Melissa Francis Rejects Juan Williams For Disputing ‘Explosion of Crime’ in New York, Says Her Neighbor Was Tied Up at Gunpoint In Store

Fox News host Melissa Francis criticized network colleague Juan Williams on Tuesday for disputing that an “explosion of crime” is taking place across New York City, before claiming that her neighbor on the Upper East Side was tied up in his store at gunpoint.

In response to the news of a one-year-old boy who was killed in a shooting on Sunday, Francis said, “I would respectfully disagree with one of my colleagues, Juan Williams, and something he said yesterday about how this has been represented as an explosion of crime across the city and that that’s not accurate.”

“In fact, it is accurate,” she said, adding, “My home police precinct is the 19th Precinct, they are wonderful. Crime is up in this neighborhood, it is the Upper East Side, this is an affluent neighborhood. It is all over the city.”

“As I have said on this show, I have a neighbor on the next block who was held up at gunpoint in his store. He was tied with hand ties and left,” Francis claimed. “Also, on the Upper West Side, David Asman, another of our colleagues, was saying in his neighborhood an older woman was held up at knifepoint. It is an explosion all over the city. The local precincts can see that, and you can look online and get that data and I look at it every day, and it is ticking up in every neighborhood.”

Francis concluded, “Yes, it is worse in the low income neighborhoods. Yes, the working population, the working poor, they are suffering so much more than the rest of us, but it is exploding all over this city everywhere.”

Francis made similar comments in January 2019 when she said, “You can see the quality of life has gone down the drain. The streets are filthy. It’s more dangerous than ever. The squeegee men are back. The quality of life has gone down the drain,” despite the fact that crime in the city was at record lows.

Though violent crime in New York City has continuously fallen since the highs of the early 1990s, there has been a rise in shootings and murders in 2020.

CNN reported in June that the 2020 “murder count is on par with New York’s murder total five years ago,” but “well below the elevated murder totals of the decades before that.” However, gun crimes spiked in the city this month. On Monday, the New York Post reported that at least 15 people were shot in the city — an unusually high number.

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