Elliott Williams

And so using the sort of modern day examples that you talk about there, I do get into quite a bit of that in Five Bullets that, you know, past is present.

And a lot of these issues that the country grappled with in 1984 really aren't resolved today and certainly are, if not front of mind

certainly lingering in all of our brains.

Yeah.

So it's impossible to judge the story without talking about what New York City was like in the 1980s.

You know, it wasn't Labradoodle and Lululemon New York City.

It was not.

It was it was Times Square and.

Times Square where you went for your peep shows or some cocaine.

It was a homicide rate that flirted with 2000 homicides a year, which is, you know, literally more than today by a factor of four.

It was rough.

It was gritty.

crack epidemic, HIV, with a closeted mayor who did not want to confront HIV as an issue because he thought, and I talk about this in the book Five Bullets, Ed Koch was in the closet and did not want to be outspoken on the rise of AIDS because he thought it would

you know, it would come back to fire.

So New York city was just, there was, you know, the blackout of 77 that turned into a giant riot and the purge, everything was just really rough.

And people saw many, many people saw in Bernard gets this hero who was sort of fixing, um, the forces of disorder that were really bringing the city down.

But, um,

To many, certainly to black politicians and many white columnists, the big one being Jimmy Breslin at the Daily News, saw the racial dynamics of the case as unmistakable.

No one, and I would challenge everybody to think this, like of any story, just flip the races of the participants.

And if a black man had left four white teenagers bleeding out in a subway, fled to New Hampshire and hid,