Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked a local Portland leader, who favors defunding the police, for making a 911 call that police said amounted to “no crimes.”
On his show Thursday night, Carlson played a tape of Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, a city official who pushed for $18 million of the police budget to be reallocated away to other public facilities, reporting her Lyft driver to police after he ended the drive by pulling into a gas station.
“The whole defund the police hysteria was a disaster for everyone involved. A lot of people died because of it. They got murdered when the police retreated, neighborhoods got much more dangerous, of course. But the other thing we learned was just how deeply hypocritical the people in charge are. There’s really no depth to their hypocrisy,” Carlson said before playing the tape.
In the tape, Hardesty can be heard telling a dispatcher that her Lyft driver left her “in the dark at a filling station.”
“Not happening. All because I asked him to put the window up, but I’m not leaving. He says I’ve got to get out of his car, or he’s calling the police, so I decided to call for him,” she continued.
Richmond Frost, the driver, also called police minutes after Hardesty called 911. “I’ve got a customer that I’ve canceled the ride, and I’ve taken her off the freeway to the filling station so that she can order another ride. She’s refusing to get out of my car,” he said.
Hardesty said Frost wouldn’t open the window, but he added that the window was opened just enough for a pencil to fit through the crack, in keeping with the company’s coronavirus protocols.
“It turns out, even in Portland, it’s not a criminal offense to have your windows open, though maybe they’ll make it one,” Carlson quipped. “In response to all this, Jo Ann Hardesty claims that she ‘proactively called the police’ because, as a woman of color, she was worried that officers would put her in danger if someone called them first. In other words, we have to call the police to protect us from the police until we defund the police. There you go!”
