Eric Adams: My Fellow Democrats Ruined the Justice System

BUCK: I actually had a moment of surprise when I went back and read the transcript of a press conference by Mayor Eric Adams of New York City and his police commissioner, Commissioner Sewell, as they were discussing the situation of crime in New York City. Let me just start with… this is the new mayor of New York, relatively new. He’s been the job, what, seven/eight months now? Here he is. His mandate is to get crime under control, and this is what it sounds like when he’s describing America’s largest city of 8.5 million people, what the criminal justice system is like.

BUCK: I’m just wondering, does he sound like anybody you all know, that you’ve all heard recently? “It’s crazy. It’s insane. Recidivism is skyrocketing.” It sounds like what we’ve been saying on this show for a year now. I live here in New York City. I was born and raised here in New York City. I know this town as well as anybody. And, yeah, it’s gotten worse, your feelings or that sense you have.

Any of you who live in a city anywhere in the country where you’ve gotta always be aware of your surroundings. You know, it’s more dangerous on the subway, more dangerous on the streets at night. Something has changed here. And here you have the mayor of New York telling everybody that, yes, what the progressive prosecutors and the end mass incarceration, the defund police, BLM movement has done to this and so many other cities is wildly destructive. It undermines public safety.

And they had a data dump — I’ll share some of it with you — just yesterday, official press conference. Didn’t get a lot of pickup you’ll notice. At CNN, not a lot of pickup on this over at MSNBC or, you know, PBS. Oh, let’s talk more about ending mass incarceration today on PBS. You know, it’s all these libs who, even if they live in a city that is plagued by rising crime rates, they live in rich areas. They live in fancy parts.

So they feel disconnected from it. More important to them… It is more important to the Schumers and Pelosis of the world that they feel righteous, really that they get to be sanctimonious and accrue power while virtue signaling, than people in this country, including the minorities who are disproportionately the victims of crime are actually safer. It’s more important to the rich lifestyle libs that they get to walk around, “Oh, did you see the BLM sticker I have on my yard sign? I’m doing my part for justice!”

Yeah? What’s happening in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the last two years in New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago? What’s been going on since Democrats, who put their BLM stickers and the black square up on Instagram and pray to St. George Floyd…? What has happened in the cities that have taken that mantra? Well, you don’t have to take my word for it, although you should. The mayor of New York, Eric Adams, is laying it out for everybody.

He said the criminal justice system is insane. Recidivism rates — and this was the big objection, the objection to the change in our criminal justice system which came from a moment of the panic of mass white guilt during the BLM riots. It was, “Oh, okay. Well, we have to change the system. Let’s defund police! Let’s have state legislatures push laws that make it so that you get out, effectively, right after a criminal infraction. We’ll lower the pain points for being a criminal.”

That was, effectively, what they were doing, under the pretense that, what, a lot of innocent people are spending a long time in prison? That’s just not true. That’s not true. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people in the criminal justice system serving actual time, I got news for you: They did the crime. I know there are innocents. I know people are gonna yell, “What about this case?” Yeah, of course.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred did the actual crime. And remember we’re at a time here where people are being held in solitary for going on two years for nonviolent crimes on January 6th, in some cases, while other people are committing 10, 15, 100 serious crimes over months, if not years. “Just let ’em out. Just let ’em out. Don’t want to punish them too harshly! That seems unfair. That seems unjust.”

Nancy Pelosi doesn’t get to look at all of her rich friends across their glasses, their big glasses of chardonnay and feel like they’re doing their part when people go to prison who break the law a lot. No. That doesn’t make them feel good. Mayor Adams, New York City mayor. Here you go. Let’s look at the real numbers, he says. In 2022, 25% of the 1494 people arrested for burglary committed another felony within 60 days. That’s 393 people who did the same.

In 2017, just 7.7% went on to commit another crime. So, call it a tripling of the recidivism rate. That’s just in a few years. The recidivism rate tripled. Why? Bail reform, progressive prosecutors, all of this. So this is now more on the criminal justice end, right? There’s Law & Order. You’ve all seen that show so many times. The cops are doing their jobs. The cops are making a lot of arrests. The cops are doing their part here in New York and a lot of other places, even with the pressure on them, even with the shifting political winds.

It’s what happens after the arrest is made. That’s where the system is entirely breaking down. That is the weak seam that the Soros radicals are using to undermine public safety in the name of racial justice. This is what they’re doing. “Our criminal justice system is racist; therefore, we must change it in these ways…” But hold on. That doesn’t address whatever racism you think is in the criminal justice system.

