The Democrats Broke Our Criminal Justice System

BUCK: Clay, one of the issues as we were speaking to number 45 himself is you look at the ways that things are not moving in the right direction in the country. He mentioned the border. We could have spent an hour, honestly, just talking about the situation of the U.S.-Mexico border and how that’s such a complete and utter mess these days. The economy, obviously, is not where it should be. And that’s not just our opinion; this is the opinion of, what, 75% of Americans right now, something along those lines.

But on crime as well, you know, there has been a slow recognition that the most radical progressive DAs, the Soros-backed DAs. You’ve got former DA Boudin in San Francisco got removed and now you’ve got Gascon who could get removed in L.A. They crossed that hurdle in July to get the recall going. You have Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, another Soros-backed DA. I think… Well, you have Kim Foxx in Chicago. Marilyn Mosby, I think, in Baltimore. I think she has some other problems these days, legal issues. Point being there are a lot of prosecutors that everyone’s realized what they’re doing is reckless. But it’s a lot more than just that. It’s the entire system, right? It’s the way that the police — and we had a fantastic interview with Rafael Mangual about this.

CLAY: He was great.

BUCK: He’s so good. You know, we try to always bring people on if they’re a specific subject matter expert with deep expertise on this. He’s at the Manhattan Institute. He’s got a book, was it Criminal (In)Justice, I believe, and he was talking about how the whole system, there were all these breakdowns. It’s been a change that’s intentional, and Democrats have been pushing this. This is not from both sides of the aisle, which brings me to this New York Post piece: “Recidivism Rates for New York City’s Burglars and Thieves Soar Amid Bail Reform.” This is based on NYPD data.

Clay, roughly one in five criminals who have been arrested for burglary or theft were arrested for an additional felony charge within 60 days after being put back on the streets. I mean, this is… One of the biggest problems that we’ve seen is, one, people are not being punished by the criminal justice system for repeated infractions in a way that’s gonna make them not want to keep doing this. And also generally, when their interaction with the criminal justice system — it’s true in New York; it’s true all over the country — is so minimal, they actually end up often going on. People that are breaking the law going on to create much more serious crimes, which is why we see somebody in a broad daylight shooting as a… You know, that was a carjacking that went bad or something. You find that person’s been arrested 15 times for shoplifting, burglary, all these things.

CLAY: Buck, here’s an easy way to think about it for everybody out there listening. You just ran through a lot of big city DA names. How often did you even know the name of the DA in the nineties and the 2000s?

BUCK: My own city. That’s it.

CLAY: That’s right. Other than your own city — and you even had to be kind of plugged in in your own city to know the DA. Those names we all know: Gascon in L.A.; Krasner, as you said, in Philadelphia. Coast to coast, we are aware. Alvin Bragg and the choices that he’s making as the DA in New York City. DAs are so out of control and crime has skyrocketed to such an extent that many of us out there can just roll the names of DAs off our tongues because they’re doing such a useful job. And I would submit to you that being a DA is a lot like being an umpire or a referee in sports. If we’re talking about your name, you probably did something that is a bad job. ‘Cause I can’t even remember in the nineties and the 2000s, even the early 2010s, Buck, where you could run so many DAs names off the tip of your tongue like we can now.

BUCK: I mentioned Baltimore’s city attorney — state’s attorney — Marilyn Mosby. She actually just finished… I knew she’d been in the headlines recent days. She finished last in her reelection bid for that job. She’s also facing federal trial in September on mortgage fraud and perjury charges —

CLAY: That’s not ideal.

BUCK: — which if you have seen The Wire remember —

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: — there’s a Baltimore politician who they try to get on mortgage fraud, which mortgage fraud can be… When they decide to go after it, it’s a pretty serious crime.

CLAY: And as we said, in Baltimore in particular it’s such a perfect window into where violent crime is coming from, Buck. You mentioned the number of recidivists, people who commit crimes end up back out on the streets. One of the data points in that analysis that was done for the Wall Street Journal of murders in Baltimore showed that 90 out of 110 of murders that had been committed in a particular area were being committed by people who had already been in prison for violent crime and shouldn’t have been out.

