BUCK: Clay, first off for me, we often talk about a political reckoning. I think in advance of the midterm election we are already starting to see a progressive prosecutor reckoning.
We look at where was there a lot of horrific violence over the weekend, people being shot, just they were in a crowd, in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was a mass shooting in Philadelphia. There’s video showing you on an absolutely packed street in Philly, three dead, 14 hit by gunfire there.
There was a mass shooting in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Two dead from gunfire. One run over and killed by a fleeing car. 14 injured, and those are just the ones that are getting the most attention from the press. But there were also mass shootings in Grand Rapids, in Phoenix, in El Paso, I mentioned Chattanooga, in Omaha, all over the country.
What is one of the things we can say that you find in common about so many of these shootings? They are occurring in places where criminal justice reform and progressive prosecutors have had their way for years. In a place like Philadelphia, for example, they last year hit their all-time murder record. In San Francisco and other places the overall crime is through the roof — theft, larceny, breaking and entering, all of this.
I think, Clay, the American people have woken up to going soft on crime and acting like this is just our collective punishment because we don’t do enough social justice in this country. I think people are fed up with it in cities, at least, all across America.
CLAY: Yeah, I think you’re right. And the data is not complicated here. I think it’s worth pointing out. We have seen a massive skyrocketing in violent crime since George Floyd in May of 2020. Anyone who is trying to argue for any other explanation other than we have demonized police is 1 billion percent wrong based on the data at this point.
I think this is important and I think it needs to consistently be hammered home. We had Joe Biden address, was it Thursday of last week, 20-minute talk about gun violence. Democrats have painted themselves into a corner here because there is simultaneously a lack of enforcement of existing law and a demonization of police, which has led to a skyrocketing crime rate all over the country. And you are seeing that is a reflection, these mass shootings are.
Now, remember we talked about this, Buck, and I think it’s important to mention this, too: Mass shootings are a small part of the overall crime wave that we are seeing. Now, they get a lot of attention, and right now the media is very fixated on them. But if we had a magic wand and we said we’re going to solve every mass shooting in America, 99 percent of violent crime would still be occurring.
BUCK: Murders.
CLAY: Yes, murders. So this idea that suddenly, oh, if we just did away with mass shootings, we would address violent crime in a massive way is just not true. What we have to address is at the root cause of the violent crime and I believe what’s going on is police have been demonized to such an extent that they’re not able to do their jobs. A lot of them have quit. They’re understaffed, overworked, disrespected by prosecutors all over this country who, when they arrest someone, they put them back out on the street and allow them to continue to propagate violence.
To me, if you wanted to have a real conversation about reducing crime — which, by the way, everyone is in favor of, let’s not pretending that it’s a complicated issue with many sides — then the solution to me seems pretty clear. You put more police back on the streets and you put violent criminals behind bars. We know this because that’s exactly what we did in the early ’90s and crime collapsed all over the country.
BUCK: There’s also the additional component here where we’ve talked a lot, Clay, about defund the police, which is a big part of this, right? Defund the police. But what about the prosecutors?
Because if you’re looking for a place where the criminal justice system can break down, and there’s really no oversight other than people voting them out. You can up the number of cops on the street. You can use CompStat, you can actually deploy officers, that’s what they have in New York City, but you can do database police and enforcement. There’s a lot of things you can do on a tactical level to try to bring crime down in certain areas.
But if you have a prosecutor who is almost messianic, who is a zealot in the desire to bring down the number of people in prison — this is the mass incarceration, we hear it all the time. There are whole books that were written years ago that were very influential on the left about the need to end the mass incarceration states.
So in places like Philadelphia they cut the prison population, even a couple years ago I believe the data was from 8,000 to 5,000 in terms of how many people were being, at any point in time, were serving a sentence for a felony or serious crime. And we have seen this all over the country where right now Krasner — Boudin, in San Francisco is facing a recall this week.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Why is he facing a recall? Because he’s a far left radical. His parents were part of the (indiscernible) underground. They were part of the Brinks armored car robbery.
Larry Krasner in Philadelphia was a ponytailed, anti-cop, left-wing activist defense attorney his entire life, who all of a sudden decided I’m going to become a district attorney. This was only possible because the media created an enormous racial panic with Donald Trump’s election.
They used to say, people forget this now, Clay. They said it was a white nationalist as the president, not even that it was rising in general terms. They said Trump was a white nationalist. They created a national panic.
All of a sudden you had, obviously a minority community, a Black community in America is hearing from Democrat media that we’re in the worst place we have been in in decades in terms of racism and we have a white supremacist, a white supremacist, they were saying that, in the White House.
CLAY: That’s legitimately what they said.
BUCK: All of a sudden these progressive prosecutors can count on the mobilization of minority communities in major cities to vote for the progressive and mass incarceration view, replacing Democrats, by the way. This is what’s interesting. It’s not like these cities had right-wing Republicans. They had Democrats but they had Democrats who were like, look, I’m going to get in trouble if we don’t lock up a gang banger who is shooing number three, I’m going to get kicked out of office.
The progressive prosecutors come in Krasner, Fox in Chicago, Gascón in Los Angeles, and they go, let’s just set up as many diversion programs, plea bargains, low-level prosecutions as possible because that’s somehow going to make us not safer, Clay, more just. And we’re paying that price. You know who pays disproportionately? Minorities who live in high-crime communities they pay the price of these prosecutors.
