BUCK: Big thesis for this hour, I guess you could say — our big, major contention here — is defund the police. Is it on the way out, at least as a slogan, as a movement? Is it gone? Is it gonna linger on? Will AOC manage to push this thing back into the headlines? Clay, one thing about the activist radical left: Do not ever expect reason or rationality to get in their way.

CLAY: It’s a good point, and today Joe Biden… The reason why I’m saying defund the police is done is Joe Biden is coming out today. And, Buck, this won’t surprise you. But what do you think Joe Biden is attributing the rise in violence to? It’s not gonna be because of police, because that would acknowledge that they were wrong. What do you think he’s going to blame? What is he gonna try to address? I’ll give you one guess.

BUCK: Can I just say, “Not only will I get it right but the whole…”

CLAY: Every single person listening.

BUCK: Everyone right now with us, everyone with us here knows, “Oh, it’s the gun’s fault!”

CLAY: Guns. He’s gonna blame guns today. He’s gonna come out and say, “Hey, the reason why we have these numbers,” which no one can deny. We’ve got homicide rates in large cities up 30% last year — and, up so far, another 24% from the beginning of this year. That is a generational rise in violence.

And so Joe Biden, recognizing that the tide has turned, is going to try to shift the focus to, “Hey, the reason why all this is happening is guns,” even though every single person listening to us right now with a functional brain, which is hopefully all of you, knows that criminals have always had guns.

And so this idea that somehow we’re gonna change some gun rules and that the murder rate’s gonna go down doesn’t make sense. And what I think is so fascinating about this is they’re already trying to pivot. Thomas Friedman, New York Times: “Want to Get Trump Re-elected?” we don’t know if Trump’s running or not, “Dismantle the Police,” and there are a couple of big details in here that I think are significant.

He kind of muddles his way to this conclusion, using the city of Minneapolis, which is where George Floyd obviously took over the country and basically has led — I think, legitimately, to thousands of additional deaths — our response to the George Floyd incident in terms of not allowing police to do their jobs since that incident went viral.

BUCK: That’s where BLM 2.0 got going. It was the George Floyd incident, or you could say the second Ferguson moment was Minneapolis this year. And it was one of the places that has had the most substantial increase in shootings and homicides. There were other cities too, you know, I visited Austin, Texas, not long ago, ’cause I went down to the border — which obviously is not where Austin is. But I was at the border, then I went to the Austin. Somebody else might be going to the border, Clay.

CLAY: We’re gonna talk about that soon.

BUCK: Ah! Ah! Ah!

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: We won’t spoil it for everybody. Someone may be heading to the border that hasn’t been willing to go before. But I remember when I was in Austin I spoke to a member of the city council who happened to be a listener to the show, and she told me that they had defunded their police $100 million, and it was really… The numbers, you could just line up.

You defund police $100 million in the city of Austin and you have 100% increase in a 12-month period in homicides. These aren’t hard statistical things to put together. You know, when you do a survey of 200 police departments across the country — this is just in the last week or so — retirements are up 45%. Resignations are up 18% compared to the last full year for which we have data. This is all very obvious, and yet cities like Portland, just to give everyone… I keep talking about it, ’cause that’s the place where —

CLAY: They’ve just given up.

BUCK: That’s right. They’ve ceded downtown Portland to the lunatics. I mean, really, to the Antifa, the anarchists.

CLAY: They have completely given up on the idea of having any sort of police presence.

BUCK: And yet the city of Portland — which just recently had its rapid response team resign. It’s like, in New York City they call it ESU, Emergency Services Unit, colloquially known as riot police, but we don’t like that. They’re not really called the riot police, but that’s really what they are. They resigned all together because one of their officers was charged criminally for hitting somebody with a baton during, you know, one of these Antifa people, during a riot. And so that obviously really hurts morale. You know what they’re doing now? They’re saying, “We also should have less enforcement.”

This goes to what I was saying before about, you know, the pyramid of law and order: Less enforcement of more minor traffic infractions and things like that. And when people say, “How is that gonna make things better?” you know what the answers they’re getting? “Well, we don’t have the cops on the force right now to deal with it.” Oh. So that’s the answer.

CLAY:  It’s a cascading sea of stupidity, Buck.  And this, to me, in this Thomas Friedman column that I wanted to hit — where he’s talking about, oh, we gotta be careful we don’t dismantle the police or Trump’s gonna come back — there’s an interesting quote.  People like this typically don’t get a lot of attention. It’s actually birthed in this column, but he quotes a woman named Sondra Samuels.

This is Minneapolis, where obviously George Floyd happened and all the issues. She wanted to talk about “a 9-year-old girl, Trinity Ottoson-Smith.” She was killed, Buck, “by a stray bullet while jumping on a trampoline.” I bet this is the first time anybody is hearing her name because stories like these don’t get attention, and Sondra Samuels directly addressed this.

She said, “For the last year, I and my neighbors have watched Black mothers react with incredulity when their child is killed in community violence and not by a white cop. Their tragedies do not trigger citywide protest rallies, people don’t say their child’s name and there are no citywide demands that this has to stop.” Buck, that! That paragraph from this woman…

I have no idea what her politics are, Sondra Samuels quoted in this Thomas Friedman piece.