You’re just not punishing criminals. Eh, they never think beyond that. And I’ll get into some even more stunning statistics here in a second. So the recidivism rate, for example, for grand larceny in 2022? This is from the mayor, from the press conference. The 60-day recidivism was 16.8%. In 2017, 6.5%. So it triples. It triples. Again, another major crime category, and it just goes… By the way, this is a long press conference. They go on and on and on.

This is happening all over the place. This is not just happening across all crime categories in New York City. It’s in every city. It’s in Portland. It’s in Houston. It’s in L.A. It’s in Atlanta. It’s in Chicago. It’s in Phoenix. Name a city where there are progressive prosecutors and Democrats are calling the shots. This became almost a religious belief for the libs. And then this one is even more interesting to me. This is from Chief Michael Lipetri, who is the chief of control strategies in the police department.

Remember, I worked in the intel division of the NYPD for a year. I did kind of a rotation there. I spent some time in intel division so got used to looking at the numbers and crime stats, and they do a lot of analysis of this stuff. Here’s what he said. “In New York City, we’ve identified 716 individuals who are responsible for approximately 30% of the shooting incidents since 2021,” 30% of shooting incidents since 2021, think about that, over the last year.

You have less than 1,000 people committing a third of all shootings in New York. This really starts to put it in perspective, doesn’t it? And this is the critical point that I’ve made to you so many times. And this is where the leftist mentality — critical race theory indoctrination and BLM and all of this ideology rooted in agitation and racial Marxism. This is where it all collapses because you see that when you have roughly 700 people committing a third of the shootings in New York.

And these people are committing multiple shootings. Fifty of them, by the way, already have a felony charge. So they’re looking for them now. They already have a felony charge in their background, and they shot somebody. Just to put it in perspective, okay, so we’re gonna say that there are, let’s say, a few thousand shooting incidents — I’m sorry, 2,400 shooting incidents — in New York City since 2021. So, 2400 shooting incidents, okay, total. So you have, call it, 2,000 people in New York City total who have…

This is by the numbers, by the book, by the stats, folks. About 2,000 who have committed all of the shootings in New York, give or take, right, about 2,000 people. What is the…? Just because they say this about racial justice, what is the black population of New York City alone? How many black residents — how many black fellow New Yorkers — are there here? About two million. Okay?

So in the name of racial justice, the Soros progressive prosecutors decide, “Let’s go really easy on the less than a thousand people who are committing all of the shootings who are disproportionately — disproportionately — victimizing the two million black residents of New York City and the over a million Latino residents of New York City.” So 99% plus of the black and Hispanic population of New York City law-abiding, living their lives, committing no crimes, just like all the rest of us.

Of course, right? Makes perfect sense. But the progressive prosecutors come in and say, oh, we’ve got disproportionate, we’ve got — Rikers Island is 90% black and Hispanic. Which is true, by the way, the primary jail here, primary prison is 90% black and Hispanic. So we just need to let more people out of prison. That is what they are doing. I am not exaggerating it. They decided we have too many people who are minorities in prison; therefore, we’re going to incarcerate them less.

And there will be more shootings, more robberies, more assaults that affect the several million black and Hispanic residents of in New York City disproportionately. I think the criminal justice system should work much more toward the benefit of the 99.9% of the law-abiding in the minority community, in any community, than cater to the interests of criminals.

Who, as they point out, in this — by the numbers, by the stats — are committing sometimes 30, 50, a hundred serious crimes. Here you go. This is Chief Lipetri. “We talked about the seven major arrest categories. When we look at who we’re arresting, we are arresting individuals sometimes a hundred times since 2020.” A hundred times, okay? That’s from the chief of stats at the NYPD, basically, in crime. Yeah.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck.

This is Buck in NYC, and there our new mayor — a Democrat, formerly in law enforcement and now the mayor and, therefore, the boss of the NYPD — Eric Adams, our mayor who is supposed to clean things up. It sounds like he listened to the Clay and Buck show. I’m just gonna tell you. He says (summarized), “The criminal justice system is crazy in New York. These progressive prosecutors are nuts. Eh lock up people for doing bad things?

“We’re not sending people to prison for stealing an apple. That is a lie. Recidivism rates are through the roof.” Everything we’ve been telling you, it’s true. It’s all true. You know, the libs the MSNBC and the View, crying all the time about, “Oh, we need to end mass incarceration.” Okay, well, what are we gonna do? What about the victims of the crimes? Oh, they’re not shed any tears for them. Not a lot of time spent by the CNN anchors worried about the victims.