CLAY: One of the other wild things that’s going on right now is an attempt to use covid as a justification for why the overall crime rate is skyrocketing all over the country. In 2020, we discussed with you, FBI data showed nearly a 30% increase in the overall number of murders which was the largest increase on record. Things so far, in many cities, are not getting better.
It’s likely that we are going to see an overall increase from that massive increase in 2020 in 2021 as well, meaning that things are not going to have gotten better in many of the places across the country. Why could that be occurring, and what is the overall impact on so many of you all of this country? Well, this is interesting. Beverly Hills police chief Mark Stainbrook is willing to actually speak out.
Of course, Beverly Hills a part of Los Angeles, where we have seen overall in the city of Los Angeles, massive increases in crime all over California. And he says, the police chief there does, that the reason why crime is surging is because California voters have been sold a bill of goods when it comes to criminal justice reform.
STAINBROOK: The California voters were sold a bill of goods that these laws would reduce the criminal population in jails, but the money that was saved would be used for job placement, drug and alcohol treatment, mental illness, housing, those sorts of things, and we just haven’t seen those services on the back end to reduce crime.
BUCK: Even if that were a good plan, Clay, over the long term — which is highly debatable — the notion that you should allow, from what we’ve seen — which is the loosening of the enforcement of the law and undermining of police simultaneously, and that that wouldn’t result in people suffering now. You can talk about better services and outreach and all those things and that’s all on good.
By the way, that’s already going on at stunning levels in places like New York, Los Angeles, where there’s manifest social welfare and services state and operation, a bureaucracy. That’s, by the way, highly inefficient and not very good at a job. But there’s already all kinds of stuff going with regard to that. But in the meantime, people get their homes broken into, get their stuff stolen, and get clubbed over the head in New York City here when they’re on the way to the subway.
The crime that matters to you is the crime that’s local, right? So I just want to make sure that we always keep in mind this is true of basically every major city across the country and most medium size cities. If you look at places across the country — I mention Wichita and Lansing ’cause I crunched the numbers on those. There are others, though, that are in the less than half a million range, a couple of hundred thousand, where they’ve still had big increases in crime.
Portland, a city of 60,000, had a thousand shootings in the last year, right? So, Clay, what we have, though, with the Democrat Party that is in denial about this — because what are they gonna say, right? They pushed all this stuff like they had the panacea. Undermine cops, more social services, less crime! Everybody’s happier. More social justice!
What we’ve gotten is old ladies being clubbed on the head on the way to the store, those guys being let out the same day because no cash bail, people being either not prosecuted for felonies or very lightly prosecuted for felonies because social justice is gonna be better? This is madness. AOC said just last week — this was the quote, folks — “We have to talk about specifics, for example, because we’re actually seeing a lot of these allegations of organized retail theft are actually not panning out.” This is last week. I believe it’s a Walgreens in California cited it, but the data didn’t back it up? This woman’s living on another planet. She’s not even living in another country. She’s living on another planet. This is insane.
CLAY: Being concerned with the punishment of criminals being too strong is a luxury of low crime. I hate to sound like Matthew McConaughey in True Detective, but time is a flat circle. What ends up happening over and over again is we go through the same cycles in this country. People get convinced that police have too much power, and there’s a couple of viral videos that go out and it becomes anecdotal evidence to support the indictment of police everywhere in the wake of George Floyd and the overall result is so eminently predictable.
Crime skyrockets. The people that are ostensibly being protested for are the ones who bear the brunt of the crime, ’cause make no mistake about it: Black Lives Matter? In an unbelievable irony, the more active Black Lives Matter protests are, the more black people who die. That happens almost every single city. If you look at the data, the more active the protests are, the less police are able to do their job.
The media disappears, and the murder rate skyrockets for those who are left behind in cities. So this is eminently predictable. It’s why in 2022, we need to see a massive outreach of Republican voters to repudiate “defund the police” and to let police do their jobs again and put violent criminals back behind bars. To me, even though people want to pretend it didn’t happen, Waukesha is a perfect example of this, Buck.
You had a guy who never should have been on the streets at all. Darrell Brooks was a violent, hardened criminal who was allowed out with a limited bail, and then we believe committed racially charged murders in Waukesha, and media wants to pretend it didn’t happen because the media directly has blood on its hands with what happened there.
But so did the DAs who were not enforcing the law and allowing violent criminals out. You see this all the time, Buck. How often do you see whenever one of these incidents happened, the person who does it almost never has any kind of clean rap sheet, right? They have been in and out of prison for years, violent crime after violent crime. They had no business being out. This is happening all over our country, whether it’s Milwaukee, whether it’s Phoenix, whether it’s Houston, whether it’s New York City, Atlanta. You name the place. It’s happening everywhere.
BUCK: Clay, there was just a horrific fatal stabbing in New York of a PhD student. Actually were two stabbings —
CLAY: A Columbia PhD, right?
BUCK: I’m sorry?
CLAY: A Columbia PhD student, right?
BUCK: Yeah, a Columbia PhD student who was stabbed to death, and unsurprisingly, the guy who stabbed him to death had already been arrested 11 times. Now, I understand that the story that we’re supposed to believe here from the criminal justice reformers out there on the left, the Soros thinking. Social justice, progressive prosecutor types, whether the prosecutors are the same individuals, but the same mentality is, “Oh, my gosh!
“Some guy got caught a third time stealing a pair of shorts. He’s going to prison forever for it and that shouldn’t happen.” By the way, that shouldn’t happen. But what also shouldn’t happen is you change laws that aren’t really going to stop that but will result in people who have multiple felony convictions, arrests. Once you’ve been arrested 10, 11, 15, 20 times?
In the case of a guy who hit an old lady here on the street some months ago — it went viral ’cause there’s video of it — he literally just clocked an old lady in the head walking past her. Broad daylight, an elderly woman. The guy had been arrested a hundred times, okay? So at what point do the libs have to accept that when someone’s been arrested 15 times, 50 times, a hundred times, it’s not because the system is so unfair to them, at least the criminal justice system.
If anything, it’s too permissive and there are people that need to be taken off the street for the safety of those around them. Notice with covid, you’re a threat to other people if you breathe. But with violent felons it’s, “Hey, come on! Let’s not be too harsh. Let’s not get crazy. This guy doesn’t need to go to prison. He only hit his fifth old lady over the head with a hammer. Maybe if we give him some more social services, he’ll stop hitting old ladies with hammers.”
CLAY: The irony here also, Buck, is that maybe the only thing Joe Biden’s almost gotten right in his entire crime is the 1994 crime bill, which he now has repudiated.
BUCK: I know. Isn’t that amazing? One thing.
CLAY: One thing may have gotten right.
BUCK: There were Republicans at the time just out of sheer hatred of Biden were saying, “Oh, he even turned his…” No, no, guys, but that was actually good. That was actually good.
CLAY: One of the things he’s gotten right.
BUCK: That was actually a good thing, and now we should be hitting him for abandoning the one thing that he did. Anyway, it’s crazy. Everyone’s seeing it. You just go down the list, right? New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Phoenix, Minneapolis, all these cities, Clay, people listening across the country — Houston — shooting’s way up, crime way up. What the heck is going on? Democrats. That’s what’s going on, folks. They’re in charge.