Tucker Carlson: Police officers are quitting across the country and aren't being replaced
WARNING-Graphic footage: Fox News host Tucker Carlson breaks down the rise in violent crime across the United States on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Imagine dystopia. You hear that word frequently. What does it mean? Picture it in your mind's eye. Dystopia is a world where the police will not protect you. They refuse. And at the same time, you are not allowed to protect yourself. So, who does that leave in charge? Who runs a world like that? Well, young men with guns. They're in charge— the cruelest and most violent element of any society, the people with the least to lose, the shortest time horizons, the shallow reservoirs of impulse control. People like that have all the power.
You have no power and that means that everything you have is theirs. That's the end of civilization. It exists in pockets around the world, Mogadishu, famously, but if you think it's confined to Mogadishu, you haven't been to Chicago lately. This past Friday, just before noon, a 30-year-old man called Ryan King walked out of a gym in Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood. Bucktown is a former Polish enclave just west of Lincoln Park. That's one of the nicest parts of the city. Real estate websites describe Bucktown as young and hip, a place where recent college graduates who can pay above average rents might live. It's where your kids might live with their friends as they start their first jobs. That's how most people think of Bucktown, people who haven't been there recently.
But local news accounts suggest a very different reality. "Shots fired during Bucktown robbery. Man shot during robbery attempt in Bucktown. Bucktown couple shares account of armed robbery" and so on and on, many stories like this. Ryan King probably wasn't thinking of armed robbery as he walked out of the gym on Friday. It was broad daylight. It was a weekday, but then a car pulled up right next to him. Three young men jumped out and stuck a gun in his face. Here's an account from a local FOX station in Chicago.
REPORTER: Ryan King turned into an alley near the corner of Wabansia and Oakley to get back to his mother's apartment when a dark-colored vehicle pulls up and three young men jump out. King says one of them pointed a gun right in his face, demanding his wallet and moments later, he says, a passerby saw the mugging unfolding and yelled. Instincts and his martial arts training kicked in and that's when King hit one of the men with an elbow and ran off.
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Again, broad daylight, middle of the day, nice neighborhood in one of America's biggest cities. So, what happened next? Well, according to reporting by CWB Chicago, just minutes after Ryan King was threatened with death for daring to walk outside in his own neighborhood, Chicago police spotted the gunman's vehicle, but there was nothing they could do about it. Their supervisor ordered them not to pursue it, so the criminals just drove off and, of course, they committed more violent crimes.
In the hours after Ryan King was attacked, 16 more armed robberies were reported in the area. Police believe at least two organized armed gangs are operating with impunity around Bucktown, which means the gangs are in charge now. That's what the collapse of civilization looks like. But it's now normal in Chicago. According to data from the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper last year, police made arrests in just 12% of reported crimes. That's the lowest level recorded in Chicago history and that is what it means when politicians hand control of a city to criminals. "Here. you run it."
In Chicago right now, taxpayers are more likely to be the victims of crime than criminals are to be punished for it. So, the question is, why would anyone in Chicago pay taxes? You'd have to be a masochist to do that and pretty soon only the masochists will be.
So, how did this happen? It's no mystery. There are many threads, but George Soros is a big one. Soros paid for this to happen. Soros backed a prosecutor called Kim Foxx, who turns Chicago over to the most vicious people who live there—not the decent, good people in all neighborhoods—the most vicious, antisocial people, the ones who truly don't care about others, who are willing to kill people for their shoes or their car, the worst people, and they run things now. This is from our FOX station, Chicago.
REPORTER: Clutching pictures of loved ones, families come together to share their loss.
KIAIA NEWSOME/VICTIM'S SISTER: My sister's name is Tiera Taylor. She died at 30-years-old by the hands of her husband.
MYCHAL MOULTRY SR., VICTIM'S FATHER: It's been 336 days since the murder of my son that was 4-years-old.
REPORTER: They're also united in their anger and frustration that the killers of their family members walk free. They largely blame the office of the Cook County state's attorney and Kim Foxx.