That should be what every Republican politician in the country is focused on because — and I don’t think this gets enough attention — over 80% of inner-city residents don’t support defunding the police. This is a white, liberal, rich environment argument to defund the police that isn’t supported by the people who actually live in communities where 9-year-old girls are getting killed by stray bullets while jumping on trampolines because police aren’t protecting them.

BUCK: It’s virtue signaling by elite liberals on the top of the graves of those who suffer 88% consequences of the defund movement. And people — whether we’re talking about Pelosi or we discuss Maya Wiley, the New York City mayoral candidate — who came in second place, by the way — who has private security for her neighborhood.

She’s big on defund the police and disarm the police! You know, there’s defund, disarm, abolish. Those are actually on the continuum of leftist anti-cop lunacy, that’s the one, two, three. And what we see here, as you point out, is an unwillingness to deal with where the real violence is happening in society, what communities are really affected by this, to take serious measures to address that.

Although, to your point and to the whole notion of dying of defund police as an idea, that may be changing now. But what we also have to understand is the fundamental, foundational lie of the BLM movement is that… I mean, the Washington Post compiled data on this, and in 2019, they claim that 13 unarmed… That’s the year that they’ve done this last full spectrum data.

CLAY: It’s a lie.

BUCK: That’s a lie. And until we can get to a point where we can all look at the data, the reality, the facts, and start from there and then focus… I’m not saying that — and I know you agree with me — every one of those cases of police-involved force should not be fully investigated and when someone transgresses who wears the badge and carries the gun, they should face the full consequences too.

By the way, every cop I know — and I know a lot of them — feels that way too. Their job is made harder when somebody… They call them “perps in uniform” in the NYPD. They say sometimes there are perpetrators in uniform. Anytime that happens, they know it makes their lives, their jobs harder. It also puts them at greater risk, by the way.

Another statistic from the Washington Examiner is you’ve had a 40% increase in cops killed in 2021. Now, people that have just heard me talk about the number of unarmed black men, 13 killed in 2019, would say, “Buck, you know, how many cops are we talking about?” It’s less than a hundred.

But again if we’re looking at the trend, for every law enforcement officer who’s killed in the line of duty, there are a whole lot more who are attacked, assaulted, spit on, have a more difficult, more violent interaction with the public, right? I mean, I’m thinking about this like a pyramid.

So when you have a substantial increase in what is admittedly a pretty small number in the grand scheme of things of law enforcement officers in a lethal-force incident like that, you could assume that people think that they can get rougher with cops. And that’s going to lead with more bad outcomes on both sides.

More people get shot who are unarmed and more law enforcement officers who are killed, and I’m sure you’ve seen there’s some of these recent viral videos of exactly that happening. And they get far less attention, to your point about that mother and how she’s outraged. The focus gets to the point where it’s almost dishonest.

CLAY: It’s totally dishonest, and I think there’s a lot in what you said. One stat that jumps out to me: I believe the most recent data is police officers are about — of all races — 18,000 times more likely to be killed by a black person than they are to kill an unarmed black person. Think about that. A police officer about 18,000 times as likely. I believe they were Heather Mac Donald stats I was reading about that.

You talked about police shootings, and I think this goes to the fundamental essence of the lie behind the Black Lives Matter movement: 75% of people who are shot and killed by police every single year are white, Hispanic, or Asian; 25% are black.

I think the vast majority of Black Lives Matter protesters would have no idea that that data is actually 100% true when you look at the statistical numbers. And then the larger context here, we have a society right now that is run by anecdote. Whatever you believe, there is a viral video out there to support it.

The George Floyd case in particular to me is founded in many ways on a lie because I’m not convinced, Buck — and I don’t know what your perspective is on this. But in the Derek Chauvin-George Floyd interaction, was race the overwhelming reason why that situation happened? I don’t believe so at all.

In fact, if you watched the criminal trial, there wasn’t a suggestion that Derek Chauvin behaved that way with George Floyd because of his race. And I hate to go A Time to Kill on you again, but let’s pretend that that same exact incident happens in Minneapolis and the police officer who is on the ground is Asian and the person that he is kneeling on is white?

Is race an issue in any way there? Would our thought process on what the response should be differ? In other words, you have to be very careful of the lazy analysis of “white guy/black guy involved, it’s automatically a hugely race-related incident.” Because if you go look, there’s a situation in Dallas, Texas, that was nearly identical involving a white guy getting kneeled on.

And it received almost no attention. Same thing on video. Everything else associated with it. Bad things happen. It’s unfortunate. But we can’t allow our world to be driven by anecdote, Buck, because if we do, then we end up with thousands dead. That’s what’s happened here with the defund the police movement. There are thousands of people dead today that would not be dead if defund the police did not exist.

BUCK: And people who have had their cars stolen, their homes broken into, home invasions, assaults, all kinds of things.

CLAY: All of it.

BUCK: The reason this increase is happening is because of a narrative that was, as we said, built on a lie. The BLM movement is built on some foundational lies. We want to hear from you on this ’cause I know we got a lot of law enforcement, family of law enforcement, just folks with strong opinions on this all across the country.