CLAY: And by the way, this is mostly a white woke agenda political move. It’s not something that’s supported by minorities in cities. The white woke universe has taken over the Democratic Party. And the results have been, I think this is important to emphasize, thousands of additional dead minorities based on their political argument.
There should be substantial consequences at the ballot box, not just for people who traditionally vote Republican, but I know there’s a lot of people listening to us now — white, Black, Asian, Hispanic — who ordinarily consider themselves maybe even to be Democrats. Maybe even you consider yourself to be a little left of center, but you’re looking at all of this chaos in city streets everywhere and you’re saying we have to fix this.
And I just keep hammering home being concerned that you’re too tough on crime is a luxury of a low-crime environment. That’s the world that you are able to sell the idea of, hey, we’re being too tough. We’re putting too many people behind bars.
Well, when crime went down in 2014, 2015, 2016, remember, this started with Obama as president. Ferguson was on Obama’s watch. And it was all a luxury — I really do believe this — a luxury of low-crime environment. Because if you have high crime you don’t have time to say, we’re being too mean to the criminal element.
You want those guys behind bars. You don’t want random people sitting in a subway car getting shot. You don’t want someone sitting in a bar in Philadelphia or Chattanooga with their girlfriend and they walk outside and the next thing they know there’s a hail of bullets everywhere and they’re dead.
This is a total reality of the Democrat idea that they need to take people from behind bars and simultaneously, I think it’s two-pronged, Buck, take people from behind bars and simultaneously destroy the legitimacy of police.
BUCK: Absolutely.
CLAY: So they’re not able to do their job.
BUCK: It was really a two-pronged dismantling, and we focused a lot on what we called the Ferguson Effect, coined by our friend Heather MacDonald. That’s now just become a criminal justice term. And for everyone, just as a refresher, the Ferguson Effect is cops know if they have to wrestle somebody to the ground to make an arrest, they might be on video, so I don’t know what I’m going to —
CLAY: I’m not turning around and running that license plate.
BUCK: Maybe he just robbed a liquor store at gunpoint or knifepoint, but I don’t see the gun on him, I’m not going to deal with this right now.
When you see that playing out in city after city across the country, it has a massive deleterious effect to public safety. And when you add the prosecutors to it, I’ve been really digging into this because I find it fascinating.
There were — I want everyone to be clear on this — in 2017 and 2018 glowing profiles written in the New Yorker, in the New York Times, in The Washington Post about all these different progressive prosecutors who represented a left-wing social justice above actual justice attitude toward crime, policing and prosecution.
And in every single place, Clay, where they took over, crime across the board went up, went up dramatically. Homicides in America, just so everyone understands, the score we’re talking about, 2019 to 2020, nationwide, went up 30 percent.
CLAY: Most in recorded history in one year.
BUCK: Ever done in one year. Now people can say, wow, it was absolutely not the pandemic because those elevated levels have pretty much stayed constant in those cities.
This was the result, finally, of the left and smug Democrats getting what they want, which is police who are not supported and prosecutors who do not want to lock up criminals. They would rather get glowing profiles written about them in the New York Times and get awards from community organizers than keep people safe from violent, habitual criminals, which is exactly what we’re seeing. That’s why people are so upset. They see Chesa Boudin, for example.
Why is it we’re seeing, Clay, someone’s arrested 12, 15, 20 times, then they do something heinous that makes national news, we go, why were they on the street in the first place? It’s because of these prosecutors. There’s no mystery here.
CLAY: And, by the way, front page article of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, Democrats are voting these people out. It’s not like there’s a legitimate Republican party opposition in San Francisco. This is an internal civil war and Democrats have gotten so furious at Chesa Boudin.
We’ll talk about. This to me, Buck, it’s full fruition of Democratic Party ideals. They can’t blame Republicans for this. This is what happens when they get free rein. It is chaos, death and destruction on inner city streets.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: We’re talking about the streets of American cities becoming killing fields as murder rates skyrocket all over the country. And it’s a two-pronged attack.
It is a delegitimization of police authority as well as many police retiring, not being able to do their job, coupled with when they do their job and they arrest violent criminals, those violent criminals are often kept inside of lockup and prosecuted to the least extent of the law.
We’ve got a lot of people who want to weigh in, including a police officer in St. Louis. Let’s go ahead and bring in Phil. What’s up? What do you see in your job?
CALLER: You hit the nail right on the head. I worked Ferguson. And I don’t work for the city, but I work in the county where it happened. And you’re spot on. It’s not only the Ferguson Effect but it’s the amount of officers that we’re losing because of it. We’re losing good officers every single day who just want to go into other career paths. It’s a great time to need a job right now. And it’s just going to get worse.
CLAY: How long have you been a police officer?
CALLER: 12 years.
CLAY: How would you compare the treatment you get over the last couple of years compared to when you started.
CALLER: Well, this is just in terms of the national coverage and media, it’s not the specific community, I would say that we do feel the demonization and we do see it in the news. But I will see that the St. Louis area, the public in general, is very supportive.
BUCK: That’s good to hear. I think it’s going to get more supportive in a lot of places across the country for cops as people realize the only way out of this is to actually punish criminals and keep people safe.
Thanks for calling in, Phil. Thanks for trying to keep your community safe out in St. Louis, Missouri, unfortunately one of the cities that actually has one of the highest violent crime rate of any place in the country. It would be great if we could turn that around.