Exclusive — Herschel Walker on Atlanta Crime Wave: I’m ‘Afraid to Let’ My Wife ‘Go Out by Herself’

ATLANTA — Republican Herschel Walker lamented Atlanta’s high crime rate in an interview with Breitbart News on Saturday, reiterating that he does not allow his wife to go to the mall alone because of it.

Walker, who is running for U.S. Senate in Georgia, has repeatedly expressed concern for his wife’s safety because of violent crime in the state’s most urban city, where he and his wife live.

“It’s sad to me because I won’t let my wife go to the mall now. I won’t let her go to the mall by herself, and I am afraid to let her go out by herself because people have lost respect for our law enforcement,” Walker said.

Law enforcement representatives, including roughly 70 percent of Georgia sheriffs, the U.S. Border Patrol union, and state police unions, are overwhelmingly supporting Walker over incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) in Georgia’s battleground Senate race.

The Georgia Fraternal Order of Police, which reports a membership of 5,000, endorsed Walker in August, praising the Georgia conservative for having “demonstrated a commitment to keep Americans safe while giving needed support to law enforcement through [his] words and actions.”

Crime statistics in Atlanta remain grim. While the latest police data shows homicides have changed zero percent since last year, this time last year they were up 23 percent over 2020 and a shocking 68 percent over 2019. In other words, murders are maintaining their year-over-year sky-high rate of occurrence.

Crime on the whole has increased over the past two years. Police data shows all violent crimes and property offenses combined are up five percent over last year, and last year at about this same time, they were up ten percent.

At the end of July, local outlet 11Alive went so far as to fact-check if Atlanta’s crime rate was worse than Chicago’s because, the outlet noted, numerous readers had begun drawing the comparison. “For certain crimes, especially what is considered violent,” Atlanta was indeed worse than Chicago, 11Alive found. Chicago is a notorious haven for gun violence.

Walker noted, “Atlanta, the crime is up, and it’s dangerous now. People out there have to be careful, and we have to support our military. … We have to get behind our men and women in blue and support them. This is the toughest time to be a police officer today is right now.”

Taking a jab at Warnock, who has worked as a pastor for decades, Walker added, “You have a senator like Reverend Warnock that calls them names and he talks real smooth like he’s behind our law enforcement — He calls them names.”

Warnock came under fire during his first Senate run in 2020 for conveying anti-police sentiments in various past sermons. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson compiled multiple instances of Warnock’s remarks:

In one 2015 instance, Warnock referenced “police power showing up in a kind of gangster and thug mentality.”

The comment was specifically about the 2014 incident in Ferguson, Missouri, in which Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown. Warnock’s criticism of the Ferguson police fed the false notion perpetuated by left-wing leaders and groups that Wilson murdered an innocent man, when, in reality, Wilson was exonerated of wrongdoing by a grand jury and the Obama Justice Department after investigations found Brown had attacked Wilson.

Warnock recently touted passage of a bipartisan bill he spearheaded to fund small police forces, but in addition to his past lack of support for law enforcement, the Georgia Democrat has also supported sweeping police reforms, such as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, that would place restrictions on officers and eliminate qualified immunity.