BUCK: There was a decision made — largely pushed by the political pressure off the BLM movement — to start being a whole lot more permissive, not only about violent crime, shorter sentences, bail reform laws, things of that nature, but just day-to-day crime. Shoplifting has been almost legalized in some major American cities with predictably disastrous consequences, along with turnstile jumping and public urination.

These are lessons that were learned in major cities in the eighties, in the nineties, and Democrats decided, “You know what? Let’s just try it again. Let’s just see what happens when we abandon law and order in the name of social justice.” Criminal justice gets sidelined for social justice. And the mayor of New York — who I have been a skeptic of from the beginning and find deeply disappointing a few months in, Eric Adams — says that it is actually…

They’re gonna try this, Clay. They’re just gonna see what will fly. You know, they’re gonna try all kinds of stuff. Here he is telling everybody that it is Republicans who are guilty of defunding the police or wanting to because they won’t pass Build Back Better.

“We have to rebuild that trust. But we can’t rebuild that trust by allowing those who are dangerous and that have a repeated history of violence to continue to be on our streets,” NYC Mayor Eric Adams tells @GStephanopoulos. https://t.co/ahuu0Up1K4 pic.twitter.com/ppgyvXnlEN

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) April 17, 2022

BUCK: This is all politics.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Being concerned about people being in prison for too long is a luxury of a low crime era. And what happened time after time after time was people said, “Oh, we’re punishing criminals too much,” and, as all the DAs started to lead… This guy had been arrested — the one who shot on the subway — 12 times, Buck, nine times in New York and three times in New Jersey.

And I understand that the three-strikes-and-you’re-out crime bill — which basically said, “Hey, you commit three felonies; you’re gone” — there were people who got caught up in that and ended up getting Draconian sentences as a result. But as a group, we put people who were violent behind bars and crime came down for the rest of us. And now those same people? Back out on the streets, not suffering any sort of significant consequences for their criminal behavior, and all of us are bearing the price.

BUCK: I’m just gonna tell everybody this — and I know not everyone’s gonna like to hear it, but it’s true. The Trump administration got caught up in some of this stuff. We’re gonna be honest about this; let’s be honest about this. Trump administration was pushing the First Step Act, the Trump administration after BLM…

Now, when I say, “caught up in some of this.” Maybe they were 5% or 10% as caught up as the 90 or 95% of this was Democrat policies and ideas. But this became fashionable on the right as well for a while, not just… When I say Trump administration, I mean that more generally also with the GOP, the Trump White House, but also a lot of people in the GOP were talking about criminal justice reform.

This became fashionable for a while, and it was always, “We’re locking up too many people for nonviolent drug offenses.” That’s not really the case when you look at what the drug offenses actually usually involve. Drug offenses are often easy to prove, and so federal prosecutors will say, “Well, we’ll get you on the drugs. We’re not even gonna go after the weapons possession.

“We’re not even gonna go after the violent gang assault or whatever the other charges may be.” So all you see for an individual are possession of X ounces of fill in the blank with illegal drug. We weren’t actually locking up a whole lot of people for decades for just having a bag of marijuana. And I think that’s started to become the perception that was pushed by a lot of people to get… Clay, why else do we have all these criminal justice reform laws going into effect 2018, 2019, 2020? And then the BLM movement came about, the undermining of police as racist.