Former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy on Sunday blamed the Black Lives Matter movement for the uptick in violent crime in this country.

During an interview with John Catsimatidis on AM 970 in New York, McCarthy blamed anti-police brutality protests in Baltimore, Ferguson, and Charlotte for creating a “political atmosphere of anti-police sentiment,” according to the Hill.

“So what’s happening, and this is ironic, is that a movement with the goal of saving black lives at this point is getting black lives taken, because 80 percent of our murder victims here in Chicago are male blacks,” McCarthy said. “Less than half of 1 percent of all the shootings in this city involve police officers shooting civilians.”

McCarthy was fired last year over the controversy caused by a fatal police-involved shooting in October 2014 of a black 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald.

Dashcam video footage released a year later showed that Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke shot McDonald more than a dozen times, eventually killing him as he tried to walk away from the officers, NBC 5 Chicago reported.

The officer was charged with first-degree murder, and there was a public outcry that McCarthy resign.

McCarthy admitted it was a “bad shooting” and that the officer in that incident should be punished, but also said that this anti-police brutality sentiment is “hamstringing” law enforcement.

McCarthy said that he is “hopeful” that President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, will do more for police than the justice department under President Obama.

“I think the Trump election quite frankly is a reaction to that,” he said. “I think the people are tired of career politicians who’ve never really had a job telling us how we should think and how we should act.”