BUCK: Crime, top of the agenda. Interestingly enough, you’re not seeing a ton of news stories that try to look at the aggregate numbers and try to pull together what’s happening. I think it’s pretty clear why that is, because there are individual incidents that are gonna get covered at the local level. You’re gonna see a story about a shooting here, a carjacking there.
I think, Clay, it was almost 400 carjackings in Washington, D.C., over the last 12 months, which is a stunning number for a city that’s not that big and in only 365 days in a year, folks. So, very serious crimes getting reported on. But no one’s looking at it from the top down because this is — and let’s be clear — an enormous weakness for the Democrats going into the midterms.
There are some of them — the smarter Democrats, politically — having flashbacks to what happened in the seventies and then the eighties when Reagan came along and then getting into the nineties where you had tough-on-crime policies beginning in cities like New York with Giuliani, Bratton, crime turnaround that happened in New York City.
I lived through it, so I experienced that. It was a different city when it was done over the course of about 10 years. New York went from some kind of a urban hellscape to the safest, most prosperous big city in America — and in some ways, the world. So why is it turning around? Well, because Democrats have bad ideas, and they don’t want to people to focus in on that.
Instead, you had Joe Biden just yesterday in New York City with the new mayor, Eric Adams. And here, for example, is the kinds of things the Democrats are focusing on. They can’t avoid the crime problem entirely. We all are aware of the numbers.
Houston, I think, has more murders right now — for all of you listening in Houston — than even New York, Los Angeles, or I think Chicago at this stage of the year, which is stunning. So this is hitting a lot of places all over the country. But here in New York, Eric Adams is saying, “We gotta really look at the domestic terrorism issue.” Play clip 11.
ADAMS: We need, as I stated, a 9/11-type response to address the domestic terror that is (sputters) pervasive in this city and country. And President Biden is here to deliver on his promise to come here. He committed to it, and he is here to give New Yorkers the backup we need. Far too long, we called for backup, and it was not here. It is time to have that backup.
BUCK: Clay, it’s not, in fact… I live in New York, and I got family all over New York, and it is not the insurrectionists, okay, of January 6th that are clubbing old ladies and throwing innocent people in front of trains. It is career criminals that lives with their soft-on-crime police refuse to lock up. It’s vagrancy running rampant. It’s people urinating in the streets and doing heroin in broad daylight and the city paying them for it. That’s what’s happening and this is what Democrats have done in cities all across the country.
CLAY: Yeah. This is a real mess. Because as we just finished the first hour, we said there’s no longer a question that crime is up in a big way. ‘Cause remember, Buck, in 2020 what did they say? “Oh, the reason why crime went up was because of covid.” That’s what they tried to argue, even though as we pointed out on this show, “No, no, no, no. Lockdowns actually decrease crime!”
Crime did not skyrocket in 2020 until after the George Floyd incident, ’til the Black Lives Matter protests started, ’til basically chaos began to run rampant in streets of cities and states all over this country. So we had in 2020 the largest single-year increase in murders… Let’s focus on murders, ’cause we like to say on this show “murders are crimes that you know 100% happen because there’s a dead body involved that died violently.”
So murders were up 29% in 2020, Buck, the largest single-year increase on record one year — 2019 to 2020 — and in 2021, they went up again, and we had cities all over the country setting all-time murder records. And now, as you have pointed out — and as the data has reflected — the first month of 2022 has been incredibly violent as well in many cities all over the country.
So the data is clear. You don’t really have any argument. So what’s gonna happen? One, you’re gonna obfuscate and say, “Hey, what’s really going on here is this is a gun issue,” and that’s the pivot that you’ve seen. That’s the audio we played with Joe Biden. Two, you’re going to have a dishonest discussion about who is actually committing the crimes and where the danger is coming from.
And again, it’s as if people are so afraid to look at the data and analyze it and say, “Wait. Where is crime from?” As you know well, Buck, from the time you worked with NYPD in consultation with them, the way that the broken-windows policy worked with Giuliani and Bratton and everyone else back in the day was crime doesn’t occur equally across a city.
So if you look at the numbers, over 50% of all murders are committed by mostly young black men, okay? Young black men represent, whatever it is, 3% of the overall population in the country, right? I’m talking about men between the ages of 16, roughly, and 40. That’s where almost all murders are committed by all races.
But over half of those murders basically in the country are committed by young black men, right? Overwhelmingly, their victims are also young plaque men. So when crime skyrockets, the cost is overwhelmingly borne by people in inner cities and high crime areas. So the terrible irony of Black Lives Matter is there are thousands of people who are dead today that would be alive of all ages if police had been able to do their jobs, period.
BUCK: There are multiple components to broken windows theory. I think it’s often misunderstood when it’s discussed in public, and I think some people misrepresent it at some level, too, with, “Oh, it’s Draconian,” right? “It’s super strict and that’s why…” No, what it does is really twofold. One, you have less than 1% of the population of any city is committing a vast majority of the serious crimes. So, wherever you are, 99% of people are just trying to go about their lives. Speeding tickets or parking tickets aside, they’re law-abiding.
CLAY: Jaywalking, yeah.
BUCK: It’s a tiny percentage in whatever the neighborhood is and wherever you are in a major city that are gonna be committing the crime. By enforcing laws, you are creating contact between the-lawbreaking segment of a community and law enforcement. The classic thing in New York City was the jumping of turnstiles. It’s not, “Oh, my gosh! Someone jumped a turnstile; civilization is over!”
