Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld criticized leaders’ policies regarding crime in major cities throughout the country on a Monday episode of “The Five.”
“We went from Christ has risen to crime has risen,” Gutfeld said. “It’s not about crime, it’s about the recidivism. Crime would go down if you stopped letting the people out that were committing the crimes. I think that’s where we’ve run into this problem where we look at every suspect in these crimes and they have just like a paper trail. And you start to think in all of these areas of society, whether it’s crime, or education, the border, there’s a rejection of systems and structure and process.”
“We used to be okay with that but then we started talking about the systemic problems and we started taking apart these processes. And that’s really bad for a society that naturally decays,” he said.
Gutfeld said the rules and laws are not being applied to everyone due to the goal of combating systemic racism. He said this has led to a decrease in disincentives for crime, which in turn leads to a spike in rates. (RELATED: 16-Year-Old Charged With Shooting Police Officer Able To Leave Jail After Posting $250,000 Bail)
“Now we’re basically saying that the same sensible rules and laws that we have for everybody are now not for everybody because of this systemic bigotry, this systemic racism,” he continued. “So we’ve reduced, in some ways, eliminated disincentives for crime and then crime goes up. So now you have some shooting suspect who’s on house arrest, you’ve eliminated one disincentive which is prison. It might not be such a bad thing, risk to commit crime if the worse thing you’re going to get is sit at home with your ankle bracelet.”
Jewayne Price, the 22-year-old suspect in Saturday’s South Carolina mall shooting, got a $25,000 bond set and is permitted to go to work wearing an ankle bracelet and otherwise be on house arrest if bail is paid. Price opened fire inside the Columbiana mall on Saturday afternoon which caused 14 non-fatal injuries.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced in January that a defendant will only receive prison time if they are convicted of murder, violent felonies, sex offenses or white collar crimes. Crimes including prostitution, marijuana possession, resisting arrest and trespassing would not be prosecuted.
Bragg overturned two policies announcing that robberies committed at gunpoint or another weapon will be charged as a felony after initially being treated as misdemeanors or petty larceny.
Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon has received backlash for his “soft on crime” policies while simultaneously witnessing drastic increases in crime throughout the city. Union Pacific Railroad called him out in January for witnessing a 356% increase in criminal rail theft between October 2020 and 2021. The district attorney reportedly reduced several felony crimes to misdemeanors since taking office.