Peter,
I'm sure you understood the language, but perhaps not the subtle nuances? Mr. Bennett is guilty of extremely poor word choice. Hopefully, that's as far as it goes.

The context of the dialogue is fairly obvious when you read the the transcript, and to be fair to Mr. Bennett, it really sounds as if he became aware he was "stepping in it" more deeply with each word and tried to backpedal about 2 sentences too late.

>Jason,
>Although I'm not a native English speaker indeed, I think I've understood it well enough. Were you aware of the issue about the cause of NY's crime rate fall, as explained in Freakonomics? I was, because I have read about it in a recent Dutch book about the States. It enabled me to fully understand the context of the discussion between Bennet and the caller.
>