L.A. District Attorney: Crime Is Down — Except for Murder

CLAY: We were talking earlier in the show about the number of people that are leaving California — and, by the way, the states overwhelmingly that they are going to (this is according to a recent study that came out from LinkedIn which was looking at where people were changing their resume locations) are the state of Florida, state of Texas, Tennessee.

Those are three biggest states. A variety of different cities there that people are all moving to. One place, certainly, that people are moving to when they leave California is Las Vegas. We got a big audience of you listening there. Arizona. Phoenix, is one of our biggest being markets, a lot of people there, Salt Lake City — where we’re now number one — and part of the reason is because of L.A. become increasingly uncomfortable due to the increase of crime.

And part is also because District Attorney George Gascon won’t actually address or analyze or discuss the real data. Here is — we’re about to play this cut for you — an unidentified reporter says, “To what extent do you and your policies bear any responsibility because of the increase of crime?” Here is what it sounded like in that question happened.

GASCON: Well, actually none. (sputters) I — I know you hear a lot of — a lot of misinformation concerning, uhh, the — this, uhh, particular wave of crime. Number one, actually most crime is down, uh, but for homicides. My dad used to say, uh, that when you wrestle with a pig, you both get muddy and the pig likes it.

PRESS: (nervous giggles)

GASCON: Okay? And that’s not “pig,” in terms of using the term as law enforcement.

BUCK: Yeah. He stumbled into a rough one there ’cause he was talking about a senior law enforcement official speaking out about the crime rate, and he’s using the wrestling-with-a-pig analogy.

CLAY: Ohhhh, yeah. I didn’t even think about that.

BUCK: Yeah. Yeah. That did not go well.

CLAY: What he stumbled into, Buck, was, anytime you find yourself saying, “Most crime is down except for homicides,” I’m sorry. The crime I care about the most is homicides! If you were, like, “Hey, most crime is down except for jaywalking,” I might be like, “Okay, well, jaywalking? In the grand scheme of things, maybe that’s not that big of a deal.” But when you say most crime is down except for homicides?

It reminds me, Buck. Do you remember Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington, D.C.? He said almost the identical thing and got crushed. He said, “D.C. doesn’t have a crime problem except for the homicides.” I’m sorry, that’s the only one you can’t reverse! That’s the one I care about the most!

BUCK: Well, and there’s also… As you know, I worked at the NYPD for a while and so I knew about CompStat and the ways they were pulling all the numbers together and the figures. The thing about murders, it’s not only the most important crime that people pay attention to in a city really in any context. You also can’t hide them.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: There are a lot of things going on in places like San Francisco right now. Here’s a perfect example: I still haven’t reported my stolen electric scooter. Beep-beep.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Still haven’t reported it. Right?

CLAY: Poor, poor Buck.

BUCK: It was probably for the best because I kept trying to get something that wasn’t… There was a little bell on it was the only thing you had, and they ran out on Amazon when I was trying to find one. They had ones that make a little more of an aggressive, like “Mah! Maaah!” ’cause the little bell noise, I gotta tell you, I felt like I should have a little basket on the front.

CLAY: It is a little bit embarrassing to be, like, “Ding-ding! Ding-ding!

BUCK: Streamers on the side of it. It wasn’t really… Maybe I should have some training wheels on my scooter. It wasn’t a good look with the little bell. So I gotta get a more lean and mean scooter the next time around. But I bring it up just because I haven’t reported it.

CLAY: By the way, there is no such thing as a lean and mean scooter. Nobody out there looks badass on the scooter. There’s no woman who’s ever been passed by a man in a scooter and thought, “I want to have kids with that man.” Never happened.

BUCK: Some electric scooters, Clay, I’m not even sure they’re street legal these days, my man. Some of those hogs they got out on the street. Ooh.

CLAY: If there is a single woman out there listening to us right now who has ever been passed by a man on a scooter and thought, “That is the man. That is the man of my dreams! I am having children with that man.” I will be stunned.

BUCK: It would have been pretty illuminating, I think, for the electric-scooter crowd if I just gone around one time with like a GoPro cam and pulled up on some ladies a little… You have to use a tiny bell, “Ding, ding. Ding, ding.”

CLAY: Nap Dynamite.

BUCK: I want to also tell you, I did have a friend who asked me, she said, “Can we try to do two people?” No. It turns out it goes about .5 miles an hour with two people on it, so it wasn’t really good.

CLAY: But you haven’t reported the theft is what you’re saying to tie it in.

BUCK: The thing about this — other than, obviously, we need to get sponsored by an electric school company now so that I don’t have to buy one — is that the theft didn’t get reported because I know what’s gonna happen. They didn’t care. No one cares. It’s a $250 scooter. They’re not gonna do anything about it.

CLAY: In fact, you asked if you could watch the footage of your scooter being stolen and they wouldn’t even give it to you!

BUCK: The hotel said no, which I was kind of shocked because it was not even a public place in the hotel. It was the street outside the hotel. Why do they care? They would not show it without police. But again, this just goes to show you like nobody wants to make any of this stuff their problem, right?

Everyone wants to bury their heads and say, “I don’t care, it’s not my thing,” and then you even get the mentality in San Francisco. And, by the way, these DAs who are coming out — Krasner in Philadelphia, we just had Gascon — who are just looking at people. They are gaslighting you. They are telling people, “This is not our fault. It’s not that bad, what you are seeing and experiencing.”

This is a point I made about liberals live in the unreality. Liberals live in an alternate reality. What you are seeing and experiencing if you live in pretty much every city in America — Salt Lake, actually, might be one of the very few that hasn’t had a big increase. I haven’t seen that one. But a lot of other cities that we’re in and people listening to us.

Houston, huge increase. New York, huge increase. You can go down the list. They’re telling you that what you’re experiencing and what you know isn’t real, and whenever people in authority are telling you that your experience isn’t valid because they don’t want accountability, you should be very concerned — and honestly, very agitated. There are other words that I could use for it but we’re on radio.

CLAY: You should get fired if you are in charage of crime in a major city like Los Angeles — like we just heard if you’re the DA — and you say most crime is down except for the homicides. That should be, in my opinion, an immediate sign that, one, you’re not addressing the significant issues that are going on in your community, but also that you’re delegitimizing anyone who is raising it as an issue.

Other things that are happening, Buck, right now is people say, “Well, it was worse in 1986.” Okay, also you know what was worse? Our standards of living. It doesn’t make me feel better for you to be like, “Hey, you’re lucky in New York City. In 1985, the murder rate was even higher.” Okay. That’s fine. It’s not 1985. That’s not an excuse.

BUCK: Chicago is, I’m sure, a little safer than, let’s say, Juarez was about a decade ago. But they were hanging bodies from overpasses there, folks. We can play this comparison game all day. These places should be a lot safer right now than they are because all the trends in terms of communications, technology, law enforcement, ability to attract these problems — to put “cops on dots,” they call it in the places where they need to be.

Clay, all of that has been getting better and better, and so we should be seeing a continuous decrease so any change in that trajectory is cause for concern. The massive change in that trajectory is cause to hit the law enforcement, you know, panic button in a sense of we gotta look at what’s going on here and we know why it’s happening. It’s Democrats, folks.

CLAY: Portland, Albuquerque, Austin, Philadelphia, Columbus, Ohio. I just hit five different totally different cities. They all hit all-time highs for murder, and we’ll still have a full month almost of the year left before they’re finished with the tally.