BUCK: We have a number of heinous crimes that have occurred across the United States — well, notably in big cities like Los Angeles and in New York City, although there are crimes happening every day in record numbers. Remember, 2021 was a year of all-time murder highs in a number of major American cities, enormous increases in a lot of cities, double-digit increases in dozens of American cities over the last 12 to 18 months.

Of course, coinciding with the rise of the BLM movement as well. And so the theory that I’ve always put forward that Black Lives Matter as a movement manages to make everything worse for everyone and notably for young black men in America, it makes everything worse for everyone. The data proves that out. But here’s what we’ve gone through just in the last week in this country.

When we’re talking about crime and what’s happening in America today, you have Sandra Shells punched in the head, fell down and hit her head and later died. She was a nurse in Los Angeles waiting to be picked up by a bus, a nurse who was just doing her day-to-day life. Brianna Kupfer, who was stabbed to death while working at a store in Los Angeles by a — well, we’ll get into the criminals and who they are and their backgrounds in a moment.

And then Michelle Go, who was pushed in front of an oncoming subway car and struck fatally by that subway car on the Times Square subway station. This is right near where I am in New York City. It’s a subway station that, in earlier times, I would have used all the time, but everyone these days is more and more concerned about being on the subway — and here’s what’s obvious about all this right away. The criminals that do this are known criminals.

The people that have murdered these three women were known to authorities with long criminal records — violent criminal records — and yet they’re back out on the streets. What is the response of Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York City to the murder of Michelle Go, an Asian-American woman pushed in front of a subway car? “We need more mental health resources,” he says, “for this city.”

Well, there’s actually a whole other approach which would be we need to enforce the law and get serious about crime in America today. Here is the father Brianna Kupfer was stabbed to death in the store in Los Angeles. Horrific crime, completely random, unprovoked, just a vicious murder. Here’s her father speaking about this issue on Fox, Todd Kupfer. Play clip 26.

KUPFER: I’m not blaming anybody by name. I blame… What’s endemic in society right now is everybody seems to be oriented on giving back rights and bestowing favor on people that rob others of their rights. We should be celebrating the good in people, not tear down communities by exposing them to people that are falling out the bottom that really don’t care about the other human beings and just think they can do whatever they like in our society. And they are doing it more and more.

CLAY: That’s the father of the victim in L.A., this brutal murder that occurred. Buck, you had a recent graduate of college working in a furniture store, middle of the day. She is brutally murdered in the middle of the day by a career felon who has been arrested dozens of times. You have the situation — and, by the way, this is a major point of discussion right now in Los Angeles, a city that I really like and have spent a substantial amount of time in, in my career, because Fox Sports is based in L.A.

So I have been out in L.A. other than where I went to college in Washington, D.C., and where I live in Nashville. I’ve been in L.A. more time in my life than anywhere else in the world, and this is resonating in a big way. A middle-of-the-day murder by a career felon who should have never been on the streets. And, Buck, you can speak to this, and I know all of you our staff in New York City can.

For the people out there that don’t live in New York City, what happened to Michelle Go, this 40-year-old woman who was in the subway, never even saw her attacker, who shoved her in front of an oncoming subway train. This is a fear that is palpable for people who take the subway in New York City, for people who live in New York, this is something that is always in the back of your mind, this idea that someone might just come up and shove you. For anybody who’s taken the subway before, if you’re standing near the edge of that train —

BUCK: Platform.

CLAY: — platform when it comes roaring in, you know how potentially able to be shoved in front you are, how much of a victim you are, how much you’re relying on just the basic decency of society to be able to board that subway train.

BUCK: Right.

CLAY: And so for both of these incidents — and, by the way, I think this is important, Buck. These are not outlier incidents, right? What I mean by that is, these are not things that occur that are so outside of what’s going on elsewhere. They’re just two anecdotes, which are reflective of the rapid rise in violent crime that we have seen in this country, and those were the two biggest cities in America.

And right now if you’re in New York and L.A., you have heard and probably discussed with some of your friends it and family about both of these cases, and they are emblematic of Democratic policy failures that violent criminals are being allowed to maraud in our streets and kill completely, 100-billion percent innocent people. These women had no chance to defend themselves. They had no hope.

