Is Defund the Police Dead… Or a Zombie Ready to Rise Again?
BUCK: Whenever we can lead a show with something other than, you know, “The country’s falling apart; it’s all terrible,” we can say, “Okay, we got challenges, but let’s take our wins where we can.” What happened in New York City — even though it’s a Democrat primary and it’s just one city — is a big win for those of us who believe that law enforcement deserves our support and safe streets are something that aren’t even a partisan issue.
CLAY: I think defund the police died in New York City last night. And that may be an expansive take, but I want to make a little case here, and I’m gonna use data to make that case. We talked about yesterday on this show, Buck — and you know these candidates far better because they’ve been running a big campaign in New York City, your hometown, for the past year, basically, past several months for sure.
We said it was gonna come down to the candidate Eric Adams who represented a 22-year police veteran who wanted to allow police to do their jobs, and Maya Wiley, who was the AOC-endorsed candidate, who said effectively, “Hey, police shouldn’t even almost have guns.” She also said, “Hey, we need to defund the police.” That was an aggressive part of her platform.
And I want to hit a couple of data points here on this and then I want you to unpack, because you’ve lived this reality as New York City has moved from one of the safest big cities in the world to start to return to the pre-Rudy Giuliani era where you walk through Times Square and you look over your shoulder. You’re on the subway; you’re not comfortable.
You’re walking through Central Park, and it’s starting to get a little bit dark and you think to yourself, “Ah, I don’t know that I feel very safe.” I think a lot of people — whether they live in New York City or whether they’re thinking about going there on vacation — had stopped to have those thoughts in their mind; and now they are returning. And what we saw from the electorate…
I’m a big believer in — the same way I talk about putting my lawyer hat on — when you talk to a jury, Buck, ultimately the wisdom of a 12-person jury most of the time is pretty good. I think the wisdom of collective voters is pretty good, too, and what they were saying in New York City was this was their number one overall interest of all the issues out there.
Fifty percent of them cited crime or violence as the primary issue that they cared about. Covid was 30%. We know that story is going away. The Democratic obsession with racial injustice, 20%. That is seismic! Fifty percent of the voters in a very liberal city in New York, Buck, they went to the polls, and they said, “We care about crime and violence,” and you’re seeing it, I bet, in the way that people are reacting in New York.
BUCK: Well, you gotta remember I also was assigned to the intelligence division of the NYPD for a little over a year. It was a rotation, effectively. But I know still a lot of guys who are in the NYPD.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: So I can ask them and reach out — and I have been — about morale and what’s going on. And they’ve been saying things like, “You have to remember that when you’re talking about, you know, murders and shootings, the reason that that’s such a focus is that, one, those are very…”
CLAY: Kind of a serious. Kind of a serious issues.
BUCK: The most serious issues. Two, they’re hard to fudge the numbers with, so to speak, right? Like, there are a lot of other things where it doesn’t get reported or doesn’t really make it into stats necessarily. Murders get reported.
CLAY: A dead body is hard to disappear.
BUCK: So it’s a strong indicator. But that also it’s at the top of the, you know, law enforcement hierarchy of urgent needs. But then you realize below it there’s all these other things — the quality of life crimes within the more minor things — and when people realize that there’s effectively a reverse broken window is happening, right?
CLAY: That’s well said.
BUCK: The broken windows policy. You deal with the low-level stuff so that the high-level stuff doesn’t happen. When the high-level stuff — murders, homicides, assaults, rapes — are going up, when you look below, all the other stuff is always happening too. And that’s why even if you live in… I want to just make sure we broaden this out too.
What we’re talking about in New York is really the same story. I’m sure you have friends in these cities, too, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Atlanta, in Chicago, in Houston. Name a city, and you’ve seen an increase in crimes, but you’ve also likely seen an increase in some of these other indicators that are just quality-of-life stuff.
Because police are in places where they’ve been defunded less able to and even in some cases told not to enforce that stuff. So there’s a general lawlessness that these numbers that you’re talking about are reflective of. There’s a general sensibility among the population of the whole country that this is the trend, this is the trajectory.
But I will just… I want to put an idea out to you, Clay, and I want to hear your response in just a moment but you’re saying that defund the police is dead. I think that this is a huge blow for defund the police, but I think that defund the police is a zombie issue, meaning it’s going to rise again.
CLAY: Oh?
BUCK: So it’s a question… Because if you look at the history of… So I don’t disagree with the assessment, but I think we have to make sure that we really dive into, first of all, just the early stage I think we could agree of the repudiation or the pushback, right? New York is the turning of the tide, maybe. We hope.
CLAY: Tipping point.
BUCK: Tipping point. Tipping point. That’s the best way to say it but now we have to make sure that everyone understands that this was predictable and in fact predicted. You did; I did. Everyone on the right who’s been looking at this issue for the last year has said, “Guys, this is just gonna keep getting worse.”
And I just want everyone to remember, though, that BLM, which coincided with this whole thing, this is BLM 2.0 as a movement we’ve seen in the last year. The original BLM came out of Ferguson under the Obama administration. So there is already… To your point about history and repeating, this is history repeating itself. You used the term yesterday on the show the Ferguson Effect.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: It’s almost like we forgot the lesson of the Ferguson Effect over the last 12 months and we had to live through the nightmare of it again. So can we return to it?
CLAY: Now, 100% we need to dive into that because history has repeated itself. But I do think that this is a monumental and massive and I think your point is a good one. New York City is reflective and embodies what’s going on in the rest of the country, and I think their voting occurring when it did is a pretty seismic issue to unpack.
BUCK: And I got some Portland stuff. I want to spread this around, right? ‘Cause there’s New York and then there’s Portland, there’s other cities. Minneapolis. No one on the left wants to even talk about what’s happening in Minneapolis.
CLAY: Thomas Friedman wrote a column in the New York Times. The headline… I want to dive into some of this, because I think he tends to be Mr. Conventional Wisdom himself. The headline in the New York Times editorial page today from Thomas Friedman: “Want to Get Trump Re-elected? Dismantle the Police.” They are running scared, Buck. Thomas Friedman! My gosh.
BUCK: If even Friedman…!
CLAY: He’s putting it out there.
BUCK: If even Friedman is on this!
CLAY: Yes. He’s a Minneapolis guy originally.