Although in the aggregate, the small crimes do add up, and that was the second thing I was gonna get to, which is it creates a perception of lawlessness and decay which does affect the actions of individuals in a city. Why is Tokyo so safe? Millions and millions of people and basically no crime going on there. It’s ’cause everyone expects that there’s gonna be no crime and no one will accept any crime.
It’s a mentality that the population has. But back to the turnstile jumping. The guy that jumps the turnstile every day all the time tends to be the guy who’s wanted on an attempted murder and illegal gun charge as well. Not that everyone who jumps a turnstile is that, but the guy who they are looking for is also unusually a turnstile jumper or doing petty crime, petty things.
There have been cases in Times Square. There was a guy who was selling illegal… It’s a scam they run where they tried to give you a CD. They write your name on it and then they demand $20 from a tourist. One of those guys the cops went up to him, he pulled out a TEC-9 and opened fire, right? I mean, things like this actually happened.
This was years ago, but that actually happens in New York. So when you abandon enforcement of those lower-level laws, you’re creating far less contact between the law enforcement and the criminal element, which makes them more able to prey upon the population of a city that’s just trying to go about their lives. And to your point about COMPSTAT, Clay, that’s where they use the actual numbers and statics.
Where are the crimes happening? We concentrate our resources on where the crimes are happening. I know the bad neighborhoods, the high crime neighborhoods in New York very well. The whole point of it is to make all the folks — the vast majority of folks — there who are trying to go about their lives in peace, get to school, get to work, get home safely more able to do that.
CLAY: Yeah, and there’s a big part of the criminal element, right. The focus here is on…? It’s funny, people say, “Oh, you know, it’s racist, right?” People are so afraid of being called racist. No one ever makes the sexist argument. The overwhelming majority… What do you think, like 95%, 98% of all violent crime is being committed by men, right?
That’s not because police are being sexist against men and only investigating men for violent crime. It’s because the vast, vast majority of violent crime that is occurring is being perpetrated by men. So if you wanted to, you could look at the rates of incarceration, and you could say, “Oh, my God. Look how sexist it is at the overwhelming number of our prisoners that are being arrested by police are men.”
No one ever makes that argument because there’s a recognition, “Well, men commit more crimes.” Well, if you look at the racial breakdown of murders, there is a racial component to crime — and, by the way, the way to solve it and protect everyone is to address the people who are committing the crime. So your grandma probably is not gonna get stopped by a police officer as she’s walking down the street.
Your grandpa probably also is not going to get stopped. But what you’re seeing with Eric Adams, the plainclothes police coming back, Buck. Stop-and-frisk was helpful in terms of being able to catch people who are committing crimes, to your point. The guy who jumps over the turnstile at the subway is more likely to have committed a crime.
Similarly, the guy who is driving around in a car with expired tags more likely than not when you get that stopped car — more likely than not — to also have done something wrong. Not a hundred percent of the time, certainly not. But criminals commit crimes, and so being able to catch them perpetrating crimes, serious or not, can lead to less crime.
BUCK: Bill Bratton was the NYPD commissioner in New York and part of that huge turnaround — and remember, folks, you’re wondering, “What kind of a turnaround am I talking about?” I’m in junior high and there are over 2,000 murders a year in New York City in my hometown. Over 2,000. About 2200. By the time I finish high school, it’s about 300.
CLAY: It’s amazing.
BUCK: So from over 2,000 to about 300 or 350, something like that. I mean, it’s just enormous difference. Bill Bratton presided over some of that as police commissioner, and he’s saying the libs and the new mayor, Eric Adams, have good intentions, but it’s not gonna be easy to turn this ship around because the Democrats have embraced all the wrongness on this. Play 16.
BRATTON: A lot of good intentions, but they are just that: Good intentions. The devil is in the details, and whether they’re gonna be able to deliver on those good intentions remains to be seen. You referenced, “Has the pendulum begun to turn?” It has stalled a little from its movement to the left that we’ve seen so much over the last two years.
But it’s gonna be a historic struggle to get it to start moving back to center. I was pleased to see that the president and certainly the newly elected mayor, Mayor Adams, in New York have started to come back to center. I just hope that they have the ability to push back on the forces from the progressive left that have basically created the disarray.
BUCK: One of the best minds in crime fighting, Clay, you’ll find anywhere in the world and what did he say the problem is? It went too far left, obviously.
CLAY: Look. Being concerned about the punishment for criminals is a luxury of a low crime era. We’ve talked about this before, Buck, maybe the biggest irony of Joe Biden’s career, the thing that he was most trying to apologize for was the 1994 crime bill. You can argue that’s the thing in his history that he most got right because it helped to drive down crime rates all over this country.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: Listen to Representative Ritchie Torres. He’s a Democrat from New York. Listen to him slamming the idea of defunding police.
TORRES: I agree with the mayor. Uh, the defund police movement is dead in New York City, is examine good riddance — and any elected official who’s advocating for the abolition or even the defunding of police is out of touch with reality and should not be taken seriously.
BUCK: Clay, can we just say that the fact that anyone ever said that was moronic beyond words? And it’s remarkable how many people actually were saying, if you wanted hard left, the real community activist types, it wasn’t just defund the police. It was abolish police, friends. That was the real vanguard of the movement back in the summer of 2020.
The other side of it that was Trump’s a law-and-order guy, and there was a lot of disorder and anarchy leading up to that election. I think that was hurtful to at least the presidential ticket side of things. But defund the police, Clay? As we’ve said, it’s hard to come up with a dumber political slogan and one that Democrats should pay a minor price for in these midterms.
CLAY: I think it’s the dumbest single political slogan that we have ever seen in the history of our country. I really do mean that, and it’s amazing how quickly everybody’s running from it now.
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