Not only were they in prison, they were convicted, and if they had been in prison, you could have eliminated all of those murders, which goes to your point ’cause you worked with the NYPD some. It’s a tiny, tiny percentage of people who are flagrantly violating the law and making cities unsafe for white, black, Asian, and Hispanic people everywhere. We got far less than 1% of particular neighborhoods where crimes are high, and way less than 1% of the people who live there. We just have to go get the bad guys and keep ’em in jail.

BUCK: But just getting rid of the most far-left progressive prosecutors — so that’s Gascon, the ones we’ve been naming, Boudin, Mosby, Kim Foxx up in Chicago — remember, she was the one who not only… Fox has a particularly interesting legacy.

CLAY: — expertise?

BUCK: She not only made the Jussie Smollett case go away, tried to seal it —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — so that nobody could ever reopen it or look at it again, tried to just make the whole thing go away for her buddy, Jussie Smollett. It was horrible corruption. It was so obvious what had gone on there. But getting rid of these individual bad actors — and this is really the point. This is why I think the New York Post analysis of the NYPD crime data on recidivism is so interesting. It’s not just the individuals who… They’re the implementors of this. The whole ending of mass incarceration ideology needs to be rejected. People need to understand that this, oh, we need to stop locking people up for 30 years for marijuana possession.

That’s actually not what was happening. I’m not saying there weren’t incidents here and there where the criminal justice system got it wrong or went after somebody — you know, punished somebody too severely. Clearly, that’s a thing and that should be addressed. But instead of looking at those individual cases, the ideology turned to the left wing, progressive belief system was, we just need to lock up fewer people. In Philadelphia, they dropped the overall prison population over the course of a few hours, I think it was, about 40%. You know, you look at Pennsylvania State prisons that Philadelphia was sending people to; they had a huge reduction in the prisoner population, but that’s not because there was a huge reduction in crime, folks. So instead of dealing with this sensibly, they just decided to act like if we let people out, everything will be better. It’s pretty crazy.

CLAY: It somehow became racist to put criminals behind bars. And that’s why, to me, a destructive argument of that one — ’cause you’ll hear, if you’re out there right now, and maybe you’ve been in your daily life, maybe your kids, maybe one of your friends comes out and says, well, the criminal justice system is racist because there are too many minorities behind bars, that’s a common argument on the left, I would just ask you to blow people’s mind by saying, why don’t you argue that it’s sexist? Because men are overwhelmingly put behind bars. And they’ll say —

BUCK: Yeah, disparate impact is a bad theory to apply for criminal justice —

CLAY: But they’ll say —

BUCK: — any context.

CLAY: — they’ll say immediately, well, that’s because men commit more crimes.

BUCK: Right.

CLAY: You just say, exactly. Like, criminals are the people who get put behind bars. It’s not a choice that’s being made. And that’s why murder, we’ve talked about, is one of the crime statistics that typically, typically is reliable because there is a dead body involved. You can argue about drug deals, you can argue about a violent — even violent crime. But murder is the one where, when there’s a dead body, there’s a pretty good sense, somebody’s shot, pretty good sense that it didn’t happen by their own hand, there’s a crime. And if you look at the data, the data is not reflective of the population. Men commit almost all murders.

BUCK: Almost all sexual assaults too. There are a number of serious — all armed robberies. How many times have you seen an armed robbery recently committed by a female?

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: It happens, but it’s —

CLAY: Very rare.

BUCK: — small percentage overall.

CLAY: And nobody would accept the argument that the police are sexist because they’re arresting men far too often. Gotta go where the crime is, and we gotta arrest those guys, and they’re mostly guys, and we gotta ’em behind bars for full length of sentences, and then be just like the nineties all over again, Buck. We know the miracle starts to happen. Crime declines when bad guys are behind bars.

BUCK: It’s amazing. Yeah, it turns out the most obvious thing —

CLAY: — down there, and that is the answer of how to get back our cities and streets and make them safe again.