David Clarke on Crime Rise in Cities: Police Have ‘Their Hands Tied’
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CLARKE: “Black people will be the losers in all of this as violent crime rates skyrocket over time, this means more black victims.”
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KELLY: “Well, that was Milwaukee County Sheriff, David Clarke testifying before Congress two months ago about the rise in Ferguson Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown. Sheriff Clarke warned that police would unfairly blamed and law enforcement would pull back from the areas in which they're needed most. Now in places like the Big Apple, we're seeing pictures like this from the New York post, a homeless man urinating in the middle of a popular residential street in broad daylight. As New Yorkers say, low level crimes are on the rise. And nationally, homicide rates are spiking, and how in big cities. Joining me now, Sheriff David Clarke, Sheriff, good to see you, and it is unbelievable. I will speak to this as a New Yorker. You can -- you don't need a study. You don't even need that picture on the front of the New York Post. You see the litter everywhere. You see homeless people in front of restaurants and stores and begging and interfering and stopping children, stabbings, and kidnappings, on the cover of the newspaper every other day in residential areas. And we have a mayor who says, I'm doing a great job. And you see it in several cities across this country right now.”
CLARKE: “Well, first of all, Mayor De Blasio with all due respect thinks he is doing a great job, then he's delusional. Look, I know how these things work, and I know what makes a city work in terms of public safety. I've been doing this for 37 years. You have to have three things. You have to have strong and formal social controls, you have to have adherence to the social contract. And that social contract is that set of unwritten rules that we have with human interaction. The third thing that you have to have is a strong police presence. And right now, not only in New York City, not only in Baltimore, we saw it there, you look at the crime rates in Chicago. And the same thing is going on in my home town of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You have none of those. And the most important of those is a strong police presence, but right now the police have their hands tied. They don't have the backing of the political community. They have gone through six, seven, eight months of constant bashing. They're told not to enforce quality of life enforcement. And that's what you need in a city like New York. Any time you have a densely populated area, you have to have quality of life enforcement, those are things like arresting people for public urination, fighting, drunken disorderly, and the cops are told right now to stand down and not enforce those quality of life violations. That's going to lead to more crime and disorder.” [Crosstalk]
KELLY: “And the Council Speaker -- comes out -- Melissa Mark-Viverito, and she wants to decriminalize public urination, public consumption of alcohol, failure to obey park signs, and jumping subway turn stops. She said it doesn't matter. But the Police Commissioner, Bill Bratton who worked with Giuliani 20 years ago to clean up this city in the first place says, hey, would you get a brain? That stuff is -- it is the gateway to other crimes and it is not just New York, Sheriff as we the New York murder rate has increased by 20 percent. Baltimore, up almost 50 percent, Chicago 23 percent, St. Louis, almost 60 percent, New Orleans, 39, Houston, 53 and as you mentioned Milwaukee, murder rate up 92 percent in just a year.”
CLARKE: “Well look, you know Commissioner Bratton, a friend of mine. He knows how to get this done as well. His hands are being tied too; he had to fight to try to get more law enforcement officers. Public safety budgets across America for the last ten years have been cut, cut, and cut. And now we're feeling the pinch. So if they want to save the city -- and I'll tell you, Megyn the thing that bothers me the most is you can't turn these things on and off like a switch. Once they lose control of these cities -- these great American cities, it is very hard to get them back. The people who making these foolish decisions now, they were not around in the 70s and 80s when New York was unlivable, until finally they decided to clean that thing up. So once this thing goes the way it's going. When I made that comment in February, there was no starting revelation on my part. But it was based on my 37 years of serving my community in public safety.”
