How Do We Reverse the Murder Rate Increase?

BUCK: All of a sudden, you’ll get people that are saying, “Well, I’m somebody whose focus is the economy but now I want to weigh in on guns or I’m somebody whose focus is on education, but how dare you say this about crime policies?” and with that I would bring you a little back-and-forth between Senator Marco Rubio, who pointed out — ’cause there was an amendment that did not get passed over the weekend that everybody should know about, and they were hoping to add some things in about Soros-backed prosecutors, crime, to essentially make us safer, right? That was something that was part of this. So, Rubio wanted to add something into this. And he tweeted something about it. And he said, “The Democrats just blocked my effort to try and force Soros-backed prosecutors to put dangerous criminals in jail.” That was the Rubio tweet, Clay.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Because they’re trying to say, “Look, you can’t have these prosecutes who essentially decide that they are a law unto themselves, and you break the law…” This is the happening. I mean, George Gascon in Los Angeles, who still needs to be recalled, everybody, he decided the three-strike law just doesn’t apply. That is the law, but he says, “No, I’m just not gonna follow the three-strikes law.”

He’s just gonna ignore what the actual law is. This is a prosecutor. Randi Weingarten, who is alongside Fauci in some of the very worst people from the pandemic, has decided that she has some thoughts on criminal justice about which she knows nothing. But she’s the chief commissar for the teachers’ unions, as we all know. She tweeted out in response to Rubio.

BUCK: First of all, I don’t care what Orban is doing. Second, you know, I’m talking about American criminal justice system.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And second of all, George Soros-backed prosecutors are prosecutors, Clay, who George Soros says, “I am backing them, and I am writing them checks and giving them money” —

CLAY: They are literal George Soros-backed prosecutors. Like, if you said, “Hey, these are Clay Travis-backed Senate candidates,” you’d have a pretty good sense who they were, right? ‘Cause you would say, “Oh, yeah, those are people that Clay Travis has backed or Buck Sexton has backed.” Wouldn’t be like, “Oh, they tried to attack southern…” Of course, you would never say that but, like, literally he’s describe what Soros did.

BUCK: If someone were to say, “Clay Travis, by backing Herschel Walker, is, you know…” That’s not true. He’s not backing… Well, yeah, actually if you say vote for the guy, you’re backing him. If you write someone a check, you’re saying backing him. Same thing with me. So, Severn gets that point. George Soros even wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a week ago saying, “Yes, I back all these prosecutors, and I agree with what they’re doing.”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Which is the whole —

CLAY: They’re doing exactly what he wanted them to do.

BUCK: Yeah. And some stuff about, oh, the data shows, the data shows that this does not actually make people less safe. Everyone knows the data shows that it actually makes you less safe, everyone’s who is the living in a city or really anywhere in the country these days that’s had a major increase in crime. And this is still a big problem. I mean, John Miller, who was a very senior guy in the NYPD for a while.

I think he was in counterterrorism division which is different than intel division — NYPD has over 40,000 sworn law enforcement. It’s a big organization. I was in intel division for a little while, for about 18 months. But Miller was I think CTD. He might have been the chief of the counterterrorism division. But he said recently that bail reform, Clay, was an atom bomb that set us back a decade. And this has big implications particularly in New York because the mayor of New York has started to say, this stuff is crazy. Last week he said that our criminal justice system in New York is broken.

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: And Hochul, who is among the dumbest politicians in America, which is quite —

CLAY: It ain’t a high bar. Let’s be honest.

BUCK: Yeah. She’s among the dumbest. Her theory now is that the only problem with the bail reform law is we need judges… This is through a spokesman over the weekend. We need judges to be better educated in it so they’ll understand the bail reform law better. Oh, yeah, they’re gonna fix the problem here. The rubber has met the road, folks. The results are in of the experiment. And yes, the Soros-backed prosecutors are a nightmare, and bail reform is crazy.

CLAY: It is, and everybody out there knows that the murder rates have skyrocketed. I was reading over the weekend, I think the number now, Buck — and I was looking at the chart. I think we’re up almost 50% in murders nationwide since BLM protests started. I want you to think about how crazy that is. We had the largest increase ever in 2020, nearly 30%, if I remember correctly, the murders.

And as Buck and I have pointed out, the murders didn’t start until the George Floyd incident, right? We were actually under the numbers of prior year murders, prior to George Floyd. Continued to increase in 2021. And many cities have also seen further increases in 2022 such that the overall national murder rate is, I believe, up almost 50%.

BUCK: Well, was up 30% in one year.

CLAY: Yeah, right.

BUCK: So, just to put in perspective. One year, 2020, it nationally goes up 30%, which is catastrophic.

CLAY: If you add them all up, because what they’ll say the next year we know they were up again in 2021 but they were, like, up five or 6%, right? Off of the nearly 30%, it was 29% increase in 2020 and now they’re up again in 2022. And if you add all that up and look at those numbers, up nearly 50% in overall national murder rates just since May of 2020 when the George Floyd protests started. It’s wild to think about how quickly things changes, hairpin turn right then and there.

BUCK: And then there’s also the long tail to some of these — you know, there’s the aftereffects, the secondary effects, what comes down the line when you started to make some of these decisions that really you can trace back to there were a few years of very aggressive Soros-backed prosecutors getting put into place and the defund police and end mass incarceration — and I’m going to say this and some people won’t like this — Trump criminal justice reform was part of this movement and did not actually end up having the intended effect.

We thought, oh, look at this, there’s bipartisan criminal justice reform, isn’t that so nice? Well, that actually opened the door for a lot of what we’re seeing now. Because, oh, well, let’s just keep this going. It essentially created a perception that, yeah, there are a lot of — there are a lot of people who are serving prison sentences for nonviolent crimes for decades on end all across the country. In fact, that’s the norm. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. It does happen.

But is that really the norm? Are people getting arrested for their first time for nonviolent crimes and getting 10-, 15-, 20-year sentences? Because that’s what we’re led to believe. It’s not true. Depends, obviously, on the jurisdiction and what we’re talking about. But in general, that’s not… It’s certainly not true in New York and Los Angeles and these places. But the other effect, Clay, is that now you have 2,000 NYPD cops — this was just reported on the last 24 hours — quit before getting their full pensions.

That’s a 71% jump from 2021. This is cops who are leaving. The pension’s a huge benefit. I know cops that were getting their pensions ’cause intel division where I was was kind of the… One of the perks, you know, a lot of people want to go to intel division, you know, a lot of funding, kind of a, you know, premier destination for guys who had been on the job a long time. And to leave before you get your pension?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: ‘Cause the pension benefits are very solid for the NYPD. That is an indicator of people saying, I can’t take this anymore. I’m not even gonna wait it out another two or three years, Clay. I’m getting out early why I can still get out before I get caught up with a case of some kind or, you know, they decide to nail me for some nonsense.

CLAY: Well, and that’s the fear is, in addition to the fact that we haven’t been able to hire new cops, the most experienced and often some of the best are deciding to retire or leave and go into other professions because of the amount of disrespect they’re dealing with. And that’s why I think it’s gonna be hard to reverse this overall murder increase.

I mean, how do we get back down below the numbers that existed in 2020 and take it back down into the numbers that we were seeing in the early 2000s when a lot of these cities were hitting all-time lows in the amount of murders that were taking place? And the answer is, you have to have a full-on cultural change in terms of the amount of respect that you’re willing to show for police. And the Democrats don’t seem willing to do that at all.