After Defunding Cops, Ilhan Omar Blames Them for Crime

BUCK: It turns out when the Democrat Party undermines police and embraces a narrative of you defunding cops across the country, bad things happen. We’ve established that. We’ve seen the numbers. We know the data. It’s the biggest increase in homicides really since they’ve tracked homicides that normally level in this country the last 18 months.

It’s been a disaster for dozens of cities across the country. And it was all entirely predictable. Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show, by the way. But this was all entirely predictable. In fact, we predicted it here. We talked about it as it was happening and continues to occur. And now some Democrats have realized, “Hmm. We got a real problem, because there are elections that are gonna be coming up here.”

We’ve seen what exactly did the rise of the BLM movement accomplish? What did all those protests and, yes, many, many riots that rocked the country in an election year leading up to the preparation for mass riots if Joe Biden did not win. Remember that? Remember the as to anybody that were all battened down and ready for what looked like a hurricane, but it was just going to be upset democracy in case Joe Biden lost.

It turns out, well, that didn’t end up happening. We all know that. Why? But Ilhan Omar is up in Minneapolis, you know, member of The Squad. She was very vocal in defund police. Play you those defend the police montages of Democrats? You often hear, Omar’s voice, you’ll hear Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you’ll hear any number of left-wing Democrats and other Democrats that pretend to be more centrist.

But they pander and they run scared from the first moment of any push from the left. And Minneapolis is having a record-breaking year for crime — had its, I believe, worst year ever for homicides last year and is on track to have another terrible one this year. And Ilhan Omar wants you to know the problem is the police force.

OMAR: The police have chosen to not fulfill their oath of office (sic) and to provide the public safety they are owed to the citizens they serve. Minneapolis Police Department is the most dysfunctional police department in our state and probably in the country.

BUCK: Clay, Ilhan Omar was in support, vocally in support of a measure to replace the entire Minneapolis Police Department, and now she’s complaining that they’re not doing the best jobs they’ve ever done? They’re not able to do the jobs they’re supposed to do without the backing of political leadership!

CLAY: If the media did its job, Buck, this would be one of the top stories in the country. Because defund the police, as we told you it would be, is the dumbest single political idea of the twenty-first century and one of the dumbest political ideas of most of our lives. We knew exactly what he was gonna be, Buck. A while back, I encouraged people to go track it down and listen to it on the podcast. We had Heather Mac Donald on sharing all the data about policing all over this country.

And for an elected official like Ilhan Omar — who advocated for police to basically be stripped of all of their powers and all of their responsibilities — to then, in less than a year, come back and argue police aren’t doing their job and blame them for the overall increase of crime is a level of hypocritical, lying duplicity that is even off the charts for politicians whose lying and prevarication is a regular staple of their job.

Even among lying politicians, they look at Ilhan Omar and they say to themselves, “My goodness. She is one of the elite liars in all of American political history,” and for her to even have the gumption to make this argument is a testament to how little she is afraid of anyone in the media actually holding her accountable, right? This should be, if we had a fair and impartial media, a layup.

You talked about Garland getting dunked on by Tom Cotton. This is a violent, greatest dunk in the history of the game opportunity to erase someone in the political sphere over their stupidity and their duplicity and over their behavior that has directly led, unfortunately, to thousands of people being dead because of violent crime that would have otherwise been alive if politicians had not gotten involved in the defund the police movement. She led this, and now she’s blaming police for the procedures and protocols she put in place that led directly to this outcome. It’s shameful.

BUCK: If we had an honest media, they would find every person… If accountability, if holding the mirror up to those in positions of authority, if “speaking truth to power” was really what the national political media or just the national media in general was focused on and took as their real mission, they would find every Democrat — ’cause there was not a single Republican. Isn’t this amazing?

This is endemic within the Democrat Party. This does not exist within the Republican Party. Not a single Republican was saying defund the police. Some were saying police reform — and I, back in June of 2020, was saying, “Ah! Ah! Don’t start playing that game. Then they’re gonna start pulling down the statues and telling you gotta beg forgiveness for this and that and the other thing. Don’t start doing it.”

But, Clay, this is a Democrat issue, and so if we had an honest media, they would track down every single one. Go up to them during one of the daily interactions that they have on Capitol Hill or in other places with the press Corps is covering a particular police station across the country in the governor’s mansion, the statehouse. Anybody who is saying, “Defund the police.”

They should be approached by a journalist who is honest — that doesn’t really exist very much, there are a few — and they would say the following. “Have you changed your mind on this? Was this a reckless idea to push? Is defunding responsible, at least in part for not just a rise in crime as a general issue but a rise in murders and homicides in major cities in particular across the country?”

Watch them squirm if they are ever asked those questions or just divert or talk about, “Oh, but systemic racism” or “Oh, but whatever, Trump, January 6th, the insurrection, Dick Cheney, Halliburton!” They’ll just say something to get away from what should be massive accountability here and the loss of power that comes from the people rising up and saying:

“What was done here was disgraceful.” People that were saying defund the police, it goes beyond I disagree with them. It was shameful for politicians to say this, and it was shameful for news outlets to amplify it uncritically all because Orange Man Bad; you have to be Trump. Of course, we know that, too.

CLAY: Yes. And we know the data. Right? There’s lot of things we can argue about from a political perspective, and we could say, you know what? We’ve got a difference of opinion on this. The data was clear, transparent, and readily available for anyone to look at after what happened in 2016 in Ferguson to give you a direct idea of why 2020 – the defund the police movement in 2020 — was going to be even worse.

And boom, we’ve got if, unfortunately: An all-time percentage increase one year to the next in the murder rate, nearly 30%, according to the FBI, all directly because of people like Ilhan Omar who made the defund the police argument, all of whom were Democrats and many of whom now say, “Oh, we never said defund the police!” We need to play that clip again where all of them say, “Hey, we’ve gotta the defund the police.”