Yale researcher’s accidental hot mic moment exposes bias in academia

Could it be that condescending, elite academics, who advocate for extreme criminal justice reforms, secretly ridicule and look down on the actual struggles of minorities and other vulnerable New Yorkers?

Last week, Ryan McNeil, Director of Harm Reduction Research at Yale’s School of Medicine, inadvertently provided the answer to 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 suggesting that the researchers should engage with real Harlemites about the impact of increased local drug activity. “Instead of talking to people like me, a talking head, on the street impact,” Hill urged, “go and find out what people say.”

Unfortunately, McNeil, like many criminal-justice experts, was more focused on promoting an ideological agenda — drug decriminalization — than facing 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 caused harm. Human waste litters the nearby MetroNorth train platform, as mothers take their kids to the school directly across from the safe injection site. Dealers hang around dangerously close to classrooms full of children.

“That dude suuuuuuuuucked,” McNeil groaned like a teenage girl, thinking the recording with Hill had stopped. With a vocal fry, he criticized 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, that’s the only community that matters to McNeil.

But, like many Ivy League “experts,” McNeil believes that anyone who suggests addiction is harmful must be racist. According to McNeil, the only reason Hill could think that squalor is harmful is because of “white discomfort” with visible drug use. McNeil’s argument that “white discomfort” is behind some East Harlemites wanting to put an end to local drug activity is ironic; three-quarters of the neighborhood is black or Hispanic.

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

This criticism was made without considering whether these neighborhoods have disproportionately high levels of crimes that warrant enforcement, such as reckless driving, open drug consumption, and disorderly conduct.

Data shows that these neighborhoods do have such crimes. Traffic deaths have decreased by 4% in NYC’s white neighborhoods but increased by 13% in black neighborhoods and a shocking 30% in Hispanic ones. Additionally, in 2022, the OD rate was over one-and-a-half times higher for NYC blacks than whites.

It’s no surprise that a Gallup poll found that 81% of black Americans want the same or more policing in their communities. According to a Manhattan Institute survey, most residents want better quality-of-life enforcement to address “broken windows” offenses like public urination, graffiti, and littering. It seems that it’s not all about “white discomfort.”

However, like Yale’s research, John Jay’s report shapes facts around a political narrative instead of listening to the impacted communities. The biased agenda was outlined by the de Blasio-era NYC Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative Plan. John Jay was tasked with fulfilling six of the plan’s “reform initiatives,” including identifying “structural racism” in the NYPD’s internal systems and documenting “the past and present history of racialized policing in NYC.”

None of these initiatives (currently listed as “in progress”) require researchers to assess whether police enforcement makes black and Hispanic New Yorkers safer. But why would they?

To a racism hammer, everything looks like a racist nail.

Despite the public exposure of the “hot mic” incident, McNeil and his colleague admitted that their words “have caused distress.” However, they show no remorse for the damage biased research causes to the lives of Harlemites.

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

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