Fact Check: Tucker Carlson Blames Bail Reform for Spike in NYC Violent Crime — But NYPD’s Own Stats Debunk the Claim
Tucker Carlson opened his Thursday night show with a full-on broadside against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. During his attack, the Fox News host claimed the 2020 hopeful wanted to take New York’s cash bail reform nationwide and Carlson squarely blamed the policy for the recent spike in violent crime in New York City.
However, the New York Police Department’s own crime stats tell a very different story.
“These are the people who will run the country if Joe Biden is elected in November, so what’s their plan? In a sentence, they’d like to make the rest of America very much like our biggest cities have become. Squalid, dangerous, chaotic and unhappy,” Carlson ominously warned at the start of his show. “They’d like to do to your neighborhood what they have done to New York City. The main thing they’ve done to New York is make it scary. Violent crime is surging dramatically there as we have told you night after night and one of the main reasons for that is the elimination of cash bail, the city no longer holds of the people that arrests, criminals are in and out of custody immediately. The Biden campaign plans to abolish cash bail everywhere. No bail for any crime nationwide. Think about what that would mean.”
Carlson, notably, did not provide any specific evidence to back up his claims about the violent crime spike in New York City. Per NYPD’s lastest CompStat release, citywide crime through the end of June is slightly down overall compared to the same period in 2019, having fallen in three categories (rape, felonious assault, and grand larceny), remained flat in one (robbery), but increased in three (murder, burglary, and auto theft). Burglary and auto theft are not categorized as violent crimes.
On Wednesday, the New York Post published an analysis that thoroughly debunked the idea that the spike in gun violence and murder was tied to the relaxed provision of the new bail policy. According to its review of NYPD crime stats, the Post found “that most people released under the criminal justice reforms or amid the pandemic had no known ties to the bloodshed.”
Though the city logged 528 shooting incidents through June 30 — a 46 percent spike from the 362 tallied at the same point last year — just one person released under the statewide bail reform laws passed Jan. 1 has been charged with a shooting, according to a breakdown provided by the NYPD.
In fact, just 91 of the approximately 11,000 people sprung from Rikers Island under the initiative — or 0.8 percent — have been found to be anywhere near a shooting this year, the figures show.
And more than half of those 91 are not accused of any wrongdoing, with the department describing 25 as “victims” and another 24 as “witnesses” — on the grounds that the mere presence of criminal justice reform beneficiaries is leading to shootings.
Watch the video above, via Fox News.
