Fox News host Tucker Carlson called out politicians and officials who tried to blame the rise in violent crime on coronavirus rather than the nationwide cuts to police budgets.
The Fox News host began Thursday with a story of a 16-year-od boy named Aaron who was shot to death in a driveway near his Oakland, California home. The shooter fired more than a dozen rounds before fleeing, surveillance video showed, but local media blamed the killing on coronavirus.
“Everyone, particularly people in power, seemed happy to blame COVID,” Carlson said. “The pandemic did it. You heard that a lot.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio blamed the rising crime on coronavirus, telling a reporter who asked about rising crime’s relation to cuts in police funding that the rise in crime “predates any funding decisions.”
“That’s just the truth,” de Blasio continued. “The perfect storm, I mentioned, started in March and April when everything shut down and we saw the violence start in earnest May into June into July. It’s clearly because things came unglued.”
“Quarantine – it forced everyone to stay home and that’s why there are so many people on the street shooting each other and pushing strangers into oncoming subway cars. Does that make sense to you?” Carlson asked. “No, it doesn’t make sense to anyone.” (RELATED: ‘Crime Is Rising!’: Lemon, Cuomo Mock ‘Right-Wing’ Media For Reporting On Crime)
Carlson pointed out that the rise in crime has been predominately in the U.S., while other countries have seen a decline in crime. In Canada, the police reported that crime fell by 18% between March and October of 2020, and crime saw its largest annual decline in a decade in the U.K., Carlson asserted. Crime also dropped in Sweden, Russia, and Mexico – which is in the middle of a drug war.
“So for normal countries, pretty much all countries, the pandemic meant more Netflix, but less killing,” the Fox News host added. “Not here. In the United States, the opposite happened. A lot of Netflix, even more killings.”
According to a Missouri nonprofit called the Council on Criminal Justice, murders are up 800% in Portland, 56% in Minneapolis, 27% in Los Angeles, 22% in New York, and 40% in Philadelphia.
“So you have to ask yourself, because your life may depend on it, why is this country different from say Sweden or Russia or Mexico?” Carlson asked. “And you know the answer. It’s not COVID. It’s that, in our country, stupid malicious people took full control, the Democratic Party took full control of the country. And their policies resulted in a huge number of killings.”