JENNIFER RAMIREZ, MURDER VICTIM'S SISTER: So we ask you, Kim Foxx, how much longer do our families need to suffer in pain and sorrow with no justice for our loved ones being served?
MELINDA ABDALLAH, VICTIM'S MOTHER: Our children's blood on your hands, Miss Foxx and I hope you see their faces every night.
You think Kim Foxx cares? You think she's watching? You think those scenes like that penetrate at all? The shell of self-esteem that surrounds her? No, of course not. She doesn't care at all. It's why she did it in the first place. Someone should take action immediately on that, but she's not the only person who did this. The federal government also played a role and you probably didn't know what was happening. Over the eight years of the Barack Obama administration, the Department of Justice forced more than a dozen police departments around the country to introduce something called "consent decrees." Chicago was one of them. The Obama administration began an investigation into the Chicago Police Department and they got a consent decree.
Now, all of these decrees took the same form, they pronounced police departments guilty of racism if those departments disproportionately interact with African-Americans, regardless of whether those interactions were legally justified. In other words, the law is entirely irrelevant to the consent decree and so is reality itself. Here's a line from the DOJ consent decree imposed under Obama against Chicago. "Raw statistics show that CPD (Chicago Police Department) uses force almost ten times more often against Blacks than against Whites." OK, that's one data point. It's not the whole story. It doesn't begin to tell the whole story. There was no analysis whatsoever about whether the use of force in these specific cases was justified, none. So, this is not science. They may have graphs. It's not science. It's some kind of crazed race ideology. It's the equity agenda and in effect and this, of course, was the intended effect, these consent decrees have been a disaster for the people of these cities.
Even in New Orleans (whose mayor as we've told you many times has driven that city, that beautiful city which is worth saving, right into the sewer), even the Democratic mayor of New Orleans said recently, and we're quoting "the consent decrees handcuff our officers." That's an understatement. At this point, New Orleans is essentially out of police officers. The median police response time in New Orleans to 911 calls is over two hours. Imagine armed people in your home. You call the police, two hours. A lot can happen in two hours. That's the total collapse of civilization.
There's no reason to have a government if the response time is two hours. Buy your own guns, establish your own order. That's all going to be very soon. On a recent Friday night in that city, New Orleans, one third year officer called Scott Fanning just quit mid-shift. Here's how he described it. "That night I quit. There were over 40 calls holding when I logged into my computer, but there were only 35 patrol officers logged in for all eight districts in the city. Some nights there has literally been one person" in a big, dangerous city.
But it's not just New Orleans. All over the country, police officers are quitting and they're not being replaced.
REPORTER: Departments across the country say a lack of officers is severely limiting what they can respond to.
GRESHAM, OREGON COP: We'll routinely respond to shootings, but if the person is going to survive, we are not going to follow up on that.
REPORTER: In Philadelphia, the department says it's short more than 500 officers from before the pandemic. Los Angeles also missing nearly 700 officers from its ranks, prompting the cancelation of its animal cruelty unit and forcing officials to shrink the size of its human trafficking, drug and gun units and more. With officers struggling to respond to just serious felonies, communities are noticing an uptick in misdemeanors, like in Philly, where more than 30,000 abandoned car complaints are going unanswered.
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Oh, did you hear that? So, the forces of compassion, of caring, the people who have much more evolved consciences than you do, the people put coexist in bumper stickers on their Subarus. Those people defunded the animal cruelty unit in Los Angeles so dogs can get tortured to death and nobody cares and people, too and the cops who remain on those forces, by and large, don't want to work there, because who would want to work there for any amount of money?
Terrorizing the police with threats of prosecution if they do their jobs. That's what the Democratic Party has done, and the effect has been what it was intended to be, depopulating police departments. Crime surged. So, in the end, they didn't tell you this, but they succeeded in getting rid of the police.
