We’ve Got a War Going on in American Cities

CHICAGO RESIDENT BARBARA THOMPSON: We got a war right here. We ain’t gotta go to where they having a war at. We having a war right here, and every day we getting shot. I get so tired of these sirens. It is so bad! And these polices, they working overtime. They so scared — I know they are ’cause I feel for ’em myself.

CLAY: That’s what you’re seeing, Buck. There is a lot of talk about Ukraine and Russia; but, as that woman said, we got a war going on in many different American cities on a day-to-day basis. The police are often under-armed and certainly not getting the respect and support they need from many district attorneys.  And whether you’re white, black, Asian or Hispanic, many of these cities — you were just talking about it off the air in New York City — you can feel a palpable sense of the rise of crime when you’re moving around in New York, Chicago, Houston, many — L.A., big cities like that.

BUCK: Crime has a momentum to it. When you refuse to prosecute those who are a true danger to society sufficiently, when you let people out, when you get 30 arrests, 50 arrests, a hundred arrests, and you’re still out on the street, when we’re being told that crime is a communal problem, not a choice that individuals make daily. I’m talking now specifically about violent crime, but also when you look at the abandonment of the enforcement of so-called quality-of-life crimes top to bottom, a city starts to be a place of disorder and anarchy, and people leave, which makes it worse, by the way.

And that is happening in New York. It’s happening other cities across the country. This is because of bad ideas. Bad ideas that come from the progressive left and the people who promote this crap on television and the BLM activists and the abolition of prison folks and all these things that you hear have resulted in a lot of suffering and no upside. The only reason, Clay, we can’t turn this around faster is that Democrats don’t want to admit that they were wrong and they certainly don’t want to admit it in an election year.