BUCK: Public perception and social cohesion matters a whole lot when it comes to crime, right? You could talk about the socio-economics behind it, but poverty actually doesn’t cause violent crime. There are a lot of very, very poor societies where violent crime is actually quite rare. So it’s not poverty. That’s not true. There’s often a perception of whether or not certain behaviors will be tolerated.

There’s an escalation among the criminal class, because in every society there’s a small percentage of people who are committing a vast majority of nearly all of the violent crimes. That’s just the reality all around the world. And so when you look at this and you say, “Why is it that…?” Why is Tokyo so much safer than Rio de Janeiro, for example, just to pick two cities?

Rio has a very, very high crime rate and Tokyo has an incredibly low crime rate. They’re both mega cities with millions and millions of people. Well, it’s because you create a culture, essentially — a public perception — of how the police are going to react, what the public believes, how the public interacts with each other, social cohesion, social trust. That’s why the subway platform thing is so… First of all, it’s so horrific to think you’d be —

CLAY: Visceral.

BUCK: — standing there and some lunatic shoves her in front of an oncoming train. It’s a horrible way to die, and think about that done to her family. But beyond that, you see now that the Democrat policies of allowing and being permissive of the criminal class is disastrous. And we’ve gone through this before in America as a society, as a country, and we learned the lesson — and now it’s as though they want us to unlearn the lesson.

And they have no good explanation or excuse for this. And I’ll tell you this, Clay. One thing that’s really omnipresent? I know Tucker last night on his show on Fox did a whole thing on homelessness in American cities. It is a normal thing. I can even remember recently myself. I was walking with my mother — this is maybe a few months back — and a person came up and started screaming the most horrific profanity imaginable — it was a female, by the way — in our faces.

And you just realize that this has now been normalized, that there are essentially insane vagrants who wander the streets urinating, defecating, and shouting threats and profanity at people. And if you are the Democrats — and this is where we get into the politics of this a bit. In the Democrat mind-set, if you have a problem with this — if you want these people to be taken off the street, if you want these people to be incarcerated for crimes they commit without the…

Oh, they just need mental health services, depending, of course, on the individual case. You’re a bad person. They’ll often call you a racist, depending on the race of the person involved in this, and they want to shut you down. You’re not allowed anymore, Clay, as a New Yorker to be upset and complain about people relieving themselves and doing heroin in broad daylight on Broadway on the corner of wherever you live because social justice says you have to just take it. That’s what the Democrat Party’s turned into.

CLAY: And I want to hit you with this, too, Buck, because I think you can speak to this based on your background. Violent crime is typically not the first thing that someone does. This is why getting people who commit crimes off the streets is so important. You can speak to this, I think, on the percentage basis. But this guy, for instance, in L.A. who killed this young girl in a furniture store, he’d been arrested dozens of times for several violent offenses.

Usually, the first offense you commit is not killing someone, right? People don’t usually just jump from complete innocence, complete law-abidingness to suddenly committing a violent murder. Now, maybe that happens in crimes of passion-type situations more so, but it’s still very rare that the first thing on somebody’s rap sheet is murder. So, this is why the three-strikes-and-you’re-out felony law made sense back in 1994 and beyond, because there is an idea that as you commit crimes — and, by the way, get away with them — you graduate, in essence, to the severity of the crime that you might attempt. There’s a lot of evidence of that, right?

BUCK: This is like with heinous violent crimes a lot of the time people that end up, you know, becoming, whether it’s a school shooter situation or people that just go on to do the worst kinds of acts, you go back and you always find out invariably that, you know, they were torturing animals. There are always signs, is what I’m saying. There’s always these earlier educators.

And oftentimes it’s building up through crimes over time that you see that someone’s heading to… It doesn’t get better, right? It doesn’t go from, you know, I stole a stole a jacket to I stole a car to committed an armed robbery to, oh, you know, now I’m gonna downscale it and just engage in a little Medicare fraud. No, no. That’s not the direction it heads in. We all know that just from our lived experience, you could say, as human beings and seeing what it’s like to be in society.