And now politicians are just admitting it out loud in a lot of places. They've decided just legalize crime. Here's the mayor of Orland Park, Illinois, Keith Pekau, describing the state's new "SAFE-T" Act. Watch this.:
ORLAND PARK MAYOR KEITH PEKAU: As of January 1, 2023, the following things will go into effect and people need to be aware of this. It abolishes cash bail for almost every offense. This includes but isn't limited to kidnaping, armed robbery, second degree murder, drug induced homicide, aggravated DUI, threatening a public official and aggravated fleeing and eluding and keep this in mind, businesses and homeowners: officers will no longer be able to remove trespassers from your residence or your businesses.
So, how is this working exactly? Is it such a Low-T country that no one's going to do anything about this? Politicians in Illinois just legalized violent crime against you, and no one's done anything about it. A lot of these people are going to be reelected in November. Really? How does that work? Where is the constituency for violent crime in this country, is there really one? Is there anyone who is for it other than like Kamala Harris, Ron Klain, and the ideologues who run this administration? Most people are not for it. Even most Democrats are not for it. The SAFE-T act of Illinois stands for "Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today."
So, the reason they're doing this is because they didn't like the demographic breakdown of the people who were getting arrested for crimes. Period. "This can't be happening." Therefore, they're just going to redefine it away. It was ideologically inconvenient for them. So, the solution is to just legalize murder and kidnappings and trespassing and at the same time, you are not allowed to notice that an awful lot of these cases appear to be (it's hard to know and you never want to think it), but they appear to be motivated by racial animus. They do. That's just true. Again, no one wants to think that, but there are so many videos of it. Consider the horrific attack, really an attempted murder on a student at West Brook High School in Beaumont, Texas, really recently beaten and nearly killed in a bathroom at school. What did he do wrong exactly? We don't know. We can only guess.
That just can't be allowed in a civilized country. We cannot allow that or anything like it to happen in our country. This is more important than anything else that's happening because that's someone's child, but everyone just stands by in our country and lets it happen and in that video in the men's room, everyone stood by and just filmed it, snickered. The attacker, of course, is a repeat offender. He'd already been busted, went to jail. They put him back in school and that'll happen again. You'll never know his name. He's a juvenile attacker, so he has a right to go to school. What about the other kids in school? They have no rights. So, that means the bathroom at that school in Beaumont, Texas, which is in the United States, is a pretty civilized place, you can't go there anymore. That's equity.
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Having trouble eating out, too? Restaurants are suddenly out of control. Anyone noticing this? Here's footage of a robbery at a restaurant in Los Angeles from May. Unbelievable.
Then there's this. This is from Providence. This broke out recently, this scene at a place called Mi Sueño Restaurant, completely out of control. Who has to deal with this? Well, people who have no choice but to eat at middlebrow restaurants and don't have their own private security. But the rich don't have to deal with it because they know exactly what's going on.
In many cases, they vote for the politicians who do this and then they get people to protect them armed with guns. You're not allowed to have that because they have high-capacity magazines. In New Orleans, a real estate developer called Sidney Torres created his own police force. He pays his dispatchers 20 grand a month. We're not attacking him. He probably had no choice. In Greenwich Village, Manhattan, residents and businesses are paying $18,000 for two officers to patrol every month. They're doing it. Why? Because they want to spend the money? No, they pay taxes in order to be protected, but they have no choice because police have abandoned New York City too.
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REPORTER: The NYPD is releasing disturbing surveillance videos almost every day.
REPORTER: Violent video after violent video. Some are hard to watch. Who could forget this horrific shooting? A gunman opening fire on a Bronx street. Two children are caught between the gunman and his target. The shooter just continue shooting.
REPORTER: One of the suspects was seen on surveillance video pulling a gun on a 32-year-old woman as she was returning home from shopping. Then moments later, a second suspect arrived. Police say they struck the woman in the face. They tied her up, stealing $19,000 from a safe and $12,000 worth of jewelry.
REPORTER: In this one, you see a woman being kicked from behind as she walks down the steps of the Queens Plaza subway station in Long Island City. She is then hit over the head with a hammer as many as 13 times as she is shoved to the ground and robbed.
