism hammer, everything is a racist nail.

Apparently unashamed after the “hot mic” went public, McNeil and his colleague acknowledged that their words “have caused distress.” But they express no remorse for the harm biased research inflicts on Harlemites’ lives.

It’s time academic institutions and city agencies stop investing in these ideologically corrupted criminal-justice studies. They barely mask their true research aims: imposing progressive “reforms” on the communities who know they don’t work.

Hannah E. Meyers is a fellow and director of policing and public safety for the Manhattan Institute.

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