So, these crimes are so appalling. They're attacks not just on individuals, but against civilization and humanity itself, that they at this point really do require an immense and organized nonviolent civil disobedience campaign. So, just pick one of those videos at random. Who's the prosecutor with that person out, refused to charge them in the first place? Who's the politician who decided that attacker had more rights than the old lady he was beating up?
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Why aren’t 15,000 people blocking that person's office or chain themselves to the front door of it demanding an answer again? Why isn't there massive, nonviolent civil disobedience that can change this? Barking about it on cable news clearly isn't working. We've been doing it for five years. By the way it's not "we give you examples from L.A., Chicago, New York, and you think to yourself, ‘Well, yeah, those are big cities. I left. I opted out. I went somewhere nice and beautiful, somewhere like Asheville, North Carolina, up in the mountains, a famously beautiful place’." You think you can get away from this in Asheville, North Carolina, the once beautiful mountain town? Oh, no, you can't, because it's there, too.
In 2013, Asheville elected a new mayor, a lawyer called Esther Manheimer,. She had the now mandatory, complicated eyeglasses that all the girl bosses now wear. Manheimer, was never especially interested in running the city of Asheville. That was very obvious. She didn't talk much about Asheville. She talked about (Can you guess? Can you guess?) climate change and equity and by the way, anyone who talks about climate change and equity is immediately disqualified from getting your vote. That should be the rule right there. That's a baseline. Climate change and equity? No, sorry, you're a lunatic.
So, by the way, under Manheimer’s leadership Asheville promised $2.1 million in reparations to Black residents. Really? How does that work and how did it all work out? Well, here are the bottom-line numbers. From 2016 to 2020, violent crime in Asheville and up by 31%. Asheville is a beautiful place. It should have no crime, but it has a lot now. "Climate change! Equity!" Really? Now we have a lot of carjackings in Asheville. Overall, car thefts went up nearly 20% just last year across the country and they went up in Asheville. So, did this happened by accident. If all the politicians are talking about climate change and equity and life for you gets worse every single year, maybe they're doing it on purpose. Here's footage from Wisconsin, Philadelphia and Detroit.
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WITI WAUWATOSA, WI - JUNE REPORTER: The group of three young men wearing sweatshirts appearing to showcase the home. About a minute later, the trio enters the backyard. Police tell us they stole car keys, a cell phone and a wallet and that one of the men was holding a gun. They leave the backyard within 30 seconds as someone from the party follows them out. Then one of the suspects drives off in his black Volkswagen SUV while another runs down the sidewalk.
SHAWNETTE WILSON, WTXF REPORTER:: What you see in this video is a carjacking in progress. Police say two male suspects walk up to a man sitting in this white Lexus, open the car door and force him out at gunpoint. The victim walks away as the carjackers pull off.
INGRED KELLY, WJBK REPORTER: His name is Michael Brown. He's around 15 or 16 and he's identified as the suspect driver of the stolen SUV.
MAN: As you can see, the Yukon roll over the top of the front of our scout car and knocking over one of our officers seen there on the ground to the right of the Yukon. Then the officer had to roll out of the way as the Yukon tilted overtop of our scout car, nearly crushing our police officer.
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So why is this continuing? It's been going on for more than two years since George Floyd died in Minneapolis, Memorial Day 2020. Why is it continuing? Why has no one stopped it?
Because there's no one to stop it. Dad is gone. There is no one in charge with a normal testosterone level who's willing to just say, "Mo, you're not allowed to do this. I'm sorry. You can't do that. That's against the law. This is a country of laws. Nothing personal, we don't care what you look like. That's not allowed and if you do, we're going to spank you hard so you don't do it again."
In other words, no one has shown up with clear and reasonable rules and enforced them consistently. When that happens, everybody calms down. That's true in the family, and it's true in the nation. And if you don't have that, you have chaos. Armed robbers suddenly have a right to be on your property. Murderers get out without bail. What are we looking at? We’re looking at a war on the population, and it's time for real change. This is completely intolerable.